Fascinating San Francisco Part 1

Fascinating San Francisco.

by Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood.

Foreword

Enthroned on hills, San Francisco captivates the stranger who sees it from the Bay by the vivacity of its landscape long before revealing any of its intimate lures. Whether you approach in the early morning, when gulls arc wheeling above the palette of tones of the Bay, or at night, when illuminated ferryboats glide by like the yellow-bannered halls of fable, the buoyancy of San Francisco is manifest.

It increases as you pa.s.s through the Ferry Building, the turnstile behind the Golden Gate, whose blithe tower of the four clock dials is reminiscent of the Giralda in Seville.

In another moment you are in the surge of Market street, the long bazaar and highroad of this port of all flags. An invisible presence dances before your footsteps as you sense the animation of the street. It is the spirit of San Francisco, weaving its debonair spell.

Here Tetrazzini turns street singer and Jan Kubelik is a wandering minstrel enchanting crowds at Lotta's Fountain under Christmas eve stars.

From Dana to Stevenson, from Harte to Mencken, San Francisco has captured the hearts of a train of ill.u.s.trious admirers. Rudyard Kipling, master of the terse, has tooled a brisk drypoint of the city in a few strokes. "San Francisco has only one drawback," he writes. "'Tis hard to leave."

Cradled as a drowsy Spanish pueblo, reared as a child of the mines, and fed on all the exhilarants of the gold-spangled days of the Argonauts, San Francisco is like a dashing Western beauty with the eyes of an exotic ancestry.

Bristling with contradictions, the city presents the paradox of being the most intensely American and yet the most cosmopolitan community on the continent, with aspects as variable as the medley of alien tongues heard on its streets.

A festival of life is staged at this meeting place of the nations, farthest outpost of Aryan civilization in its westward march.

Inez Haynes Irwin in her Californiacs sounds a warning for the stranger in San Francisco.

"If you ever start for California with the intention of seeing anything of the state," she admonishes, "do that before you enter San Francisco.

If you must land in San Francisco first, jump into a taxi, pull down the curtain, drive through the city, breaking every speed law, to Third and Townsend, sit in the station until a train--some train, any train-- pulls out, and go with it. If in crossing Market street you raise that curtain as much as an inch, believe me, stranger, it's all off; you're lost. You'll never leave San Francisco."

This booklet aims to keep the curtain up.

Inside the Gate

If you turn a map showing the basin of San Francis...o...b..y so that the Pacific Ocean is nearest your eye, you see a peninsula thrust out from the California coast like a great boot.

San Francisco stretches for six or seven miles across the toe of the boot. Dominated by hills, the city is flanked by the Pacific on the west and by the Bay on the north and east. To the northwest, joining ocean and bay, is the Golden Gate, the only gap in the coastal mountains.

Constantinople and Rio de Janeiro have been called the only maritime cities that approach the natural beauty of situation of San Francisco.

The basin of the Bay, into which the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers pour after watering the central garden valley of the state, is an amphitheatre rimmed with peaks and ridges.

The Bay spreads out below San Francisco like an animated poster keyed in blue and silver, with Yerba Buena, Alcatraz and Angel islands tinted details in the foreground. Across the gleaming water the roofs of Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda are shingled with sun crystals, and in the distance Tamalpais and Mt. Diablo bulk against a curtain of azure.

Suavities of outline accent the horizons of San Francisco, where the skysc.r.a.pers take on fantasy as they pile up on hills and recede into vales. Most visitors cross the Bay and arrive at the city by way of the Ferry Building, the gala tower of which has a clock at each point of the compa.s.s. Travelers also arrive at the Third and Townsend street railroad station, or, if they come by sea through the Golden Gate, at the piers along the waterfront.

Market street stretches diagonally across the peninsula from the Ferry Building to the base of Twin Peaks, the urban mountain which has been tunneled to get rapid transit to residence parks.

Twin Peaks is practically the geographical center of San Francisco. By keeping this in mind visitors will avoid the mistake of thinking that the end of Market street is the western boundary of the city.

From the sweep of Market street radiate practically all of the city's important arteries. A resplendent thoroughfare by day, 100 feet wide, Market street takes on a sorcery all its own at night, when the electroliers designed by D'Arcy Ryan, light wizard of the Panama-Pacific Exposition, flood it with radiance. Market street is then the most dazzling of boulevards, every aspect of it in motion--crowds, taxis, cars and the colors of advertising displays.

The junction formed by Market, Kearny, Geary and Third streets is the heart of downtown San Francisco. It is the newspaper center, and close by are big and little hotels, shops, restaurants and sidewalk flower stalls. Here traffic eddies around Lotta's Fountain, presented to the city by Lotta Crabtree, stage idol of the yesteryears. Beside it is one of the bronze bells and iron standards that mark El Camino Real--the King's Highway--which the padres trod in making their rounds of the early California missions. Lotta's Fountain has two tablets. One has its donor's name, and the other is inscribed to Luisa Tetrazzini, whose soprano was first acclaimed to the world from San Francisco, and who crossed the continent to sing Christmas carols to the people on this street corner in 1910. One block east, Montgomery street leads into the financial center of the Pacific. To the west are Union Square and its shaft, commemorating Dewey's victory at Manila Bay, and Powell street, with its cafe and theatre crowds.

A short walk out Market street takes you to the Civic Center, with the City Hall, Library, Auditorium and State Building grouped about a formal garden. The War Memorial, with its Opera House and American Legion Museum, will face the City Hall on Van Ness avenue.

Fronting the Pacific, San Francisco, which covers a trifle over 42 square miles of territory, has an ocean beach extending for three miles on its western boundary and overlooked by automobile highways. Street cars, starting at the Ferry Building, arrive at the beach after traversing residence districts and scenic routes, unfolding views of hills, forests, parks, forts, lighthouses and seals on rocks lashed by surf.

Between the Ferry Building and the ocean front--what a sweeping canvas it would take to suggest all this even in broad outline!

The "ships, towers, domes, theatres" which Wordsworth saw from Westminster Bridge in London are here, and so are the added motifs of San Francisco's own song of seduction.

Sea Glamour

Ever has the glamour of the sea enveloped San Francisco. From the sea came Don Juan Manuel Ayala in the San Carlos in 1775, charting a course through the fog and opening the Golden Gate. From the, sea also came the Argonauts, transforming the somnolent Yerba Buena into the city, of San Francisco. And from the sea, up to the time of the railroad, came practically all of the goods with which the merchants of the city did business. Today with the sea ebbs and flows the tide of wealth that makes San Francisco the key port of the Pacific. The banks and exchanges of California and Montgomery streets, the foreign trade and insurance offices of Pine street, the downtown skysc.r.a.pers--all reflect in some way San Francisco's debt to the sea.

From the sea also comes health. The breezes that blow from it and the fogs that drift down over the ridges combine to give San Francisco a paradoxical climate--winters as warm as those in the south and summers that are matchless for their exhilarating coolness.

San Francisco shows a higher per capita industrial output than any other American city of its cla.s.s because of its ideal working conditions.

A city conscious of its obligation to the sea, San Francisco has always been interested in its waterfront, which perpetuates Spanish origins in its expressive name of Embarcadero--the embarking place.

The skyline of the city is no longer stenciled by the towering masts of sailing ships discharging or loading cargo, or lying in the stream or in Richardson's Bay awaiting charters, as in the days when wheat was king of California's great central valley. The virility of the waterfront of San Francisco, however, is as persistent as in the age that provided Frank Norris with his epic themes.

The masts and yards of older outline have given place to stubby cargo booms of liners, freighters and tramps of multiple flags and nationalities. Along the Embarcadero they disgorge upon ma.s.sive concrete piers silk, rice and tea from the Orient, coffee from Central America, hemp and tobacco from the Philippines, and all manner of odds and ends from everywhere. On the piers commodities are piled in apparent confusion, yet each lot moves with precision in or out of yawning holds at the shrill blast of the foreman's hoist whistle.

Along the Embarcadero you may see craft of every rig under the sun from a Chinese junk to a Trans.p.a.cific pa.s.senger liner. Human types are even more contrasting, knots of Chinese and Singalese strolling behind South Sea Islanders, Portuguese or Cornishmen, whose speech recalls s.n.a.t.c.hes you may have heard on the East India Dock Road in London.

Jack London heard and answered the call of the sea from the Embarcadero of San Francisco, and Stevenson found the atmosphere of his Wreckers there.

Sailors--trade winds--ships--what lurking thoughts of adventure, realized or denied, do they not summon in all of us?

Historic Background

In 1579, before Jamestown, the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony, or New Amsterdam were settled, Sir Francis Drake, British explorer, careened and repaired his ship, the Golden Hind, on the sh.o.r.e of what is now Drake's Bay, an indentation on the California coast just north of the Golden Gate. This was nearly two hundred years before Padre Junipero Serra led his band of zealots and soldiers up out of New Spain into Alta California.

At Drake's Bay the chaplain of the Golden Hind held the first religious service in the English language on the American continent--a service that is commemorated by a Celtic cross set up on a hill in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Though close by, Drake did not find the Bay and site of San Francisco.

It was not until October 31, 1769, that the peninsula and Bay of San Francisco were discovered by an expedition headed by Don Gaspar de Portola, Governor of Baja or Lower California. This expedition had set out overland from San Diego for the purpose of locating Monterey Bay, discovered in 1603 by Sebastian Vizcaino, Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain.

Six years after the Portola discovery, Don Juan Manuel Ayala sailed the first vessel, the San Carlos, through the Golden Gate. The following year the first permanent settlement by white men on the site of San Francisco was made when Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza established a military post at the Presidio beside the Golden Gate. In this same month, July, 1776, the Liberty Bell was ringing in Philadelphia. But there was no thought then that the embattled farmers of the Atlantic coast should inherit before many years this potential Spanish settlement on the Pacific.

In October, 1776, Padre Junipero Serra founded the Mission Dolores, the third of the chain of missions extending from San Diego. Subsequently a settlement was made at Yerba Buena Cove, and there was established the pueblo of Yerba Buena which has grown into the city of San Francisco.

Things moved slowly in those days--so slowly that in 1784 the pueblo had but fourteen houses and sixty inhabitants.

Let us turn back the hands of the clock to the time when the pueblo straggled over the sand hills which faced the water of the bay of Saint Francis, under the shadow of Loma Alta. What do we see? Where today the Merchants Exchange Building, central office of San Francisco's commercial life, heaves its bulk into the air was the cabin of Jacob Leese, trader. Houses were few and far between, and business was something to be done when there was nothing else to do.