Chapter 2

The sea glamour is upon the dining places of San Francisco. Any impression of them would be lacking without some reference to sea food. Every variety of fish is sold fresh in the markets daily. A number of so-called fish grottos specialize in fish caught the same morning, keeping them swimming in illuminated window-tanks. Crabs, shrimps, oysters, clams and other varieties of shell fish, including the abalone with its rainbow-tinted shell, together with sanddabs, pompano and rex sole, serve to remind one that San Francisco is washed on three sides by tides of the Pacific.

Perhaps when Bret Harte referred to San Francisco as "serene, indifferent of Fate," he was thinking of Sidney Smith's declaration:

"Fate cannot harm me--I have dined today!"

When you think of eating in San Francisco you think of bright lights and dancing. In addition to the hotels, you may dance at innumerable cafes. Influences of Old Spain dowered San Francisco with an infatuation for the fiesta. The city has always been dance-minded. Art Hickman, virtuoso of jazz orchestration, was called to New York to have the Follies on The Roof dance to the exuberant strains he had evolved in San Francisco. Patterns of new dance forms were derived by Pavlowa from the wild rhythms she found on the old Barbary Coast.

The Palais Royal, Marquard's, Tait's-at-the-Beach, the Cliff House--but where is one to stop when he starts to name the San Francisco cafes that attract dance crowds? Let's leave it to the classified lists in the telephone directories.

Hotels

Wives and daughters of the men who awoke to find themselves millionaires in the days of the Argonauts came to San Francisco to explore the social thrills of the newly rich. It is easy to understand why the hotels became the scenes of elaborate gaiety unmatched even in New York, Boston or the older communities. Haunts of the battling giants of the Comstock mines and the railroad magnates, the old Palace, Occidental, Lick and Baldwin hotels reflected their effulgent period.

The Palace, built by William C. Ralston, has survived as a landmark of San Francisco. Like Shepheard's in Cairo, the Palace is one of the gathering places of the traveling world. The present hotel, at Market and New Montgomery streets, occupies the site of the old Palace, whose outer walls remained standing after the fire of 1906 and had to be blasted with dynamite to make room for the new structure--a tribute to the original builders. The Palace retains the outstanding aspects of the old hotel, with added modern appointments. The Palm Court, which has decorative columns and a glass-domed roof, is the social center of the hotel. It is also the rendezvous of the political and business stalwarts of the city, the Palace being a clearing-house for diversified activities. The Rose Bowl, which has Maxfield Parrish's Pied Piper of Hamelin, attracts the set that dances when it dines.

Perched like a Parthenon on Nob Hill, the acropolis of San Francisco, is the Fairmont Hotel commanding a view of the Bay and the Contra Costa hills. Its Venetian Room, its Terrace and its Ball Room are among the features of the Fairmont in keeping with its individual environment. Expansive lawns frame the Renaissance architecture of the building, which seen from the Bay looks like a citadel inside the Golden Gate.

The Hotel St. Francis, fronting Union Square on Powell street, has a thousand rooms and is one of the distinctive institutions of San Francisco. The fire of 1906 damaged the building but left its steel frame and granite sheath intact, and a banquet of business men was held there to celebrate the beginning of reconstruction. When you think of the St. Francis you think of beautiful wall arrangements. Its Garden Court and Fable Room, where La Fontaine's diverting inventions serve as the motifs for murals, attract the younger set for dancing and tea. The Tapestry Room is a distinguished example of decorative treatment.

San Francisco is the greatest hotel city in the world in proportion to population. These pages necessarily skim only the surface of this aspect of the city's life. There are some 2,000 hotels, records of the Hospitality Bureau of the Chamber of Commerce show, each having rates scaled to meet the guests to whom it caters. Representatives of the Hospitality Bureau copy the names of arrivals at the hotels from the registers. These names are classified according to interests and given to a Hospitality Committee made up of business men who personally greet arrivals, bring them to the clubs, and dispense other courtesies.

Shops

It was O. Henry, caliph of phrases, who called San Francisco the Bagdad of the West. In doing so he must have had in mind its profusion of shops which stretch through the city like an endless bazaar.

Midweek shopping crowds in San Francisco are comparable to Saturday afternoon crowds in other American cities. This fact has been commented upon frequently by merchandising specialists, and it has significance.

Street population spells buying power, and San Francisco has larger shopping crowds every day of the year than any other city west of New York. Every day but Sunday is a shopping day.

Constant shopping by San Francisco women gives stimulus to the city's retailers to comb world markets for the newest and most attractive offerings. Buyers are sent by the larger establishments not only to Paris and other style centers, but to all of the larger international trade fairs. Stocks in the shops reflect the enterprise of the retailers, who not only display the latest modes, but frequently create them.

The downtown shopping district spreads from Market to all the streets that radiate from it, from Kearny westward, well above Powell. Market street itself is a continuous stretch of display windows. Grant avenue, Stockton, Powell, O'Farrell, Geary, Post and Sutter streets are lined with department stores and intimate shops.

The Richmond, Mission, Sunset and other out lying districts have their own sub-centers, each crowded six days in the week with shoppers. Otherwise the downtown streets would be congested.

Flower stands splash the street corners with color in the downtown shopping district, and the wares glow in the show windows like exotic blooms under glass.

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 Japanese streets east of Fillmore, and the Greek settlement centering around Third and Folsom are all, however, highly expressive of their habitants.

With its pagoda-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 Ass'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 passersby. 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 brasses 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 Nob 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 Nob 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 Francisco but the one from which the most unobstructed 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 skyscrapers 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 Spaces

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 spaces 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 massive gold-green buckler enameled with lustrous 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 Japanese 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 Nob 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, classic 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 Passage.

Lincoln Park, with a municipal 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, classic 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 municipal 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-god 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 assemblage 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.

The Chamber Music Society has toured the United States and added to the musical prestige of the city.

The Concerts of the Bohemian Club, the Pacific Musical Society, the San Francisco Musical Society and the Loring Club have definite places in the musical life of the community.

Organ literature attracts many people to the recitals at the Civic Auditorium. The pipe organ here was built for the Panama-Pacific Exposition. It was subsequently rebuilt and presented to the city.

The theatres of San Francisco that were famous in an earlier era are now names packed away in the lavender of remembrance. Today the city has new theatres of imposing appearance and large seating capacity. The old stage personalities, however, troop through the writings of contemporary theatrical critics like deified shades.

The first managers of the old California theatre were Lawrence Barrett and John McCullough. The foremost actors were drawn to the city, including Charles Kean and Edwin Forrest. The Bush street theatre was conducted for fifteen years by M. B. Leavitt. It is difficult to be brief with the list of famous names. David Belasco, born in San Francisco, was stage manager of the Baldwin before he made theatrical history in New York. David Warfield made his first professional appearance at the old Wigwam. William A. Brady began his theatrical career in the city, and so did Al Hayman. Holbrook Blinn was a boy star in amateur theatricals.

At the Alcazar, San Francisco's stock house, many familiar players made their debuts, including Blanche Bates, Frank Bacon, Frances Starr, Bert Lytell and Evelyn Vaughn.

The Orpheum theatre of San Francisco is the mother house of the vaudeville circuit of that name, which supplies entertainment to cities throughout the United States and has overseas affiliations. The Orpheum developed from a music hall conducted by Gustav Walter and the first building on the present site in O'Farrell street, off Powell, was erected in 1887.

Universities

Like a tower of enlightenment the campanile of the University of California, in Berkeley, is seen by visitors to San Francisco whether they come through the Golden Gate from Asia or approach the city by ferry from the terminals of the transcontinental railroads on the East Bay shore. It is likewise visible from the hills of San Francisco.