The City That Was
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Will Irwin >> The City That Was
If one wanted black coffee he paid five cents extra, and Louis brought
on a beer glass full of it. Why he threw in wine and charged extra for
after-dinner coffee was one of Louis' professional secrets.
Adulterated food at that price? Not a bit of it! The olive oil in the
salad was pure, California product - why adulterate when he could get it
so cheaply? The wine, too, was above reproach, for Louis made it
himself. Every autumn, he brought tons and tons of cheap Mission grapes,
set up a wine press in his back yard, and had a little, festival vintage
of his own. The fruit was small, and inferior, but fresh, and Louis
himself, in speaking of his business, said that he wished his guests
would eat nothing but fruit, it came so cheap.
The city never went to bed. There was no closing law, so that the
saloons kept open nights and Sundays at their own sweet will. Most of
the cafes elected to remain open until 2 o'clock in the morning at
least.
This restaurant life, however does not express exactly the careless,
pleasure-loving character of the people. In great part their pleasures
were simple, inexpensive and out of doors. No people were fonder of
expeditions into the country, of picnics - which might be brought off at
almost any season of the year - and of long tours in the great mountains
and forests.
Hospitality was nearly a vice. As in the early mining days, if they
liked the stranger the people took him in. At the first meeting the San
Francisco man had him put up at the club; at the second, he invited him
home to dinner. As long as the stranger stayed he was being invited to
week end parties at ranches, to little dinners in this or that
restaurant and to the houses of his new acquaintances, until his
engagements grew beyond hope of fulfilment. Perhaps there was rather too
much of this kind of thing. At the end of a fortnight a visitor with a
pleasant smile and a good story left the place a wreck. This tendency
ran through all grades of society - except, perhaps, the sporting people
who kept the tracks and the fighting game alive. These also met the
stranger - and also took him in.
Centres of man hospitality were the clubs, especially the famous
Bohemian and the Family. The latter was an offshot of the Bohemian; and
it had been growing fast and vieing with the older organization for the
honor of entertaining pleasing and distinguished visitors.
The Bohemian Club, whose real founder is said to have been the late
Henry George, was formed in the '70s by newspaper writers and men
working in the arts or interested in them. It had grown to a membership
of 750. It still kept for its nucleus painters, writers, musicians and
actors, amateur and professional. They were a gay group of men, and
hospitality was their avocation. Yet the thing which set this club off
from all others in the world was the midsummer High Jinks.
The club owns a fine tract of redwood forest fifty miles north of San
Francisco on the Russian River. There are two varieties of big trees in
California: the Sequoia gigantea and the Sequoia sempervirens. The great
trees of the Mariposa grove belong to the gigantea species. The
sempervirens, however, reaches the diameter of 16 feet, and some of the
greatest trees of this species are in the Bohemian Club grove. It lies
in a cleft of the mountains: and up one hillside there runs a natural
out of doors stage of remarkable acoustic properties.
In August the whole Bohemian Club, or such as could get away from
business, went up to this grove and camped out for two weeks. On the
last night they put on the Jinks proper, a great spectacle in praise of
the forest with poetic words, music and effects done by the club. In
late years this has been practically a masque or an opera. It cost about
$10,000. It took the spare time of scores of men for weeks; yet these
750 business men, professional men, artists, newspaper workers,
struggled for the honor of helping out on the Jinks; and the whole thing
was done naturally and with reverence. It would not be possible anywhere
else in this country; the thing which made it possible was the art
spirit which is in the Californian. It runs in the blood.
"Who's Who in America" is long on the arts and on learning and
comparatively weak in business and the professions. Now some one who has
taken the trouble has found that more persons mentioned in "Who's Who"
by the thousand of the population were born in Massachusetts, than in
any other state; but that Massachusetts is crowded closely by
California, with the rest nowhere. The institutions of learning in
Massachusetts account for her pre-eminence; the art spirit does it for
California. The really big men nurtured on California influence are few,
perhaps; but she has sent out an amazing number of good workers in
painting, in authorship, in music and especially in acting.
"High society" in San Francisco had settled down from the rather wild
spirit of the middle period; it had come to be there a good deal as it
is elsewhere. There was much wealth; and the hills of the western
addition were growing up with fine mansions. Outside of the city, at
Burlingame, there was a fine country club centering a region of country
estates which stretched out to Menlo Park. This club had a good polo
team, which played every year with teams of Englishmen from southern
California and even with teams from Honolulu.
The foreign quarters are worth an article in themselves. Chief of these
was, of course, Chinatown, of which every one has heard who ever heard
of San Francisco. A district six blocks long and two blocks wide, housed
30,000 Chinese when the quarter was full. The dwellings were old
business blocks of the early days; but the Chinese had added to them,
had rebuilt them, had run out their own balconies and entrances, and had
given the quarter that feeling of huddled irregularity which makes all
Chinese built dwellings fall naturally into pictures. Not only this;
they had burrowed to a depth of a story or two under the ground, and
through this ran passages in which the Chinese transacted their dark and
devious affairs - as the smuggling of opium, the traffic in slave girls
and the settlement of their difficulties.
In the last five years there was less of this underground life than
formerly, for the Board of Health had a cleanup some time ago; but it
was still possible to go from one end of Chinatown to the other through
secret underground passages. The tourist, who always included Chinatown
in his itinerary, saw little of the real quarter. The guides gave him a
show by actors hired for his benefit. In reality the place amounted to a
great deal in a financial way. There were clothing and cigar factories
of importance, and much of the Pacific rice, tea and silk importing was
in the hands of the merchants, who numbered several millionaires.
Mainly, however, it was a Tenderloin for the house servants of the city
- for the San Francisco Chinaman was seldom a laundryman; he was too
much in demand at fancy prices as a servant.
The Chinese lived their own lives in their own way and settled their own
quarrels with the revolvers of their highbinders. There were two
theatres in the quarter, a number of rich joss houses, three newspapers
and a Chinese telephone exchange. There is a race feeling against the
Chinese among the working people of San Francisco, and no white man,
except the very lowest outcasts, lived in the quarter.
On the slopes of Telegraph Hill dwelt the Mexicans and Spanish, in low
houses, which they had transformed by balconies into a semblance of
Spain. Above, and streaming over the hill, were the Italians. The
tenement quarter of San Francisco shone by contrast with those of
Chicago and New York, for while these people lived in old and humble
houses they had room to breathe and an eminence for light and air. Their
shanties clung to the side of the hill or hung on the very edge of the
precipice overlooking the bay, on the verge of which a wall kept their
babies from falling. The effect was picturesque, and this hill was the
delight of painters. It was all more like Italy than anything in the
Italian quarter of New York and Chicago - the very climate and
surroundings, the wine country close at hand, the bay for their lateen
boats, helped them.
Over by the ocean and surrounded by cemeteries in which there are no
more burials, there is an eminence which is topped by two peaks and
which the Spanish of the early days named after the breasts of a woman.
The unpoetic Americans had renamed it Twin Peaks. At its foot was
Mission Dolores, the last mission planted by the Spanish padres in their
march up the coast, and from these hills the Spanish looked for the
first time upon the golden bay.
Many years ago some one set up at the summit of this peak a sixty foot
cross of timber. Once a high wind blew it down, and the women of the
Fair family then had it restored so firmly that it would resist
anything. It has risen for fifty years above the gay, careless,
luxuriant and lovable city, in full view from every eminence and from
every valley. It stands tonight, above the desolation of ruins.
The bonny, merry city - the good, gray city - O that one who has mingled
the wine of her bounding life with the wine of his youth should live to
write the obituary of Old San Francisco!