Bancroft's Tourist's Guide Yosemite Part 9

PRINTING, Lithographing, Binding, and Blank Book Manufacturing Establishment, 172-173

PRIVATE RESIDENCES--Davis', Eldridges, Laidley's, Latham's, Bancroft's, Otis', Parrott's, Tallant's, Taylor's, Tobin's, 174

POINTS OF OBSERVATION--Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill, Clay Street Hill, California Street Hill, Rincon Hill, Lone Mountain, Twin Peaks, Bernal Heights, U. S.

Observatory. Views from each, 174-184

HOW TO GET ABOUT--Horse Car Lines, Routes, Distances, Times, Fares, Buggies, Carriages, Coaches and Saddle Horses; qualities of, and charges for. Hacks, with rates of hire, 184-188

II. SUBURBS AND VICINITY.

Commencing at the foot of Market street, thence southward along or near the water front, continuing around the entire city and returning to the point of starting. Also, mentioning more distant points, visible to the spectator looking beyond the suburbs.

LUMBER YARDS; Wharves and Merchant Fleet; California and Oregon S. S. Co.'s Wharves and Ships; Black Diamond Coal Co.'s Pier; Rincon Point; U. S. Marine Hospital; P. M. S. S. Co.'s Piers, Docks, Sheds and Ships; Gas Works; C. P. R. R. Co,'s Freight Pier, Depot and Boat; Mission Bay; Mission Rock; U. S. Ship Anchorage; Steamboat Reserves; Long Bridge; Yacht Club and Boat-house, with Yachts; Potrero; Gla.s.s Works; Pacific Rolling Mill; Deep Cut; Islais Creek and Bridge; Rope Walk; Italian Fishing Fleet and Flakes; Celestial Ditto; South San Francisco; Catholic Orphan Asylum; Hunter's Point; Dry Dock; Bay View Race Course; Visitacion Point and Valley; San Bruno Road; New Butchertown; Ocean House Road; Lake Honda; Almshouse; Small Pox Hospital; Ocean House Race Track; Lake Merced; Ocean House; Pacific Beach; Seal Rocks; Cliff House; Farallones; Point Lobos; Signal Station; Helmet Rock; Fort Point; Fort; Light-House; Golden Gate; Lime Point; Point Bonita; Mountain Lake; Lobos Creek; Presidio; Barracks; Parade Ground; Black Point; Pacific Woolen Mills; North Beach; Angel Island; Alcatraz; North Point; Sea Wall; Ferries, 188-196

III. HOW TO SEE THE CITY.

Under this head we suggest:

Morning, or half-day excursions, in and about the city and its suburbs.

I. IN AND ABOUT THE CITY.

1. Montgomery Street, Telegraph Hill, North Beach, Washington Square, The Plaza, City Hall, Kearny street, 197

2. Chinese Quarter, 197

3. Third street, South Park, Long Bridge, Potrero, South San Francisco, Dry Dock, 201

4. Water Front, (south), Stewart street, P. M. S. S. Co.'s Docks and Mammoth Steamships, Foundries, Factories, Shot Tower, 202

5. Water Front, (north), Sea Wall, North Point, Warehouses and Clippers, Iron Ships, Bay and River Steamboats and Docks, 202

6. Southwestern Suburbs, Mission street, Woodward's Gardens, Old Mission Church, Jewish Cemeteries, Woolen Mills, Howard street, 202

7. Western Suburbs and Beyond Bush street, Laurel Hill, Lone Mountain Cemeteries, Cliff House Road, Race Track, Cliff House, Seal rocks, Pacific Beach, Ocean House, Road Track, Lake Honda, New Ocean Road, 203

8. Northwestern Suburbs and Beyond: Russian Hill, Spring Valley, Fort Point, Fortress, Lighthouse, Golden Gate, Presidio, Black Point, 203

SAN FRANCISCO.

Historical.

The site of what is now the city of San Francisco was first permanently occupied by white men, September 17, 1776. The same year witnessed the entrenchment of a garrison and the establishment of a Mission.

San Francisco owes its origin to Catholic missionaries and Spanish soldiers. Father Junipero Serra led the missionaries--and virtually commanded the soldiers. The name San Francisco was given in honor of Saint Francis of Asisis, a city of Italy, the founder of the order of Franciscans to which Father Junipero belonged. The presidio, garrison or fort, was founded first, Sept. 17, and the mission about three weeks later, Oct. 9th. The site first chosen was near a small lagoon back of, that is, west of, what is now called Russian Hill, but the prevailing winds proved so high and bitter as to compel its early removal to the more sheltered spot, over a mile south, under the lee of high hills, and near the present Mission Creek. Here, at the head of what is now Center or Sixteenth Street, the old church still stands.

For nearly sixty years the mission stood, the nucleus of a little village of rude adobe houses, tenanted by a fluctuating population of Indians, Mexicans and Spanish--and the center of a military and religious authority, which upon more than one occasion made itself felt and feared for leagues around. The population rarely rose above four hundred and frequently fell to less than a hundred and fifty.

In 1835, Capt. W. A. Richardson put up the first pioneer dwelling, with rude wooden walls and sail-cloth roof. On the fourth of July of the next year, 1836, Jacob P. Leese finished the first frame house.

This house stood where the St. Francis Hotel now stands,--on the southwest corner of Clay and Dupont streets, a single block west of the present City Hall. Leese had his store on the beach, which was where Montgomery and Commercial streets now intersect. Nearly seven solid blocks of made-land now stretch between where that old beach lay and the present water front. Other houses soon rose near that of Leese, and presently the villagers saw their little settlement fast approaching the dignity of a new town, and cast about to find a name.

Nature caused it to spring out of the ground for them in the form of a species of aromatic mint, which, surrounding their dwellings, perfuming the morning air and supplying frequent and varied medicinal needs, had proved indeed, as the Spaniards called it, "Yerba Buena,"

the Good Herb. So the herb named the town, and the name "_stuck_" as the Californians say, for nearly a dozen years. During these years the houses grew in number, until 1847, when the town contained seventy-nine buildings,--thirty-one frame, twenty-six adobe, and the rest shanties--and these houses sheltered three hundred souls, or, at least, that number of bodies. On the 30th of January of that year, these three hundred dropped the old name Yerba Buena, and adopted the older one, which had belonged to the neighboring mission for nearly fourscore years. Thus the town also became San Francisco, and has ever since so remained. The first steamboat appeared in the bay, November 15th of the same year. In March, 1848, the houses had grown to two hundred, and the population to eight hundred and fifty. On the third of the next month, the first public school began.

New Year's Day, '49, the new city claimed a population of two thousand. Three days later the two previously published weekly papers merged into the Alta California, the earliest established of all newspapers now existing in the State.

The early miners were making from twenty to thirty dollars a day, getting "bags" of dust and "piles" of nuggets, and rushing down to "Frisco" to gamble it away. These were the "flush times" of the new city. Fresh eggs cost from seventy-five cents to one dollar apiece.

For a beefsteak and a cup of coffee for breakfast one had to pay a dollar and a half, and a dinner cost him from two to ten or even twenty dollars, according to appet.i.te and drinket.i.te. Rough labor brought the old Congressional pay of eight dollars a day; draymen earned twenty dollars a day; and family "help" could hardly be had for forty, or even fifty, dollars a week. The great ma.s.s of the men lived in tents. Very few women had come, but those few were overwhelmed with attention; if one wished to cross the street in the rainy season, a score of brawny arms would fight for the privilege of gallantly wading through the sea of mud to carry her across the unpaved street.

Great fires came, four of them; the first the day before Christmas, '49--it burned over a million dollars worth; the second, May 4th, '50--it destroyed three millions dollars worth. A little over a month later, June 14th, 1850, the most destructive fire the city ever saw left it poorer by four millions of dollars; and on the 17th of the next September the fourth fire consumed another half million. Nearly nine million dollars worth burned in less than nine months!

Business thrived immensely. In 1852, more than seven vessels a day arrived at or departed from San Francisco. Commerce overdid itself.

Long piers ran out over the flats where now solid blocks of lofty buildings have stood for half a score of years. Sometimes storms kept back the clippers; then prices went still higher. Between March and November, flour went up from eight to forty dollars a barrel, while the "Alta" came down from its usual broad and sightly page to the size of a pane of window-gla.s.s, fourteen by ten. Villainy flourished; drinking, gambling, robbery and murder held high carnival; the law did little, and did that little shabbily and tardily; so the people woke and resumed their original legislative, judicial, and especially their executive, functions.

In '51 and '52, and again in '56, they came n.o.bly to the front, hung the worst villains who defied the common law, frightened away the others, restored order, established security for honest men, and resolved themselves again into law-abiding citizens. And thus, through perils of fire, social convulsions, and financial fluctuation, the cosmopolitan city has swept swiftly on until to-day, though having barely attained her majority, she stands in the first half-score of American cities. Every year she leaves a city or two behind in her steady progress toward the throne of the continent which she will surely occupy before the present century has fully fled.

Situation and Extent.

In extent, population, commerce, wealth and the growth, San Francisco of to-day is not only the chief city of California, but the great commercial metropolis of the whole Pacific slope. It is both a city and a county; the county occupies the extreme end of a hilly peninsula stretching north to the Golden Gate, between the Pacific Ocean on the west, and San Francis...o...b..y on the east.

The whole peninsula has a length of from thirty-five to forty miles, with an average width of from twelve to fifteen miles. The average width of the county from bay to ocean is four and one half miles, and its extreme length, from the Golden Gate on the north, to the San Mateo County line on the south, is six miles and a half. Its boundary line being the natural one of a coast or sh.o.r.e on the west, north and east, is more or less irregular; on the south it is straight. Its entire area is 26,681 acres, including the Presidio reservation of 1,500 acres, which belongs to the general government.

The county also includes the Farallon Islands, lying nearly thirty miles west in the Pacific Ocean, with the islands of Alcatraz and Yerba Buena, or Goat Island, in San Francis...o...b..y.

The city proper occupies the northeast corner of the county. Its limits extend about two miles and a half from east to west, by three and a half from north to south, thus including between one fifth and one sixth the area of the county.

The natural surface was very uneven and the soil equally varied--sand beach, salt marsh, mud flats, low plains, narrow ravines, small and shallow valleys, elevated benches or plateaux, sandy knolls and dunes, and stretches of the close, adobe soil, made up its original surface; while rocky bluffs fortified its sh.o.r.e line, and extensive ledges underlaid its hills or cropped out from their sides, or crowned their tops. These hills varied in height from two hundred and sixty to four hundred and ten feet, while west and south of the city limits they rose still higher. One or two small lagoons lay sluggishly about, and as many small streams found their way thence to the bay.

The original founders of the city, as is usual in similar cases, seemed never to suspect that they were moulding the beginnings of a grand metropolis. Hence they laid out what little they did project with the least possible regard to present symmetry, or the probable demands of future growth. The natural inequalities of surface, the grade and width of streets which must become necessary to a large city, reservations for public buildings, promenades, gardens, parks, etc., with the sanitary necessity of thorough drainage, were matters of which they seem to have been serenely unconscious, or, worse still, sublimely indifferent. And many of their immediate successors in authority were legitimate descendants, or humbly imitative followers.

We have not an important street in the city which conforms its course to the cardinal points of the compa.s.s, and but one main avenue, Market street, which begins to be wide enough. As Cronise truthfully says: "The whole town stands _askew_."

We now proceed to "orient" the tourist, as Horace Mann used to say, in regard to such streets, avenues, thoroughfares, cuts, parks, etc., as mainly const.i.tute the highly artificial, though not particularly ornamental, topography of our little occidental village.

General Plan.

Market street is the widest and the longest, starting at the water front, half a mile east of the old City Hall, and slightly ascending through eight or nine blocks, it runs thence southwesterly on a nearly level grade beyond the city limits. Its western end is yet unfinished.

A mile and a half from the water it cuts through a moderately high and immoderately rocky hill, beyond which it stretches away toward the unfenced freedom of the higher hills, and the dead level of the western beach beyond, at which it will probably condescend ultimately to stop. Its surface presents every variety of natural conformation ingeniously varied with artificial distortion. Plank, rubble, McAdam, cobble, Nicolson, gravel, Stow foundation, gravel, adobe, sand, and finally undisguised dirt, offer their pleasing variety to the exploring eye. From two to four horse-railroad tracks diversify its surface with their restful regularity, while the steam cars from San Jose follow their locomotive a short distance up its western end.

Stately blocks, grand hotels, ma.s.sive stores, lofty factories, tumble-down shanties, unoccupied lots and vacant sand-hills form its picturesque boundary on either hand. When the high summer winds sweep easterly down its broad avenue, laden with clouds of flying sand from vacant lots along its either margin, it becomes a decidedly open question whether the lots aforesaid really belong in the department of real estate, or should, properly enter the catalogue of "movable property."