CONTENTdm
Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection
Dunn, J. Allan (Joseph Allan), 1872-1941
83 pages : illustrations, photographs ; 23 cm
application/pdf
BAN B&NCISCO ALL^IHJNN In 1768 Portola glimpsed the Bay of San Francisco. In 1774 Lieutenant Fages found for Padre Serra the entrance to the harbor, and at Point Lobos, above the Cliff House site, set up a cross of commemoration. On Christmas Eves, these latter years, more than a hundred thousand throng at Newspaper Corners, while Tetrazzini and Bispham sing or Kubelik plays. Less than seven score years link the pictures. Copyright 1912 A. M. Robertson Printed by SUNSET PUBLISHING HOUSE San Francisco CARE-FREE SAN {FRANCISCO ALLAN DUNN Illustrations 11 a Discovery of San Francisco Bay Preface Christmas Eve (Bispham singing) The Golden Gate facing page Interior of Mission Dolores Native Sons * Monument Latham Entering Golden Gate The Canon of Market Street facing After the Orpheum Union Square facing Stevenson's Monument 'f§ Eussian Hill The Flower Venders Lotta 's Fountain Market Street Monuments facing San Francisco from the Bay Sunset on the Pacific Young China The Heart of China City facing Chinese Stores The Border Line A Chinese Corner Grocery facing Sicilian Fishing Boats Palace Hotel Court Hotel St. Francis ^ Fairmont Hotel facing Eastward to the Bay The Cliff House Market Street and Palace Hotel page 11 (i t c 25 ILLUSTRATIONS—Continued 11 11 Yachting on the Bay facing In Bohemian Grove Junior Baseball The Band Stand, Golden Gate Park The Park Stadium The Japanese Tea House facing Padre Junipero Serra The Grant Memorial Sports by Beach and Park facing Tennis and Bowls Life-Saving Practice facing The Holiday Parade The Sands at Low Tide facing The Ocean Boulevard ..... The Greek Theater facing Belvedere and Angel Island page < i Contents Chapter L- Chapter II.- Chapter III.- Chapter IV.- Chapter V.- Chapter VI.- Chapter VII.- Page -The Care-Free City 1 -The Street 13 -The City Cosmopolitan 31 -Indoors 50 -And Out Again 60 -The Beach 75 -Eoundabout 81 Spala 1775 fab sfanb bunesf, treeless, besfolate. &bout tfjem toreatbes Clje fog tfjat creeps before a tomb tfjat colblp breathes; 3m bagrom, Mullen rbptfjm toitb tbe pulling bap. 5Dben, bimlp tbrougb tbe mint, a barque tfjat bolbs it* toap &o brop an ancbor in an untmoton sea. latftam 19X1 [ftp argosies iriumpbant in tbe blue, before tbe btbrant trabe=toinbs steering true. Wbt Sparkling bap, a dtp fair tbat ribes Wfyt billsi tottb gallant mien, anb one tobo glibes &long tbe air=trails 'ttoixt tbe Sea anb &ky. [ist=mantleb, sun=kisseb, toinb=bloton, toabe=stoept toton &E elements combine tbp course to croton. Witty arms toibt open to tbe J^ationsT quest Jf air ^an Jf rancisco, CmpreSS of tbe Wttit. mm Care-Free San Francisco Chapter I THE CARE-FREE CITY DOT that they don't care. They do. It's because they meet Care in the open and conquer it, that they are free of it. When Bret Harte sang of San Francisco, Serene, indifferent to fate, he did not mean to emphasize any "don't-care-what- happens" attitude on the part of its citizens. Indifferent to the buffetings of Circumstance was the real spirit of that phrase. The bruises of Circumstance have ever urged San Franciscans on to greater effort, secure of their ultimate achievement. And as they work, they play. The Bohemian Club of San Francisco, afar renowned for the doings and sayings of its coterie of wits, artists, writers and musicians, has a yearly ceremony in its forest temple, where, at the foot of giant redwoods, Care is burned amid great rejoicing. What the Bohemians do annually and symbolically, the dwellers of San Francisco, fixed or casual, for the habit is contagious, do daily, automatically. Care, of the "carking" or "dull" variety, is tabu. CABE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO What else can you expect in a place where roses and geraniums bloom in December, where violets on Christmas Day are ten cents the generous, dewy, scented bunch, where Tetrazzini, Bispham and Kubelik charm their hundred thousand out-door auditors at Newspaper Corners on Christmas Eve, and the New Year is ushered in by dancers footing it on Market Street to the music of a dozen bands, while drifts of confetti take the place of Eastern snowstorms, and on New Year's morning the Olympic Club members jog out through the thousand verdant acres of Golden Gate Park to the ocean and make new resolutions in the splash of the surf, not for bravado, but because they like it! San Francisco is a City of Romance and Destiny; a composite of the three P's of Progress,—the Past, the Present and the Prospective. Most distinctive city of the United States, although a junior, Romance, not merely of yesterday, but of today and of tomorrow, is the very kernel or the shell of it. | To pass the portals of the Golden Gate is to cross the threshold of Adventure. Metropolitan as it is, San Francisco is still an outpost on the frontier line of the Grand Army of Progress, with its citizens of today as redblooded, as full of the joy of living and the triumph of achieving as their forebears and forerunners, the Argonauts of " '49." There is a contagion of "something doing" in San Francisco to which every visitor is susceptible, and no citizen becomes immune. No one wants to find a cure for it, and its diagnosis is difficult and CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 5 unnecessary. Climate and cosmopolitanism have much to do with the cause of it undoubtedly—a topsy-turvy, bewildering, exhilarating climate and a cosmopolitanism that is actual, not merged in the dress and customs of its foster country. This bacillus of business, born of the Pacific atmosphere, affects both the gayer and more serious sides of life, making San Francisco equally excellent workshop and perfect playroom. The great hearts that reared this metropolis, in less than the allotted span of man's years, from a huddled hamlet of the sand dunes, are the light hearts who so cheerfully rebuilt their city on the ashes of a great disaster, and, accomplishing it in record time, promptly forgot for all time there had ever been a fire at all and invited the world to a great exposition that celebrates the joining of two oceans, the hyphening of two continents, a romance of modern engineering intimately connected with the future of San Francisco. For the future, save that it looms rosy as the dawn of a fair day, big with promise, this chronicle cares not, but a backward, albeit casual, glance into the romantic bygone years, should prove worth while. The particular god upon whose knees rested the book of Fate that governed San Francisco, kept the page unturned through many flutterings of the leaves by the breezes of Chance. Only fifty years after Columbus discovered America, in 1542, Ca- brillo, sailing up the long Pacific Coast line as far jflMrtU CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO as Cape Mendocino, never dreamed of the mighty harbor whose entrance he twice passed, guarded by a kindly belt of fog against the coming of the right man and hour. In 1579 Drake, foraging hawklike for the homing pigeon of a galleon that every year brought treasure from the Philippines to Acapulco, anchored the "Golden Hind" for overhauling in Drake's Bay, only a few miles beyond the entrance to the bay, a near enough hit for the erection of a stone cross upon a San Francisco hill that today celebrates the holding of the first Protestant service on the Pacific shore, or New Albion, as Drake, annexing the country in the name of his sovereign mistress Elizabeth, so called it. Cabrillo had already charted it for Philip of Spain, and the voyages of the two adventurers marked the struggle for supremacy between the Latin and the Saxon that, after Mexico's secession from Spain and California's brief gleam of sovereignty, culminated when Fremont, descendent of Saxon squires, hauled up the American flag on the old custom house at Monterey in 1846, two hundred and forty-three years after Vizcaino had raised there the royal standard of Spain. In the same year Captain Montgomery of the sloop "Portsmouth" sent up the Stars and Stripes to the trade- winds in the plaza of San Francisco, now called Portsmouth Square. After Vizcaino's report to his patron, Count of Monte Rey and Viceroy of Mexico under Philip III. of Spain, history languished for awhile on the 8 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO Pacific Coast. Attempts to find the Bay of Monterey failed, perhaps through weather conditions, perhaps from Vizcaino's indifferent cartography. Following Drake, the sailor adventurer had raised a cross and held religious service on his landing, and the servants of that Cross once more took up the quest. In 1768 the Franciscans started the settlement of Alta and Upper California, and with Padre Junipero Serra as the spiritual, Gaspar de Portola, governor of the province, as the temporal, leader, expeditions sent by sea and land to discover Monterey resulted* in the sighting on November third the southern arm of the Bay of San Francisco. To Portola, returning weary and disconsolate to San Diego, the march was a failure. To Padre Serra, fervid enthusiast, the vision of the new harbor was divine enlightenment for the establishment of a new mission, one to be dedicated to the founder of their order, Saint Francis d'Assisi. When Governor General Galvez gave out the original plans for three missions, at San Diego, at Monterey and, midway between the two, at San Buena Ventura, he had answered somewhat sardonically the good padre's request on behalf of Saint Francis that if the holy saint needed a mission he would doubtless show them the port where it should be located. And now things marched for the establishment of San Francisco. In 1774 a party under Lieutenant Fages found for Father Serra the entrance to the harbor and, at Point Lobos, on a hill overlooking CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 9 the Golden Gate, close to where Sutro's Gardens now stand above the Cliff House and Seal Rocks, set up a cross to commemorate their work. Next year, on the fifth of August, Commander Ayala sailed the "San Carlos" through the straits, over waters never ridden before, save by the rude crafts of natives, certainly never by a navigator. One hundred and thirty-three years later the stately war fleet of the United States steamed in proud line where Ayala's clumsy barque had led, and four years later still the monoplane of Latham soared like some great seabird above the waters and over the hills of San Francisco. The presidio was established in 1776 by emigrants— soldiers and settlers with their families— from Sinaloa and Sonora in Mexico. As our forebears were formulating the Declaration of Ayala*s clumsy barque, the "San Carlos," entered the lonely harbor through the Golden Gate in 1775. Latham, of the air=ways, soared over the metropolis and bay in 1911. 10 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO Independence, these two hundred subjects of King Charles III. of Spain set up their presidio at what is known now as Fort Point, and in a sheltered valley three miles inland established the Mission Dolores, celebrating the first mass there on September the seventeenth, while five thousand miles away the sturdy colonists made ready for defense of their principles, nor even dreamed of ultimate possession of the far-away verge of the country they sought to hold for themselves. Today United States troops hold the presidio reservation. Keeping its Spanish title, the Mission Dolores, bereft of its prosperity, its lands, its cattle, stores and cash gained in the first fifty years of its existence, still stands in that section of suburban San Francisco known as the "Mission." The old tiles and hidebound timbers are intact, as are the crude decorations of the Indian neophytes. Masses are still celebrated there, and, sheltered close beneath its walls, huddle the graves of a multitude of those pre-pioneers. In 1835, Richard Henry Dana, in "Two Years Before the Mast," tells of the Russian brig from Asitka (Sitka) in Russia America, wintering off San Francisco—then Yerba Buena—and loading with tallow and grain. But the Russians, ever under the jealous surveillance of the Mexicans, sold out their California possessions to the Swiss captain John A. Sutter, and passed, save for some reminiscent nomenclatures, from the history of the State. Next came the invasion of the American whalers and strained relations between Mexico and The canon of Market Street, that runs straight from the Ferry water-gate to Twin Peaks (now being tunneled) — a thoroughfare of constant interest. 12 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO the immigrants who persistently came across the plains fired by Fremont's glowing descriptions. Came the war between the United States and Mexico, the conquest of the latter, the wresting from them in January, 1848, of California and the discovery by James Marshall, employee of the same Sutter who bought out the Russian interests, of "Gold!" Then came the "forty-niners," the quiet harbors thronged with ships, soon deserted, fortune hunters from the wide world round—from South America, from the South Seas and Australia, from New England,—a Babel of tongues and dialects. Rough days those, with adventurers of doubtful honesty and conscience living free; fire after fire amid the wooden and canvas shacks; riot, theft, murder and salutary hangings from the Vigilantes. Gradually the gold discovery proved a key to the marvelous back country and a herald to the geographical advantages of San Francisco. Leading spirits could see with prophetic eye the City-to-Be rising from the sand dunes. In '62 and yet again in '72, the Comstock Lode with its silver treasures made San Francisco again the maelstrom of mineral hunters. Millionaires were made overnight, and many of these bonanza kings applied their fortunes to the upbuilding of the place where fortune smiled upon them. The railroad was projected and built, the Atlantic and Pacific were bonded with steel. The transcontinental telegraph was completed, the destiny of the city linked with the progress of the world. Oil After the Orpheum matinee the crowds adjourn across the street to Taifs. Chapter II THE STREET EFORE the fire, when cable cars clattered up Market Street, that thoroughfare divided the city into two parts, and one was born and raised "north" or "south of the slot," and thus classed as aristocrat or plebian. The "slot southron" was of the horny-handed, tougher type of humanity; his district was of the Bowery order. To the north the homes of the classes with more money and more leisure fringed the down-town commercial district and climbed Nob Hill, while the higher they climbed the more they literally "looked down" upon those of the lower levels. The entire waterfront, as ever in a seaport town, had its fringe of the humanity that go down to the sea in ships. Telegraph Hill was then, as now, the Latin Quarter, CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 15 close neighbor to Chinatown, and both fringing Russian Hill, still the Art Colony—a Bohemia of all orders, from the artistic to the rough-and-ready. This portion is unchanged, but Market Street, though the main artery of the city, is no more the dividing line. South of it now are manufactories, the railroad yards, cheap hotels and a melange of Greek and Servian restaurants, boarding-houses and amusement places. Its original population has drifted south into the district of the Mission and down the peninsula, into a healthier form of living, with cottages and garden lots of their own, rearing a sturdier generation. The so-called poorer classes live under happier conditions here. You can't submerge a "tenth" in an out-doors land, and foraging is easy in a climate where ice in summer and coal in winter are really luxuries, never necessities. There is no anaemia and little indigence. The gum-selling, match-vending urchins of the Rooseveltian families of the Latin Quarter are full-cheeked, round of limb, with stomachs well lined with spaghetti. Even sleeping out in a barrel or a box loses its terrors where King Frost owns no realty. Blue noses, shivering limbs and chilblains leave the most unfortunate alone. The streets are an everyday playground, and there are parks everywhere, from Golden Gate, with its fifteen hundred verdant flower-set acres to Portsmouth Square, set between Chinatown, the Italian Quarter and the darker places of the city. 16 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO Nob Hill, with its homes of the wealthy, remains, though many of the owners have supplementary country places in the southern suburbs. There is a gap, partly filled by apartment houses, where the dwelling houses once joined the down-town business district, but far out to the west, across the breadth of the city, stretches the residence district, and, southward, past the Mission by aristocratic Burlin- game, Menlo Park and Redwood City, bungalows humble and elaborate alternate with palatial country estates. Take your right hand. The extended thumb well represents the peninsula at the head of which, on the nail, stands San Francisco, with its growing population, ever squeezed out downwards, past the knuckle. Between thumb and fingers is the southern arm of the great bay. To the north the other half of this inland sea balances it with, at its upper end, the combined streams of the navigable Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, ever combatting the saltiness of the waters. The western shore of this northern arm curves down to make the northern portal of the Golden Gate. The city occupies the whole nail. In early days it was easily divided into the Presidio and Potrero with the Devisadero (now Divisadero Street) between; the Mission and the Embarcadero, good old romantic and yet practical names. Today, the inside of the nail forms the main waterfront, which swings north along the rim, but mainly faces east and the mainland. Opposite, at the second knuckle of the first finger, Portsmouth Square, where Stevenson, in his most stressful days, lounged in the sun and listened to the tales of ihe vagabonds of the Seven Seas. Forget this is America and look only at the beauty of the house" scattered hill and the background of the Bay*s mountain rim. Then equal the scene of Russian Hill, home of San Francisco9s Art Colony. lie the transbay cities of Oakland, Berkeley and islanded Alameda, at the foot of the Berkeley hills. By the outer corner of the nail rim is the Presidio as of yore, and the Ocean Boulevard following the outer curve. Straight across the city, east and west, runs Market Street. Twin Peaks at its end are to be bur^ rowed through, the Panhandle of the great Golden Gate Park juts from the main grounds and ties up the Pacific Ocean with the city and the inner sheltered bay. To feel the pulse of a city and to test its temperament, watch its streets. There are scenes of San Francisco highways so distinctive, so unique, that the memories of them never fade. Let us take Market Street, partly commercial CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 19 thoroughfare, shopping district, amusement center and boulevard. With its broad sidewalks, running to sunrise and sunset, backed by high cliffs of stone and "reinforced concrete," it has two climates, two temperatures of sun and shade. They say you can wear flannels on one side and furs on the other, which is not uncomfortably true, though people really only wear furs as they follow the season's fashions in San Francisco—for exhibition purposes, to encourage the shopkeepers and for visiting purposes to climes less favored than this, For we only know it's Christmas by the calendar out here. Before noon Market Street is a bustle of business men. At noon the bright^eyed blooming youth of the office forces debouche for luncheon and a "how- d'ye-do." Then come the down-town cars to discharge shopping matrons, and forth come the butterflies of leisure and of pleasure. Towards the half light the working bees buzz out again and turn drones for the hour before dinner (the five-o'clock promenade). Playtime has commenced. Actor, soubrette and ingenue, both professional and amateur, soldier and sailor, clerk and boulevardier, workingman and workingwoman, a dozen tongues, a dozen grades of color, a dozen national costumes —miner from the desert, cowboy from the range, chekako or sourdough from Alaska; upper, lower and half world; full of the joy of being, of forming one of the lively throng, exchange greetings more or less conventional, gaze in the brilliant store 20 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO windows, buy—or hope to—and go to dinner, club- ward, homeward, to restaurant and boarding-place. The afternoon editions are out; Lotta's Fountain at Newspaper Corners is a swirl of newsboys. Fans discuss the display of final baseball scores. Swains and flower-loving folk are buying nosegays by the Chronicle Building, the safety stations are crowded with waiting car-riders traveling ferry or suburb-ways, the dusk settles into night, and Market Street has its quiet hour. Then the lights flash out above stores and restaurants, nickelodeons and dimeodeons, dental parlors, saloons and cafes. Down town comes the throng again, and the scene of the afternoon is repeated. The street keeps lively till the theatres are closed, the restaurant tables piled, the "rabbit" editions out and the all-night cars start up their intervaled procession. Not always though. On Christmas Eve a hundred thousand gather at Lotta's Fountain and listen with silent rapture and rapturous applause while Tetrazzini or Bispham sings and Kubelik plays, managers smiling the while at the advertisement, with no risk for voice or violin in the pleasant air. On New Year's Eve the whole population, young and old, wedge the sidewalks, harass the police while the parade passes, and then swarm the streets, carnival clad—a confetti-tossing, horn-blowing, bell-ringing, shouting, laughing charivari of color and clamor. Bands blare, and the crowd "rags" in gay abandon. Windows ablaze disclose the older, less CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 21 enthusiastic lookers-on. Sightseers from the "leisure ranks" try to steer at slow speed through the throng and submit, laughingly, chauffeur and passengers alike, to the chaff and confetti throwing of the happy hoi polloi. All is good humor, and "rough house" is tabu by a happy mixture of sentiment and police regulation. Dawn wags a warning finger behind the tower of the Ferry Building before the crowd goes home; the strings of electrics go out, and the deserted street looks garish with its streamers of serpentine hanging everywhere and drifts of confetti being swept up by those unfortunate enough to have to work on New Year's morning. U A great place for illuminations and display, this city. Most of the windowsills down town are set with standards, ready for flags kept stored for all emergencies. The municipal staff has an enormous property warehouse of banner-bearing poles and Flowers, outdoor grown, are sold the year around on San Francisco's streets. At Christmas violets are ten cents the generous cluster. 22 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO electrical connections. The occasion sees a systematic force moving along the main thoroughfares and leaving them wreathed and draped and festooned in a blaze of light and color. The Ferry tower and the domes and outlines of the big office buildings and hotels are always ready socketed for a chance to brighten up. The heart of the shopping district proper, where prices are not so much a matter of consideration, lies north of Market Street in a district bounded by Powell and Kearny streets, Sutter and Market. There are stores not bettered by any in the New World, few in the Old. All the heart feminine, or masculine, can desire of raiment or decoration, of furnishings for self or home, is centered here, imported from afar or near, the choice of the world's choicest. Not so many afoot here as on Market Street. The patronesses alight from gas or electric- driven cars of every expensive, exclusive style and make. Here fashion reigns, and the furs are ermine and mink. Your Market Street maiden will wear white serge at Christmas if she fancies it becoming, her admirer sport his straw in March and only abandon it in November because the football season has commenced and vaguely he fancies it incongruous. Not so on Post Street or Grant Avenue. The Boston bull wears an uncomfy but swagger suit of knitted wool matched to harmonize with his mistress's toilette and the lining of her limousine. Outside the White House, the City of Paris, Shreve's and the like magazines of trade, stand uniformed He Lotta's Fountain, the pulse of the city, at Newspaper Corners, was given by the singer in appreciation of the applause of her San Francisco admirers. commissionaires, stolid and polite as the liveried chauffeurs. Here is one phase that helps San Francisco to be fancifully named the "Paris of America." Hard by is Union Square, a city block of verdure, palm bordered, flower bedded, path checkered; the gray column of a graceful statue to Admiral Dewey at its center; faced by the striking facade of the Saint Francis Hotel and fine commercial buildings. Within two blocks are the Bohemian, Family and Olympic clubs, the Columbia, Cort and Orpheum Market Street, at its numerous intersections, is beautified by many monuments. Here are memorials to the "Pioneers," the "California Volunteers," and to "Labor." CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 25 theatres at hand, close to Tait's and Techau's restaurants. It is the hub of down-town leisure life. Its benches are always crowded, not with vagrants, but with naught-to-dos, reading the papers, discussing politics, philosophy and what not. Not of the wealthy class, these seat-holders; yet not of the tramp community. Most of them are newly shaven and cleaned, their shoes are patchless, their trousers unfringed. Bohemians in fraternity, out of work perhaps, but hopeful; out for air probably, interested in the world in general. On seats reserved for women are a few similars of the other sex, a maid or two with children. Others lounge on the sunny turf, for there are no "keep off" signs here, save one—"Loose Dogs Not Allowed"—a prohibition referring not to habits but to liberty. No stern policeman orders idlers on. At nooning the lawns are a pretty sight, with groups of girls and boys at picnic lunch together, junior clerks and "salesfolk," cash girls and office boys, chumming together, getting a real midday rest, with health and perhaps a little romance thrown in. A kindly music-man turns loose from an upper window a flood of phonographic melody each midday, and aids to make the place unique, delightful. It is a parade point also, like Lotta's Fountain. Bands play here on occasions, and reviewing stands are set up. When civic weal demands, speeches are made here, and from here at times firework displays are made. It is a part of distinctive San Francisco. Not very far away, nearer the bay, between CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 27 upper Kearny Street and Grant Avenue, as those streets merge into China City and Latin Town, is Portsmouth Square, sloping towards the Hall of Justice, a place of history, with its own peculiar loungers and its own particular monument. Once the custom house was here, "when the water came up to Montgomery Street," a block away. Now the arbiter of protective duties has receded harborward with the curbing of the tide. Commodore Montgomery, of the sloop of war "Portsmouth," raised the American flag here during the Mexican War; public meetings against lawlessness were held here by the alcalde in the days of '49; Vigilantes hung their sentenced criminals on the timbers of neighboring adobes; it has known barricades and mobs, has been the scene of lawmaking and rioting in the days when it was the Plaza. Facing the stately Hall of Justice, on the opposite side of the square, are the back doors of Chinatown, on either side the dingy alleyways of the ungilded portion of the "tenderloin." A motley crowd invests the square, crosses its pathways, drinks at its fountain. Shrill-laughing Chinese children, butterfly garbed, play American ball between the shrubberies; worn- out hulks of wanderers by many lands and seas sit in the sun, boasting or railing, according to the degrees of their wrecked manhood, and above them a bronze galleon, with surging sails, tops the monument to him who knew and pitied all humanity, flotsam and jetsam alike—a monument whereon is CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 29 carved, "To Remember Robert Louis Stevenson," and, following, that sermon of sweet manliness that starts, "To be honest, to be kind—" Then there is Van Ness Avenue, running at right angles from Market Street—most of the tributaries of the northern bank join that thoroughfare gore fashion—once a stately way of luxurious homes, now coming into a second dignity. Here the great fire halted on the eastern side, and here was set the temporary shopping district during the rehabilitation. West of it lies the better-off class residential district. On it are still some stately hojnes and some magnificent structures (largely recent) of religious and fraternal significance. Part of it the motor sales industry has pre-empted. At its junction with Market Street the new Civic Center is to be reared, dignified with City Hall, Auditorium, Opera House, Art Gallery, planned to be worthy of the future greatness of the city. The avenue is to be the main thoroughfare tying up the city proper with the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915, and it will hold many memories to be of a dignified and pleasant boulevard. California Street, toiling from the Ferry through the wholesale and banking districts, by Chinatown, up steep grades to Nob Hill, is not for the pedestrian, save when the summit is reached. Up it clank the cable cars at safe but alarming grades. Crowning it stands the Fairmont Hotel, copy of an European palace, flanked by the Pacific-Union and Family clubs and the Art Institute. From it unrolls 30 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO a view magnificent. Beneath, to north and east, the commercial city pitches to the view of gleaming bay, the shipping, the islands and the mountains of the farther shores; to the south and west shines the unsurpassed panorama of the residential lands. Hills rise here and there, dark with trees or brightly blocked with houses. All is checkered with light and shade, dazzling sun against sombre masses, a fog finger stealing in from the ocean, guided by mysterious currents; gleam of water, the sea breeze wS^IsSh R R I The turning of the giant in his sleep shows faintly through the conventions of Chinatown. Queues have vanished, and "Young China" strives to keep abreast of Occidental times. ■n CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 31 in your- face, a gull overhead, below stretching to misty horizons the City Beautiful. All about are the houses of the wealthy. Above Nob Hill again rises Russian Hill, named from the forgotten, lost graves of obscure sailors buried there four score years ago. Here the view is yet more superb to reward the climber, with the vista in all rightfulness pre-empted by lovers and portrayers of the beautiful. About the artist-planned houses are terraced gardens, and though the old-fashioned homes have passed, the place is full of charm and beauty. Chapter III THE CITY COSMOPOLITAN 'ANY cities of our mainland claim to be cosmopolitan and are so only in name. Change, not only a man's environment, but his method of making a living and then his climate, and he soon becomes but a wraith and a caricature of his original, picturesque self—American in all save accent and instinct. The cosmopolites of San Francisco are not submerged. They retain to a large extent their individuality, their language, their customs and their costumes. "For which the Lord be thankit!" Particularly is this the case with the Latin races— the Italians, Portuguese, Sicilians; with the Greeks; 32 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO the Chinese—less striking with the Scandinavians, who have in deed not so far to go—and the Japanese. The destruction of the Tower of Babel brought forth not such a polyglottery as the common consternation of the great fire. I You can stand at the Ferry Building and, whether only picturebook wise or not, pick out distinctly in an hour or so's watch, Kanaka, Indian, Filipino, Chinaman, Japanese, Lascar, Hindu, Sikh, Greek, Roumanian, Turk, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swede, Norwegian, Hollander, Frenchman, Mexican, and half a dozen others, besides the accepted racial differences of accepted Americanism and the tens of types and intertypes, with all their variations of color and patois. And all of these named, moreover, will be using their mother tongues and giving outward and visible signs—not counting garlic and like odors— of their nationality. Many of them mass and serve the ends of the city: The French range as banker and high-class merchant, chef, bakers and laundry folk; the Italians as banker, merchant, wine culturist to fisherman or laborer; the, Japanese from merchant to house servant, the Chinaman adding laundries to these last; and their colonies are substantial. The Chinese have their own ^city within a city, the Italians, Sicilians and Portuguese have their own hillside, partly shared by the lower class of French; the Japanese have burrowed into the residence district; and, save as these cosmopolites have modified their ways to suit the taste of their customers, they live as they did at home—with the exception of the Japanese and some of the younger Chinese. As visitor you can meet them on the half-way ground of the soi-disant Italian restaurants, the guide-shown byways of Chinatown; you can "butt in" on their own familiar haunts and take your chances of what you see and hear, or if you speak the language, or even if you don't, and are really polite, you can make friends with them andvfind much worth the looking at or listening to. That depends entirely upon yourself. There are so many types of tourist, both at home and abroad. Nor is this chronicle a Baedeker. Chinatown holds, it would seem, the greater interest with the greater mystery. With somewhat American architects have worked to unite Chinese style and American utility. CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 35 of superstition and lethargy as regards the world's affairs eliminated with his queue, the transplanted Chinaman is not so great a puzzle as of yore. We wonder at many of his superstitions, his peculiarities of palate, his ideas of musical scale, limitations of theatrical staging and the like, but we know and understand something of his beliefs and customs, have an admiration for the broad tenets of his religion and many of his achievements in the arts and the sciences; and, we of the West and those who have more than superficially visited the Orient, esteem him as a person of honor, of excellent family traits and a man of parts. Many deplore the passing of the Old Chinatown with the fire. The weird fascination of underground cellars where gamblers played behind labyrinths of barricaded doors and passages, where the atmosphere The border line — the entrance to Chinatown — Confucius over against Christianity. s^ff ~. © •3 *5 ijSK^^^ Isp- w^^^H | 1 ^■k^H . 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K • CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 37 was fetid with lack of sanitation and the reek of opium and strange, long kept edibles, where slave girls were celled, bartered or murdered at will; of polluted dens where degenerate wrecks sought solace in poppy-vapored dreams—all that is gone—but the Chinaman, leopard like, has not changed many of his spots. He still has his lily- footed wives and concubines who are kept in private seraglios, he still "hits the pipe" and gambles at will, still is his own lawmaker so far as he does not clash with the law of the white man—and at that rival tongs still use the highbinder and hatchet- man on occasion, though the automatic pistol has displaced the axe. Still is held the feast of the moon, the feast of the dead and quaint rituals for wedding, birth and funeral. Clang of gong, squeak of clarionet and fiddle and scent of incense are still local color. The gorgeous dragon flaunts abroad yet. In a tea house you might well be in Canton, as you eat strange preserves and sip Oolong. There is no occasion to put up the sign "Ichabod" over Grant Avenue, for the glory of San Francisco's Chinatown is far from departed. There is less talk of danger from the guides, and the "rubberneck" wagon has hurt their income. The eye of the law is turned upon the district in kindly restraint, but Chinatown with its bazaars, its temples, its vivid costumes, its own distinctive shops and wares is vividly picturesque, and still carries 38 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO hints of ancient civilization, pomp and power of bygone empire with vivid suggestion of a latterday awakening that is worth the watching equally of the careless and thoughtful onlooker. The trend of the Young Republicanism is interesting. | On the day the edict for the clipping of queues went forth in China City, and the flag of the new party replaced the dragon, the trip through China City was an interesting one. The barbers sheared diligently and much long black hair doubtless later adorned the heads of unsuspecting Caucasian ladies. On one corner of Portsmouth Square I saw a Chinaman of the older order stand clad in orthodox brocades, be-felted shoes and button-topped hat, looking at two young chaps, apparently his sons, with much the same aspect as a hen beholding her first brood of ducklings. The young men were garbed in the peg-top trousers and other eccentricities of the ultra freshman type, pointed shoes of patent leather, socks, handkerchief and I tie to match; gazing with glee at the "old man" as he vaguely felt about the back of his head "in the place where his hair ought to be." Outside the Saint Francis one afternoon two charming Oriental maidens, complexions like camellias, unspoiled by rice ^powder or paint, polished hair set with rich gold and jade, arrayed in dainty garments of light blue and rose brocade—two animated Chinese lilies—walked with perfect poise past the ladies' entrance at the tea hour. "What charming little heathens," said a tourist lady. The lateen=rigged fishing feluccas help to give the irresistible suggestion of the Mediterranean, though many of them have auxiliary gas engines. "Hush! Listen to their quaint talk," said her companion. What the Chinese lilies said was—"Are you going to the reception tomorrow? " "Yes, if I am not too fatigued." Shade of Confucius! Yet many a merchant who replies in kind to the "pidgin- English" you thrust upon him in his bazaar, will talk in perfect vernacular to you if you give him a chance. As it is you are likely to be charged for the underrating of his scholarship. Oh, those bazaars! Despoilers of the pocket! 40 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO Much that is meretricious is there, demanded by the casual customer; but, if you desire the beautiful, treasures of silk brocade and embroidery, of carven teak and ivory, sandal and camphor wood, of bronze and silver and lacquer, enamel and porcelain, gold and jade, shall be laid out before you; much of the embroidered stuffs modernized into such enticement of shirtwaist patterns or made up in kimonos and mandarin theater coats or bags that the heart-strings of women and the purse- strings of their providers loosen simultaneously. There are other wares in China City that interest but do not tempt. The dried lizards and seahorses, the ginseng and sliced deer horns of the apothecaries; the dried abalones, antediluvian eggs encased in river mud, dried fish, flattened out ducklings, weird "innards" of pig and cow at the butchers, fail to appeal. Other edibles do. Lychis, preserved ginger and melon seeds, joints of sugar cane, almonds, cumquats and cookies, fragrant tea, and many of the restaurant dishes are more than palatable. With rice, chicken and young pickled bamboo sprouts the Chinese chef can achieve a masterpiece. The costumes, sensible and picturesque, constantly attract the eye. Color is everywhere, on great lanterns aswing from restaurant, store or temple, in splashes of vermilion on the walls where strips of paper may be the reward for somebody's head or the result of a lottery. The children are always rainbow clad. Trouserettes of pink bor- The Palace Court, where high teas are held and all classes come. It is the meeting place by long custom of miner, promoter, cattle* man and deep-sea rover. dered with green, jackets of blue and yellow, headgear of tinsel and embroidery, and their wearers good-natured and healthy withal. The temples of their gods, gorgeous in gilding and carving, are open to the public eye if not the understanding. The Chinaman views the incursion of the curious white folk with outward calm and doubtless inward amusement. They do not understand them, but "they buy, and at a good price." "Can one have too much of a good thing? " 42 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO Telegraph Hill! Once from here came the first signal of a ship's entrance through the Gate. It fronts the bay and a magnificent view. One chunk of it has been bitten out by ruthless contractors for the rock. On the slopes cling the homes of the Latin Quarter, not hovels, all habitable, and many picturesque. Goats are herded on its steeps, the twang of guitar and lilt pf song come often from it at the purple hour. Spaghetti and red wine are staples at its meals. The streets that radiate about it are peopled by folk from the Mediterranean, come to a land where skies are blue and money much more plentiful. Between here and Chinatown is the region called the Barbary Coast, a strange melange of Italian and Greek restaurants of lowly or of pretentious bills of fare. In the latter the visitor sits at the next table to the Simon Pure habitue and furtively admires his handling of spaghetti. There are others which cater more particularly to the tourist taste, and cellar cafes where Italian singers alternate with ragtime artists, and the diners sit till one o'clock, the closing hour for the music, rising to dance upon a crowded square of polished floor; places thronged always till no one has elbow-room. There are other datice halls intended for the cruder pleasures of the laborers of the waterfront and the deep sea, and generally for those who earn their living by the sweat of their brows and the callouses of their hands. Quite decorous, on the surface at least, are these places, and "vastly enter- CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 43 taining." In one the great dancing floor is circular and on it glides the passing show in the latest exhibition of "chicken glide" or "rabbit flip." You may join, an' you will. No one will criticize, all will tolerate your old-fashioned methods of following rhythm. The floor here is also the stage, and on it the entertainers of both sexes perform between dances. It is the understood thing for visitors to toss money on the floor as payment if not applause for the offering, and anything under half a dollar The Hotel Saint Francis is fortunate in situation, opposite Union Square and in the center of the shopping, theater and club district. a o CI a 09 I •», ,c •a qj •51 a> U (JQ a V, o *©. V «8 »a © «8 <5i ■** a © »©. a V, 0> 09 a 09 2 © a 3 ■** 09 «8 © © 09 I •** -fc4 a © »a CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 45 proclaims the "cheap sport." Girls are there as partners for the guests, and incidentally to keep the waiters busy. The sexes mingle at the great serving bar, if they prefer it, but to drink at the round tables is the correct thing, as is the treating of the entertainers. You need not fear "knock-out drops" nor violence, unless you attempt to force yourself behind the scenes. This is not your world, and you are lookers-on at sufferance for a consideration of profit. Across the street the dancing floor is a great oblong with a real stage at one end, and at the other a barrier against which packs the same sort of crowd you could duplicate at almost any port. Jack ashore, Jim out of work, Bill with his wages in his pocket—all looking to be amused. Jack, Jim and Bill are tackled persistently by the hard-working, tawdry-clad and made-up girls, ready to dance, more willing to take the percentage on drinks sold. When you come in sight-seeing from uptown it costs you a dollar for a glass of very indifferent anything you call for. Jack, Jim and Bill have a different schedule; and if you bring ladies with you you may sit in open boxes at the side of the floor and pay regulation cafe prices for your refreshment as you watch the dancing (much of which is extraordinarily good, generally graceful, often athletic, less fierce, but as original as the whirls of the Apaches) or the pitiful, clumsy gallantry of Jack et alii. Don't entertain the idea that these daughters of the lower world are utterly 46 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO vicious. Their mode of life is not an easy one, and their wages far from idly earned. There are dance halls monopolized by the negro, where again the dancing is unique and clever. There are dark alleys with darker shadows skulking about them where the seamy side of vice is tucked away, but most of the "entertainment" offered is open and above board. One trip to the Barbary Coast, aside from the really good restaurants like Dante's, Felix, Buon Gusto, Gianduja, Coppa's and a dozen of varying type, will prove probably exciting and interesting, but enough. It is the Montmartre of this Paris. By day the region is decorous enough. The dance halls are closed and the stores cater to the needs of the dwellers of the neighborhood who do not participate in the night life and cannot help its establishment in their propinquity. There are drug stores with talk of French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and ten other tongues within. Bakers with crisp, inviting forms of bread in foreign fashion. One store exclusively mends melodeons for the district. Brown faces, browner eyes people the streets. Tiny tots tend tinier bambini, older girls and sometimes the grandmothers herd goats on the hilly streets. The wives prepare in home style the macaroni, taglierini, the enchiladas and tamales you get at the restaurants, and there is a general flavor of Naples in the air. Down at Fisherman's Wharf the lateen-rigged, brown-sailed boats line the pier-side, while blue- WMmwcv > jtsuiMWs«ss,i !V' This is the direct view eastward from the Fairmont. shirted, red-sashed Sicilian, Portuguese and Greek mend the tanned nets against another casting, or come in happy from a haul of striped bass, salmon or tomcod. A simple, kindly folk, these of the Quarter. There are those of the race who have become powerful padrones, bankers, or the establishers of great vine growing and wine making colonies in Napa and Sonoma counties to the north. But those transplanted peasant and fisher folk, grading up with more money to spend, better education for the youngsters, better opportunity everywhere of getting on, preserve their native generosity and good manners, living happily under California skies. There is no Mafia here, the Mano Negro has never shown the menace of its imprint. Perhaps The Cliff House, its terrace and the Seal Rocks, where sea-lions gambol. because these sons of Italy are of a different type from the peanut seller, banana huckster, street laborer, "Ginny" of Castle Garden entrance. A kindly folk! Bid them buon giorno, and show a working acquaintance with their mother tongue and their house is yours. I remember once, when the Bohemian Club gave a distinctive dinner, roaming the hills in search of a celebrated melodeon player. We found his mother sitting on an old wall (relic of the fire), wand in hand, watching the blue hills of Marin and a billy goat that resented our appearance. She promised the appearance of her boy, "the best melodeon player of San Francisco," and insisted with evident hospitality on our having one glass of wine. CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 49 So we went up and through her garden, gay with nasturtiums and geraniums, through the neat house, sun and air swept by open door and window, on to a tiny loggia, vine clad, that overlooked the bay. There we pledged health and happiness, and there, as she looked at purple Tamalpais she told us of her Sorrento home, of the immigration of those yet to come, and of her husband, buried back where she still thought of it as "home." Good had been their fortune, and while one boy, the musician, liked the town, the youngest was a fine gardener, and bye and bye, when Pietro married they were to live on a little hill ranch in Napa County, "with vines and an olive orchard, signor, vines and olives, as it used to be." Chapter IV INDOORS ^Jm± ;HESE days, the principal indoor pastimes € J are those of eating and auction bridge. ^**^ Unless, indeed, one accept sleeping as a diversion, and include that.. Theater going, concerts, dancing and shopping may also be accounted minor amusements of the same order. It takes more than mere taste to properly appreciate most of them. However, they are all obtainable in San Francisco. To the visitor the eating and sleeping call for a good hotel. Bridge we have always with us. As to eating, restaurants give variety. Let us consider a California menu. The real bill of fare of a country depends upon its specialties and the latter upon its natural larder. In the cosmopolitan restaurants of the city one can enjoy the piece de resistance of many countries. You can get bouillabaisse to equal that of Marseilles. Spaghetti, macaroni, taglierini, ravioli, enchiladas, tamales, frijoles and stews pungent with herbs, as excellent as those of Naples or Madrid. The "Charlemagne" of Chinatown with rice perfect in every flake, chicken and mushrooms tender as Market Street by Lotta's Fountain and the Chronicle Building at Newspaper Corners. Across the street shows the facade of the Palace Hotel. rose leaves, young bamboo sprouts vieing with them, is not lightly to be overlooked. Try the imported escargots, or the frog legs poulette of Camille or Blanco—call for aught an epicurean palate of European fantasy can remember and ■MM i Tbe trade-winds blow steadily across tbe bay and give tbe yachtsmen an eight months' season of delight, cruising by Island, river and hill-set shore. CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 53 hotel chef or restaurateur will furnish it to the correct taste. Your real gourmet, though, your adventurer in appetite, looks for the indigenous fleshpots, for meats and fruits native to the soil, and out of this great larder of California, with its bi-climatic outputs of temperate and tropic zone, there will be found many a new bonne bouche. The world eats canned what the Californian eats au naturel. The grapefruit, the orange, the apple, pear, peach, apricot, fig and grape, all the delicious, acidulous range of fruit comes to you from the tree. If you order strawberries in December they have not been forced, but picked outdoors within the half day. Somewhere in the State they ripen every month. If you feel like raspberry shortcake in October you shall call for it and not be disappointed. Celery and asparagus, artichokes of luscious heart, all the edible vegetable kingdom fill the markets. Does your appetite fail? Ask not for tonic or doctor, but stroll through the California market. Here at first hand is spoil for Lucullus. Pineapples and alligator pears fresh from Hawaii. Papaias, too, and bananas. Mexico sends in her best on a twenty-four hour schedule. The wizard of fruitdom, Burbank, perfects his marvels only two hours' distance from the Ferry, and you may call for his pitless plums, potatoes of concentrated flour, and magic berries with blends of sweetly puckering juice. His latest masterpiece, a glorified prickly pear, eats like a combination of the heart of a watermelon and a Bartlett pear. Pirture by Waters A concert rehearsal on the lower stage of the forest theater of the Bohemian Club, set amid redwoods towering to two hundred feet. CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 55 Delicate sea foods, fresh landed at Fisherman's Wharf await you. Their evanescent flavors are unspoiled by ice-packed travel. Pompano, sand dabs, sole, firm encarnadined shoulder cutlets of salmon that in six hours exchange the chasing of sardines outside the Golden Gate for the will of your fork tines; sea trout, brook trout, lake trout, striped bass, white sea bass, tomcod, all fresh as whitebait at Richmond, and more genuine. Transplanted Eastern oysters which flourish but breed not, and so have no "R" months of banishment. The little California oyster—essence of succulence —the California lobster, clawless but worthy of the skill of a Chateaubriand. Wish you game—hare hunter style? Venison or mayhap duck? Of the latter take your choice of mallard, teal, canvasback or sprig, yet if you would be wise choose the latter. As this chronicle is not a Baedeker, neither is it a Mrs. Rohrer, therefore let it suffice that, to the sapient, Califor- nian eating, in the preparation and the realization, has long been proverbial for its excellence. At the Saint Francis and the Palace the chefs have fame that commands recognition in the capitals of Europe. Yours to command, they will prove faithful genii. At Bergez-Frank's, the Poodle Dog, Blanco's, the Maison Doree, at Coppa's, Frank's and Felix, at Dante's, at Techau's or at Tait's you will find digestion wait on appetite, pick from the concentration of French, Italian, Spanish, German, Austrian and American culinary triumphs 56 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO and find music and singing and Bohemian unrestraint—even to cabinets particuliers. Tait's, indeed, the uptown favorite of pre- and post-theater patrons, emulates in carte du jour, decoration and variety of vaudeville, the accepted restaurants of all big cities. Before we leave our restaurant, a word on drinking. California wines are cursed with a propensity for mimic nomenclature. As "types" of all well-known brands are they labeled, prompted by imported vine-cuttings and close similarity of soil and climate. Some day the wine-growers will, like those of the Rhine and Switzerland, boldly give them independent names, and they will come into their own. Vintages are beginning to be recognized, and blends are diminishing. Ask some Cali- fornian friend who knows how to dine to introduce you to a bottle of native wine, white or red. Forget its label and you will not regret the venture. Time was when the Palace was the one great hotel of the city. Kings, chancellors, ambassadors, diplomats of white and yellow, brown and duskier races have wined and dined and slept there—and still do. It holds yet the atmosphere of the early days, and in its palm-shaded court the modern representatives of adventure, miner, gambler, cattleman and sea rover yet feel at home and are un- awed by the four hundred at their tea. Social events are divided, like other honors, with the Palace by the Fairmont, on the hill, and the Saint Francis on Union Square. The Palace held the CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 59 great Mardi Gras ball of 1912, the Fairmont is the scene of the Greenway cotillions, while the chamber concerts go to the Saint Francis. As to social amusements—for the inner circle one carries one's own entree. The city is renowned for its hospitality. Are you of the gay world elsewhere, your cachet is acknowledged instanter and private homes and the clubs of city and country open to you. For entertainment open to all, there is much. The chief theatrical attractions always are booked and, thanks to its climate, in the summer San Francisco offers unequaled playbills. Music is pre-eminently recognized. The Symphony Concert, two seasons, under Henry Hadley's baton, satisfies the fastidious. Every artiste recognizes a San Francisco audience as more than whimsically worth while. There are the usual coterie of clubs, social, commercial, official and national. The most original is the Bohemian Club, a coterie of wits, professional men of the Arts and Sciences, and their recognized admirers. The athletes have a magnificent organization in the Olympic Club. The Country clubs are not supposedly of "indoor" interest. Let us pass them by, closing the chapter with a hint to visit the Mission, the Mint and the museums at the Affiliated Colleges (particularly full of anthropological interest) and at Golden Gate Park. Chapter V AND OUT AGAIN VJflfli *HE best part of life in San Francisco is £ J spent out of doors. The most seductive of ^**^ repasts needs appetite, and hotels, however luxurious, are not capable of much walled restraint where the climate laughs in at the window after breakfast every morning. There be fogs in San Francisco, gentle reader. It was the fog outside the Golden Gate that retarded the heralding of the harbor until the moment was auspicious for revelation. It is the fog that fosters bloom upon the ladies' cheeks and makes velvet their skins. But it is a kindly, convenient fog. It will tone up the atmosphere all night and sometimes hang around till the breakfast dishes are cleared away, but it is only done in friendly wrestle with the sun, and good-naturedly retires well before noon. Usually it stays outside the Golden Gate and beneficently charges the air with coolness. It is an equalizer of temperature, preserving an average the year around of under sixty degrees. It has only the Golden Gate to enter through, and should it linger too late, Phoebus comes charging in = CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO his chariot and it beats a swift retreat. Mostly it is ornamental in its delay with veily wisps or floating cloaks about Tamalpais and the peaks. It helps the roses to keep blooming and the fair-greens verdant, it should never be denied, good friend as it is. It is an ally, not an enemy, as the record of over three hundred days of sunshine attests. Come you to San Francisco by steamer from the Orient, or trainbound from the Occident, you enter by the water-gate, the Ferry Building, and perforce cross the Bay. I spell it with a B (and a capital one at that) because it is beautiful. Sir Thomas Lipton, who is of a surety a judge of harbors, said, at the risk of being thought unpatriotic, "It is the most beautiful Bay I have ever seen." It is, and The stadium is the largest in the world. Marathons start here, and the track is never idle. •5 u fe «8 ui *a fe *3 09 •»* -+* -s: >■* *»« v ?i •f\ . o © to © © t* ^ -w V <Q 0, •>*< •a *a "*4 a © * V, a a © i* *a q> *a a © ^kl <u 0} 'a a 0] es a <u •a V, BJ *D »J x •*« *a a * <u 09 a o •a ii «8 Qi 1m <U *J S CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 63 the same is true for you. It has a thousand moods, a dozen climates. Sometimes it recalls the frowning but majestic fjords of Norway, graysea'd, windswept, high-cliff ed; awesome, majestic, almost desolate. Oftener it smiles beneath blue skies, its hills checkered with gleaming buildings, forested above, with the mountain summits purple as the heart of an amethyst. Verdant isles rest on its bosom, gulls are a-wing on its windways, craft of a score of flags, battleship, submarine, freighter, liner, barque and schooner, a fleet of yachts, brown lateen sails, junks of China, sampans of Japan, whalers and scow-hulled river craft; busy ferries, fussy tugs and smart launches, dazzle everywhere. It is the Mediterranean over again, with something of the semi-tropic suggestion of South American ports. There's nothing just like it. Two great rivers, navigable a hundred miles and more, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, send down their sweet waters to temper it, the great tides chafe about the boundaries; one shore will gleam in brightness, another loom forbidding under the passing clouds or scurrying mists. Sand dune, tree-set hill and towering mountain rim it, with cities breaking out like an irresistible contagion* everywhere. At night the city lights invest the harbor like great diamond snakes of some djhin-jeweler. The ferry-boats are fairy boats of mystery plying between haven lights made from great rubies and emeralds. The wind sighs of lands beyond the Gate, of palm-fringed shores and pagoda'd cities, full of the lust of life and the zest of adventure. Half a dozen lighthouses wink wisely of narrow escapes and tragedies before their time. Listen, and if your mind is atune, you can hear the pulse of Progress beating steadily, day and night. The same winds greet you on the hills, on the links, if you are a golf player, in the park, across the Presidio valleys, in the hollows of a hundred hills where iris and violet, Johnny-jump-ups, lupines purple and yellow, poppies of California—cup of gold—smile as you cut short their life to help your holiday. Great masses of eucalyptus, recent intruders, old oaks that defy any month to take toll of their leaves, all tell the tale of this heritage of ours, speak of its youth, abounding vitality and promise. Come to the Park, the fifteen hundred acres of Golden Gate, made into a garden by the grace of God, manifested through John McLaren, superintendent, Scotchman and master gardener. In Padre Junipero Serra, premier missionary of California. * isa CAME-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 65 1870 here were shifting dunes, a waste of sand, wind waved, desolate of herbage. Today are seventeen miles of driveways set with trees from every clime, that open on enchanting glades and vistas of mountain and sea. Here are lakes where wild ducks breed and paddocks where elk and deer and buffalo graze under unconscious guardianship. The conservatory is a rainbow of tropic blooms matched by the living splendor of the aviary. Flowers are everywhere, luxuriant in clustering fragrance. Old folk, families, lovers, babies, all find their charm. The children have their swings and donkey rides in their special playground, their grizzly bears and other strange beasts of the Zoo, and their sand bed games; the young men and maidens use the tennis courts whence national champions have issued. There is baseball for the young, bowls for the old, One of the many statues that adorn the lawns. CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 67 the largest stadium in America for marathons or minor athletic events, a course for speedy horses, special waters for model yachtsmen, and a great stone stand where music for the million is dispensed. The view from Strawberry Hill, above Stow Lake, takes in the Golden Gate, with Tamalpais beyond, the Berkeley Hills, the loom of Mount Diablo and, closer, the Cross on Lone Mountain. Below, on the bridged and isleted lakelet is the Japanese tea house in its quaint garden, a bit of Chrysanthemum Land inlaid in the great play table of the Park. On warm nights—not necessarily summer—and on all nights in fact, the paths are illumined by the brilliance of motor headlights, speeding to the ocean front. Days see more motor occupants out for airing and thousands of pedestrians, while well groomed riders and horses test their mettle on the bridle-paths. Set about the lawns, enlivening the vistas are many statues of more than common merit. Those to U. S. Grant, to Padre Serra, to Robert Burns, the "Baseball Player," are particularly interesting. The sand hills surrounding the Park and rapidly giving way before the builders' advance army of road graders, form a region little known, though easy of access. At the end of Twenty-second and the farther adjoining avenues one enters this labyrinth of dunes, the battleground between the sand and the flowers. Wind-blown the sand rises in mock continuation of the waves behind and valiantly the blossoms, the seaweeds of the sandy ocean, strive to McLoughlin, Long and other champions learned their tennis here. Close by the elder men play the ancient and honorable game of bowls on the smooth turf. check its advance. Here are great masses of purple and yellow lupines, scarlet painters' brush and golden poppies everywhere, amid a tangle of grease- wood, tortured and buffeted scrub growths, a bizarre wild garden of bloom with the shining sea and changing sky for its background, and only the trailing smoke of a steamer or the glint of sails to bring the realization that this is not some wilderness beyond the pale and that the electric car is only a little way over the dunes. CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 69 The Presidio, heavily forested with eucalypts sheltering its open places, great guns embanked, players on the links, soldiers on the parade ground, gives a delightful walk. The sea fringes it and the view is magnificent. Motorcars are allowed and the street cars enter one of its gates. This same car line, that of Union Street, runs up and down the fringe of hills that mount from the northern shore and winds up at the Ferry Building. It looks down upon the water site of the Exposition and across Alcatraz to the low mountains of Marin, topped by Tamalpais, it skirts Russian Hill and skims through the Barbary Coast to the waterfront. Here, if you find imagination good company, walk the length of it. What a heterogeneous mass of shipping. The fishing boats, army transports, freighters, oil tankers and mail liners of the Pacific bound for Panama, for Hawaii, for Australasia and the Orient; lumber ships, deck laden, from the north, a lumber raft maybe, river steamers and bay ferries, launches galore, ship, schooner, barque and barkentine in stream or at dock, loading, unloading, being scraped and painted and overhauled. Whalers, a treasure-hunting schooner outfitting, a copra carrier from the South Seas, boats of the police patrol, fire boats, ships of the lighthouse service and fish commission, quarantine and custom tugs, shore boats and launches of the cruisers and battleships sure to be in naval row; and the strange mixture of mankind that serves them all. CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 71 To walk the docks is to find in workmen and loungers the characters of a whole month's issue of those magazines that specialize on adventurous fiction. From the warehouses come subtle smells that conjure up tales of Stevenson and the Swiss Family Robinson and visions of Oriental ports. It is a fascinating world of its own, bounded by so-called snuggeries and saloons set in dark streets that after nightfall are best left untrod—the real Coast of the High Barbaree, where clubs are trumps, where they "Cut, shoot or stab without formality And a nickel is the value of a life." To the motorist San Francisco out-of-doors gives many opportunities. The old Camino Real, the King's Highway, ran northward, a day's journey at a time from San Diego, mission by mission, ending at the Mission Dolores, San Francisco. It is pleasant journeying, starting by the beach boulevard, to turn southwards toward San Jose city, fifty miles away, center of the orchard-covered Santa Clara Valley. The way lies through constant suburbs, by palatial estates, by country clubs, by humbler dwellings, all flower set, tree shaded, and the return can be made easily by looping the trip with the Hotel Vendome at San Jose as center of your curve and returning by orchard and through more miles of civic environs to Oakland and back by ferry. Close to San Francisco are the beautiful lakes of the water system, bounded by a road that leads through verdant hillways to old-time fishing 72 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO villages. The motorcar can be shipped also on the river steamers to Sacramento in preparation for a glorious day's run to Lake Tahoe, a mile up in the Sierra. There are numberless excursions through picturesque Marin County,-through vineyarded Napa and Sonoma, up to the waters of Lake County, about Mount Diablo, all trips over good, well-defined roads—ventures of a day or two at most, with pleasant hostelries to tempt extensions. Golf has been lightly touched upon. To the enthusiast there are many opportunities at hand, and it is a year-round sport. The San Francisco Country Club at Ingleside has a course in many respects ideal, with natural hazards, springy turf on the fair greens and a view of the ocean at every resting place. The Presidio reservation links, open to the public, but upheld by a club, has a sporty range of full eighteen holes and great scenic beauty, overlooking, as it does, the Golden Gate. Across the bay in the Piedmont Hills is an almost perfect course and a beautiful clubhouse. Rewards are plentiful for the steady, but difficulties rife for him who fails to play straight. Down the peninsula are the well-kept links of the Burlingame and Menlo Park clubs, and in Marin County the greens of San Rafael, all easy of access. For those who love the water, there are four or five yachting organizations, led by the San Francisco and Corinthian clubs, with a fleet of schooners, sloops, yawls and launches that keep in commission CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 73 eight months of the year, some of them all year. The bay, though tricky to sail by reason of current and tide-rip, is a delightful pleasure ground, and invites the planning of a series of ferry and boat trips—to Sausalito, Belvedere, to Mare Island Navy Yard, to Yerba Buena Island with its Naval Training School, Alcatraz with its prison, or up the rivers to Sacramento and Stockton. Rodmen and gunmen can find good sport in season. There are salmon in the bay and outside the heads, striped bass in estuary and slough, black bass in river and lake, steelhead in lagoon and river, and rainbow a-plenty in a score of coast streams. Ducks and geese are plentiful and, while most of the ground is preserved, there is plenty of open water. Close by, too, are deer and dove and quail. The holiday parade and promenade along the Ocean Boulevard is a whirl of color and action. M *a a «8 © V, «»4 a © V. «8 93 3i 09 qj *a «»4 o 09 14 0) ••"•» -a 14 09 09 V, <u a 14 a *a «8 a a © *a a «8 <3i © v, «8 •8 a «8 09 © »a 14 ♦a 14 Chapter VI THE BEACH Vw^HEN the suggestion is made, "Let's go out 1 I # *° ^e Beach," it presages a night trip by Vmx motor through the winding roadways of Golden Gate Park, a dash along the five-mile boulevard that borders the sea, with throbbing engines and shafts of headlights all about, the surf pounding on one hand, breaking in gray spray on the broad sands; and on the other the electric signs and gay windows of half a dozen roadhouses. It is not exactly slumming, this "doing the Beach," yet it is the Barbary Coast over again to a more refined audience, plus a better selection of liquids and minus the unsolicited attentions of the fair sex. Each has its separate bar, the inevitable dancing floor,— a polished parallelogram set about with tables,—its fireplace and its corps of entertainers. Good voices are here, clever in parody and originality that have often been transplanted to the Orpheum Circuit with success. The wife of one proprietor sings ballads in a honey voice of caressing charm; one owner himself can change from Chopin to the latest ragtime swing with a facility of technique that is dazzling. There are negro players and singers, a white quartet at one resort, girls at another. CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO At most of the places you can eat, at all of them drink and be merry. Often they are so crowded until far into the night that the dancing floor is reduced to a few square feet that are none the less popular every time the cry comes, "Everybody two" —meaning two-step, alias rag. Sometimes there is exhibition dancing; the "Texas Tommy" was born here, and the spare hours of the entertainers are taken up as teachers of the latest glide and dip. The music is legally supposed to stop at one o'clock, and sometimes does, as the eye of the law happens to glance that way. But there is nothing vicious about these places, nothing vulgar. Little wilful mothlings flutter here, as ever where the bright lights glare, and get scorched, but the excuse for the Beach night life lies in it being the result of the effervescence of the San Francisco pleasure- seeker, who refuses to go home because the theater is out and the down-town cafes closed. Why indeed? The moon rides high amid her court of stars, the wind is balmy, and the dawn yet hours away. Therefore, join the procession of cars purring steadily along, "Beachward Bound." By day the Beach has a more substantial charm. Motorcars take their owners out for a taste of salty, tonic breeze along the v boulevard. Horse-women and their escorts come out of the Park for a canter and to wet fetlocks in the surf. Lovers sit on the outward rampart of the dunes and watch for their ships to come home. Children paddle in the sea- foam, and parents out of tide reach boast about them. PL^Ilfe,, From the Cliff House beach and boulevard stretch southward in five miles of parallel. The electric cars come to either end of the five- mile boulevard, and all sorts and conditions of men profit by their cheap transportation. Golden Gate Park has its sea entrance on this ocean CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 79 promenade, close by where Amundsen's stout but tiny "Gjoa" rests in a man-made pool, the prow toward the seas it bid farewell to after the making of the "Northwest Passage." At one end of the Ocean Boulevard the road turns southward up the peninsula, by violet fields and the links of the Country Club. At the other, toward the Golden Gate, stands the famous Cliff House, set in the land-rock with terraces overlooking, the Seal Rocks and their colony of sea-lions. Here one can revel in sunset dinners, looking out between courses to where the day dies like a dolphin, radiant in the west. Here also music mingles with the well- served feast. Above are the Italian gardens of Sutro, stately, formal, and set with statues, given to the public by the philanthropic engineer of the Comstock Tunnel. Here is the spot where Fages raised the cross for Padre Serra as a standard of Christian victory over these then "unfaithful parts." Close by the Cliff House are the Sutro Baths, where the ocean comes in fresh from the sea, beyond its glass sea front— the largest baths of their type. There are less costly places than the Cliff House, where popular clam chowders are served, but, for the people at large, the boulevard and beach are picnic grounds, where on holidays the place is a combination of family resort and gay promenade. Sunlight or arc light, the "Beach" is worth the visiting. ^ 'a a o 83 fe *4 09 S fcl »>4 © fe a ^ o ■ft, ««4 o U a © © 0) 0) •»« 83 09 a. «3 1 *4 83 83 83 u K •>4 u «H © © 5 ^ © ««4 © © a. © 14 © a iC © 14 w V *© o a 1 83 o 14 09 ••4 83 83 © 09 09 a 83 © to € *a 5 a a 09 o © 'a ■a •*« € *a 83 a 83 14 © 09 © V, © •a © u *■« © 03 *^ a «** •»« 14 a 83 © «3 Chapter VII ROUNDABOUT ONLY a hint can here be given of the roundabout, worth-while places. One likes to know that the University of Stanford, coeducational, most richly endowed of any similar institution, is less than an hour's ride, and that the University of California is set among the Berkeley hills, just across the bay. Here is the exquisite Greek Theater, modeled on that ancient one of Epi- daurus. Thanks to the generosity of Mrs. Phoebe and William Randolph Hearst, ten thousand people can see reproductions of the plays of Sophocles and Euripides and listen to the best of music al fresco. Bernhardt played Phedre here, and Maude Adams "As You Like It," in perfect surroundings. Symphony and other concerts are frequently given. Up wooded Tamalpais winds "the crookedest railway in the world" to the tavern at the summit, branching off to a grove of giant redwoods, two, perhaps three, thousand years old, by a sparkling stream. Here, too, there is an inn beside the trees. On top is an observatory, j Across the slopes of madrona, oak, pine and laurel, manzanita and chaparral, gleams a glorious panorama of bay and sea and shore, the cities on their hills and the coast 82 CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO range behind. At the base, in the green valleys, are towns and clustered settlements, the country homes of suburbanites linked to San Francisco by Sausalito and a half-hour ferry service. Sausalito, too, has many dwellers on its picturesque hillside above the yacht moorings. From here the ferry goes to Belvedere, practically an island, the most unique, perhaps the most beautiful, spot in California—and the least known. Not in the Riviera is a more charming place. The traveler inevitably likens it to Sorrento, but it is above the indignity of comparison; it is Belvedere. The steep sides are covered on the weather side with euca- lypts, oaks and golden-balled acacias. From ridge to shore line, on the lee, terrace after terrace holds houses and gardens of resplendent bloom. Oaks and palms, trumpet blooms and hawthorn, little orange groves, cascades of vivid flowers. Roses, geraniums, passion and honeysuckle vines, hydrangea, carnations—the whole catalogue of blossom — tumble down the hill, now in formal order, oftener in old-world profusion. The roads are bordered with gray stone walls that guide them winding to invest the hill. The view swings from the Golden Gate round half the circle. Alcatraz, Yerba Buena and Angel Island swim in hazes of lavender and lilac, or thrust themselves clear profiled from the bay in verdant ridges, purple shadowed. Sunshine is a perpetual resident, and the sheltered waters of the cove see pleasure craft in constant service. CARE-FREE SAN FRANCISCO 83 Between the lights, three days before Thanksgiving of this year, I stood on the road that runs above the wooded promontory of Blanding's Point. The scent of flowers came on the warm breeze, intermingled with the balm of the scimitar-leaved euca-^ lypts. Palms framed the scene into a triptych. Beyond Raccoon Straits, ascending between Corinthian Island and Angel Island, rose the November moon, orange behind its misty veil. The Golden Gate glowed dusky crimson, staining the prison walls of Alcatraz that looms halfway across the bay like another Chateau d'If. Italian fisher-boats winged homeward, like brown birds, as the water purpled. The fire in the west died out, the moon rose clear from the mists and trailed a pale golden glory across the racing currents of the straits. Clear shone the eyes from Alcatraz light tower and from Baker's Beach. Off the point of Angel Island, now a purple mound of uncertain outline, a warning light glowed like a ruby. The bell-buoy below clanged in the tide-rip, and the ferry-boats, a dazzle of electrics, seemed moving through liquid fire, as the reflected lights broke rippling from the paddle-wheels. The San Francisco hills were only a smudge of vague form that suddenly was barred and checkered by a myriad dancing lights—diamonds set in platinum that mocked the stars. The night was clear, and all was well. Quail were calling in the garden as we strolled home, and the air was redolent with the breath of roses. Si RECENT PUBLICATIONS A. m.|robertson UNION SQUARE, SAN FRANCISCO BOOKS by GEORGE STERLING The House of Orchids and Other Poems Crown 8vo. Full cloth boards, stamped in silver, $1.25 net. "It seems at first almost too good to be true—this excellence of Mr. Sterling's poems. One could look long for a line in any of these poems which is not perfect. There are no faults. Is there any need for the reviewer here? In fact, this poetry either takes rank with the immortals, or it doesn't rank at all." The Mirror, St. Louis. The Wine of Wizardry and Other Poems Crown 8vo. Full cloth boards, $1.25 net. "He has never in our minds surpassed his 'Testimony of the Suns/ with its cosmic sweep, but he has in his new volume a poem that exhibits much of the same power to awaken in a reader the sense of the awfulness of the universe and the littleness of man. The last two lines of the third stanza of 'A Dream of Fear' are worthy to stand alongside of any two lines ever penned by any of the poets." Current Literature. "Out of the West comes the book of a poet, a true poet ***** But is it really 'our greatest poem ?>***** 'A Wine of Wizardry' is unequalled by anything else in our literature; it stands alone, a marvel of color and verbal beauty." Bdwin Markham. The Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems Third edition. Crown 8vo. Full cloth boards, $1.25 net. "A Masterpiece" THE SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF 1UTHER BURBANK'S WORK By DAVID STARR JORDAN and VERNON LYMAN KELLOGG 8vo. Boards, pp. 115, $1.75 net. Illustrated with 37 two-colored engravings, descriptive of the SPINELESS CACTUS as grown for food purposes, the STONELESS PRUNE, the SEEDLESS APPLE, the PLUM- COT—an absolutely new fruit, the OPUNTIA, and numerous hybrid fruits, berries and flowers. GARDENING IN CALIFORNIA—LANDSCAPE AND FLOWER By JOHN McLAREN Superintendent of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Small quarto. Cloth, pp. 339 (with a 20-page index), $3.75 net. With 150 engravings (mostly of photographs) of plants, flowers, landscape gardening and plans, together with the names of trees and shrubs suitable for decorative effects, etc. Eminently practical, showing the results of 35 years of original investigation and experimental work. IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE PADRES By CHARLES WARREN STODDARD A new edition of one of the most famous books on early days in California. With 24 full-page illustrations. Beautifully printed, and bound in full boards. 24 illustrations. Size, 5% x 7% inches. Price, $2.00 net. Mailed to any address, securely wrapped; postage, 15 cents. THE CLOUDS AND FOGS OF SAN FRANCISCO By ALEXANDER McADIE There is no place except perhaps the Bay of Rio de Janeiro where the fog formations are as strikingly beautiful as near San Francisco Bay, and the author explains the various types and methods of formation. The work is illustrated with sixteen full-page half-tones and one colored plate from a painting by Edgar Matthews. 16 illustrations. Size, 6x8^4 inches. Price, $1.50 net. Mailed to any address, securely wrapped; postage, 10 cents. fibs mm Si s.
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