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.