Fascinating San Francisco Part 2

San Francisco shows a market as complete and original in styles as any city in the country. The excessive seasonal changes demanded in the East are not needed here. San Francisco is essentially an out-of-door city, with three hundred odd days of clement weather, made for the display of light raiment, whether it be organdie dresses, sports togs or afternoon frocks. Women of the city insist on being modish, however, so they wear furs with the airiest of apparel on the warmest days, contradictory but vivacious apparitions. Even the Chinese girls ape their Western sisters and appear in brocaded mandarins with fur neck pieces.

The dash of San Francisco women on the street, as well as in the hotels and cafes, is not a legend. You may read about it in Hergesheimer's iridescent detail, but seeing is believing.

The art shops and the book shops of San Francisco evoke the admiration of every visitor. The art shops, on Post, Sutter and adjacent streets, close to Union Square, with their own galleries of paintings, bronzes and marbles, have showrooms that are more like museums than commercial establishments. The book shops are in this same neighborhood. They are well worth visiting, several of the dealers being publishers of the works of California authors.

Chinatown and Foreign Colonies

From its beginning as a Spanish trading post to the present time there has always been something essentially foreign about San Francisco.

Always there have been foreign elements, with well-marked colonies, districts or haunts.

To visitors Chinatown appears to exercise the greatest appeal among the foreign colonies. The Latin Quarter, the Spanish and Mexican districts out toward the end of Powell street at the Bay, the j.a.panese streets east of Fillmore, and the Greek settlement centering around Third and Folsom are all, however, highly expressive of their habitants.

With its paG.o.da-like roofs, its bazaars, its restaurants of amazing orchestration and stranger East-West decoration, it is easy to.

understand why Chinatown sways the imagination of wayfarers in San Francisco. Every street and alley in it is obviously exotic. Life appears here like a festival, and both the eye and the ear are beguiled by fantastic nuances.

Silks, ivories, porcelains and bronzes peer from the shop windows at hesitant purchasers like the articles of virtu flung before the bewildered gaze of readers by Balzac in his Wild a.s.s's Skin.

You are diverted by the bizarre on all sides, Grant avenue, the main artery of Chinatown, stretching before you in a many-hued arabesque of shop fronts, no two quite alike in tone or in the stuff they have to sell.

The shops of the jewelers, who perform miracles of craftsmanship in gold fliagree and in jade, are especially interesting, the sensitive-fingered artisans working at benches set in the windows in full view of pa.s.sersby. The meat and fish stalls, the apothecaries, the cobblers who work on the sidewalks, the lily and the bird vendors, the telephone exchange where Chinese girls operate the switchboard, the headquarters of the Six Companies, the Joss House and the Chinese theatre, spilled over into the Latin Quarter, are among the sights much written about by globe-trotting notetakers in the quarter. Organized sightseeing tours may be made through Chinatown with licensed guides, but visitors can wander securely about at will. It is no longer the subterranean Chinatown of opium-scented years, but it is still the most interesting foreign quarter in America. Charles Dana Gibson called it a bit of Hongkong and Canton caught in a Western frame.

By continuing out Grant avenue to Columbus avenue the stroller visiting Chinatown reaches the street that places him in the heart of the Latin Quarter, its Italian and French restaurants, and its manners and customs that make it an epitome of Naples and Rome.

In the Greek settlement in the vicinity of Third and Folsom streets you will see narghile water pipes displayed in the windows alongside Russian bra.s.ses and Byzantine ware. If you crave the cooking of Attica and the honey-sweets of the Grecian archipelago you can get them here.

Hills and Vistas

What city built on hills has not been exalted in song and legend? San Francisco, like Athens, Jerusalem, Rome and Naples, has the spell that comes from setting one's house on a high place. Those who can look out over the world are those who dominate it.

History shows that every three hundred years a great city arises at some very necessary and strategic point on the international highway. Such an inevitable world city is San Francisco. Whether it is the ragged slope of Telegraph Hill, the heights of Twin Peaks, the rolling green-brown softness of the Potrero bluffs, or the contours of any of the other high places that confront the visitor approaching from the Bay, the hills of San Francisco arrest the eye and intrigue the imagination.

To the visitor who would comprehend almost at a glance the cycloramic setting of San Francisco the way is easy of access to half a dozen peaks. There are good automobile roads to all of them.

Let him for a start go to n.o.b Hill, crossed by California street, where the Fairmont Hotel, the Pacific Union Club, Grace Cathedral and many distinctive residences and apartments will engage his attention when it is not occupied with the shipping in the harbor, Goat and Alcatraz islands, and the animated perspectives inside the Golden Gate.

Russian Hill, of which n.o.b Hill is a southward shoulder, is the habitat of many of the writer and painter folk of San Francisco. It affords superb panoramas of the city and bay. So does Telegraph Hill, whose sides have been scarred to provide rock for the sea wall along which the modern argosies of commerce discharge their cargoes. Views northwesterly from these hilltops suggest the Bay of Naples.

The most comprehensive close-up of the city is probably obtained from the crest of Buena Vista Park, which is not the highest of the fourteen good-sized hills in San Francis...o...b..t the one from which the most un.o.bstructed views are to be obtained. Tourists and other visitors to San Francisco who enjoy walking will find, rambling over this height most interesting.

Street cars, Nos. 6 or 7, will take you to Haight and Broderick streets, from which point many paths lead to the top of the hill. At every turn there is an effective view. Through a tunnel-like alley of shrubbery the towers of St. Ignatius, with crosses pointing to the sky, loom like spires from one of the cathedral towns of France. As you swing 'round you obtain glimpses from different angles of the skysc.r.a.pers of San Francisco, with every now and then a stretch of glistening water. From the summit of Buena Vista you see, on three sides, expanses of ocean and bay. To the left is the diamond of Lake Merced in its setting of bluegreen eucalyptus and its surrounding waves of sand, ribboned with roads extending to the ocean beach. Beyond is the emerald stretch of Golden Gate Park, with buildings in demi-outline through the changing tones of foliage. Above and beyond are the rolling hills of the Presidio, and in the distance Tamalpais rears its friendly bulk, a dark blue shadow against a cerulean mantle, crowned at times with filmy gonfalons of cloud like a color print by Hokusai. Lone Mountain and its cross, visible far out at sea, is here in conspicuous range.

To see San Francisco in a series of highly colored pictures suggestive of Maxfield Parrish or Dulac go to the scenic boulevard that winds over Twin Peaks. You may motor there, walk or take a street car to the foot of this city mountain, the ascent either way being easy. You may scale Twin Peaks from the flank within view of Market street, climbing along the side and over the shoulder by way of the boulevard. Or if you prefer, you may climb up from Sloat Boulevard via Portola Drive through one of the city's restricted residence sections. On the summit of Twin Peaks you feel at the top of the world, and you see San Francisco spread out below you as multicolored as a rug of Kermanshah. No other city in the two Americas, not excepting Quebec or Rio de Janeiro, so overwhelms the beholder with its vistas--with its luminous enchantments. At night the lights of the city zigzag in patterns of distracting loveliness, and Market street reaches from the foot of the mountain to the Embarcadero like the tail of some flaming comet athwart a sea of stars.

Parks and Open s.p.a.ces

Surmounted by a freighted galleon, with streaming pennant and wind-filled sails, a granite pedestal "remembers" Robert Louis Stevenson in Portsmouth Square, cradle of San Francisco's civic history. This square, the Plaza of the early city, was the forerunner of a chain of parks, children's playgrounds and open s.p.a.ces that checkers San Francisco with refreshing green.

Farther uptown is Union Square, in the center of the hotel and retail district. Over on the other side toward North Beach, at the foot of Telegraph Hill, is Washington Square, one of the recreation spots of the Latin Quarter, with church spires outlined above its willows. A park that will command the entire harbor is being built on top of Telegraph Hill.

In the Western Addition, Richmond, Sunset and Mission districts are many parks that provide resting places for mothers, their infants in go-carts, and romping children.

Golden Gate Park is the aureole of San Francisco's recreational haunts.

It was saved to the city in the beginning by Frank McCoppin and C. R.

Dempster and made an area of living beauty by John McLaren, Scotch landscape engineer, who is Superintendent of Parks.

From the panhandle at Baker street to the Ocean Beach, the park stretches like a ma.s.sive gold-green buckler enameled with l.u.s.trous gems.

There are 1013 acres in the park, its Main Drive, including the panhandle, being 4 1/2 miles long.

Whether you loiter along tree-shaded alleys, or stroll through rhododendron dells in the late Spring, when the landscape fairly quivers with color, there is an ineffable loveliness about Golden Gate Park. Its opulence is heightened by its contrasts, as are all well-considered landscape designs. Treading the expanse of daisy-starred emerald lawns, loitering under the elms in the Band Concourse, or wandering through the dwarf trees patterned against humpback bridges in the j.a.panese Tea Garden, you find new lures in Golden Gate Park with each successive visit.

The de Young Memorial Museum, the Academy of Sciences, the Steinhart Aquarium, Stow Lake, the Dutch windmills, Huntington Falls, the aviary, the buffalo paddock, the bear pit, the children's playground with its goats and donkeys, the tennis courts, the harness racing in the Stadium, the bowling on the green--almost every rod of the thousand odd acres in the park unfolds unexpected allurements.

On a hill in the park is the granite cross which commemorates the first church service in the English language on the American continent, held in 1579 by Sir Francis Drake's chaplain on the coast just north of the Golden Gate.

A copy of Rodin's bronze Thinker is here. The "Portal of the Past,"

taken from a n.o.b Hill residence after the fire of 1906, is seen in idyllic whiteness against a clump of Irish yews across the luminous water of a lake that picks up their outline like a Renaissance picture.

Statuary, cla.s.sic and modern, arrests interest at every turn in the park. Among the figures and busts are those of Junipero Serra, General Grant, Goethe, Schiller, Cervantes, General Pershing and President Garfield.

At the extreme westerly end of the park, fronting the sea whose perils it braved, is the sloop Gjoa in which Captain Roald Amundsen cut one of the Gordian knots of exploration and found and navigated the Northwest Pa.s.sage.

Lincoln Park, with a munic.i.p.al golf course on a headland overlooking the Golden Gate, affords a distant but luring view of San Francisco. In Lincoln Park is a replica of the Palace of the Legion of Honor in Paris, gift of Mr. and Mrs. A. B. Spreckels as a memorial to San Francisco's soldiers in the world war. In addition to its art treasures it was built to house trophies from all the fronts on which the American expeditionary forces fought, Marshal Foch and other commanders having interested themselves in the collection.

The Palace of Fine Arts on the Marina close to the Presidio, with its masterpieces from the Phoebe A. Hearst and other collections, is a short drive from Lincoln Park. The city's Aquatic Park is close by.

Sutro Heights, with its gardens, cla.s.sic marbles and outlook upon the sea, is near the Cliff House above the Ocean Beach. The Seal Rocks and the Sutro baths are in sight of these heights.

San Francisco has established a new playground for children at the end of Sloat Boulevard, with a second munic.i.p.al golf course and the largest outdoor swimming pool in the world among its attractions.

Music and Drama

Hasty reading of annals makes some people gather the mistaken impression that San Francisco's dramatic and musical history had its genesis when miners threw gold nuggets at the feet of Lotta Crabtree. But it has been pointed out by one musical critic that the Franciscan padres were chanting Gregorian measures in the Mission Dolores when the battles of Lexington and Concord were being fought, and that the Indians were intoning hymns and staging miracle-plays for their sun-G.o.d in California before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.

San Francisco not only discovered the gold in the soprano of Luisa Tetrazzini at the old Tivoli Opera House, but it has figured in the triumphs of many luminaries of the musical and dramatic stage--from Adelina Patti and Tamagno to Mary Garden and Galli-Curci--from Edwin Booth and Charles Kean to John Drew and Henry Miller. Celebrities braved the discomforts of trips across the continent from the earliest days because of the city's repute as a place where the people were not only responsive but arrived at their own independent judgments.

Ysaye, Kreisler and Mischa Elman have esteemed the acclaim of audiences here as much as Ole Bull and Wieniawski did in earlier days.

Since the conversion of the Tivoli into a motion picture theatre, and pending the construction of the Memorial Opera House opposite the City Hall, the city hears most of its opera in the Civic Auditorium.

Performances of the San Francisco Opera Company, with its local orchestra and chorus supporting international stars, and of visiting troupes from New York and Chicago in this auditorium provide two spectacles one on the stage and the other in the a.s.semblage itself. The auditorium seats 10,000 persons. To be present when a prima donna awes this audience into silence by her tones, and then to hear a triumphant roar of approval rend the silence, is an unforgettable adventure of the spirit.

The Symphony Orchestra of San Francisco is one of the ranking musical bodies of the United States. No better symphonic music is played anywhere. The concerts of this orchestra fill the Civic Auditorium to overflowing. Close to fifty per cent of the audiences are people attracted from surrounding cities.