California conform to his back-home standards is responsible for the
fact that many of the tourist hotels out there are not so typical of the
West as they might be--and as in my humble judgment they should be--but
are as Eastern as it is possible to make them--Eastern in cuisine, in
charges and in their operating schedules. Here, again, there are some
notable exceptions.
In the supposedly wilder sections of the West, lying between the Rockies
and the Sierras, the situation is different. It is notably different in
Arizona and New Mexico in the South, and in Utah, Montana and Wyoming
in the North. There the person who serves you for hire is neither your
menial nor your superior; whereas in the East he or she is nearly always
one or the other, and sometimes both at once. This particular type of
Westerner doesn't patronize you; neither does he cringe to you in
expectation of a tip. He gives you the best he has in stock, meanwhile
retaining his own self-respect and expecting you to do the same. He
ennobles and dignifies personal service.
Out on the Coast, however--or at least at several of the big hotels out
on the Coast--the system, thanks to Eastern influence, has been changed.
The whole scheme is patterned after the accepted New York model. The
charges for small services are as exorbitant as in New York, and the
iniquities of the tipping system are worked out as amply and as wickedly
as in the city where they originated.
Somebody with a taste for statistics figured it out once that if a man
owned a three-dollar hat and wore it for two months, lunching every day
at a New York cafe, and if he dined four nights a week at a New York
restaurant and attended the theater twice a week, his hat at the end of
those two months would cost him in tips eighteen dollars and seventy
cents! No, on second thought, I guess it was a pair of earmuffs that
would have cost him eighteen-seventy.
A hat would have been more.
It would be more in Southern California--I'm sure of that. There the
tipping habit is made more expensive by reason of the prevalent spirit
of Western generosity. The born Westerner never has got used to dimes
and nickels. To him quarters are still chicken-feed and a half dollar is
small change. So the tips are just as numerous as in New York and for
the same service they are frequently larger.
A lot has been said and written about the marvelous palms of Lower
California and a lot more might be said--for they are outstretched
everywhere; and if you don't cross them with silver at frequent
intervals you would do well to try camping out for a change. Likewise a
cursory glance at the prices on some of the menus is calculated to make
a New Yorker homesick--they're so familiarly and unreasonably steep. And
frequently the dishes you get aren't typical of the country; they
are--thanks again be to the Easterner--mostly transplanted imitations of
the concoctions of the Broadway and the Fifth Avenue chefs.
There are compensations, though. There are some hotels that are operated
on admirably different lines, and there are abundant opportunities for
escaping altogether from hotel life and seeing this Land of the Living
Backdrop where it is untainted and unspoiled; where the hills are
clothed in green and yellow; where little Spanishy looking towns nestle
below the Missions, and the mocking-birds sing, and the real-estate
boomer leaps from crag to crag, sounding his flute-like note. And don't
forget the climate! But that is unnecessary advice. You won't have a
chance to forget it--not for a minute you won't!
_IN THE HAUNT OF THE NATIVE SON_
[Illustration]
_In the Haunt of the Native Son_
THERE are various ways of entering San Francisco, and the traveling
general passenger agent of any one of half a dozen trunklines stands
ready to prove to you--absolutely beyond the peradventure of a
doubt--that his particular way is incomparably the best one; but to my
mind a very satisfactory way is to go overland from Monterey.
The route we followed led us lengthwise through the wonderful Santa
Clara country, straight up a wide box plait of valley tucked in between
an ornamental double ruffle of mountains. I suppose if we passed one
ranch we passed a thousand--cattle ranches, fruit ranches, hen ranches,
chicken ranches, bee ranches--all the known varieties and subvarieties.
In California you mighty soon get out of the habit of speaking of farms;
for there are no farms--only ranches. The particular ranch to which you
have reference may be a ten-thousand-acre ranch, where they raise enough
beef critters to feed a standing army, or it may be a half-acre ranch,
where somebody is trying to make things home-like and happy for eight
hens and a rooster; but a ranch it always is, and usually it is a model
of its kind, too. The birds in California do not build nests. They build
ranches.
Most of the way along the Santa Clara Valley our tires glided upon an
arrow-straight, unbelievably smooth stretch of magnificent automobile
road, which--when it is completed--will extend without a break from the
Oregon line to the Mexican line, and will be the finest, costliest, best
thoroughfare to be found within the boundaries of any state of the
Union, that being the scale upon which they work out their
public-utility plans in the West.
Eventually the road changes into a paved and curbed avenue, lined with
seemingly unending aisles of the tall gum trees. Soon you begin to
skitter past the suburban villas of rich men, set back in ornamental
landscape effects of green lawns and among tropical verdure. You emerge
from this into a gently rolling plateau, upon which flower gardens of
incomparable richness are interspersed with the homely structures that
inevitably mark the proximity of any great city. There, rising ahead of
you, are the foothills that protect, upon its landward side, San
Francisco, the city that has produced more artists, more poets, more
writers, more actors, more pugilists, more sudden millionaires--cries of
Question! Question! from the Pittsburgh delegation--more good fiction
and more Native Sons than any community in the Western Hemisphere.
You aren't there yet, however. Next you round a sloping shoulder of a
hill and slide down into a shore road, with the beating, creaming surf
on one side, and on the other a long succession of the sort of
architectural triumphs that have made Coney Island famous. You negotiate
another small ridge and there, suddenly spread out before you, is the
Golden Gate, with the city itself cuddled in between the ocean and the
friendly protecting mountains at its back. The Seal Rocks are there, and
the Cliff House, and the Presidio, and all. New York has a wonderful
harbor entrance; Nature did some of it and man did the rest. San
Francisco has an even more wonderful one, and the hand of man did not
need to touch it. When Nature got through with it, it was a complete and
satisfactory job.
The first convincing impression the newcomer gets of San Francisco is
that here is a permanent city--a city that has found itself, has
achieved its own personality, and is satisfied with it. Perhaps, because
they are growing so fast, certain of the other Coast cities strike the
casual observer as having just been put up. I was told that a man who
lives on a residential street of San Diego has to mark his house with
chalk when he leaves of a morning in order to know it when he gets home
at night. A real-estate agent told me so, and I do not think a Southern
California real-estate agent would deceive anybody--more particularly a
stranger from the East. So it must be true. And Los Angeles' main
business district is like a transverse slice chopped out of the middle
of Manhattan Island. It isn't Western. It is typically New Yorky--as
alive as New York and as handsomely done. You can almost imagine you are
at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street.
San Francisco, it seems to me, isn't like any city on earth except San
Francisco. Once you get away from the larger hotels, which are accurate
copies of the metropolitan article of the East, even to the afternoon
tea-fighting melees of the women, you find yourself in a city that is
absolutely individual and distinctive. It impresses its originality upon
you; it presents itself with an air of having been right there from the
beginning--and this, too, in spite of the fact that the ravages of the
great fire are still visible in old cellar excavations and piles of
debris. Practically every building in the main part of the town has
been rebuilt within eight years and is still new. The scars are fresh,
but the spirit is old and abides.
This same essence of individuality tinctures the lives, the manners and
the conversations of the people. They do not strike you as being
Westerners or as being transplanted Easterners; they are San
Franciscans. Even when all other signs fail you may, nevertheless,
instantly discern certain unfailing traits--to wit, as follows: 1--A San
Franciscan shudders with ill-concealed horror when anybody refers to his
beloved city as Frisco--which nobody ever does unless it be a raw alien
from the other side of the continent; 2--He does not brag of the climate
with that constancy which provides his neighbor of Los Angeles a
never-failing topic of congenial conversation; and 3--He assures you
with a regretful sighing note in his voice that the old-time romance
disappeared with the destruction of the old-time buildings, the old-time
resorts and the old-time neighborhoods.
It has been my experience that romance is always in the past tense
anyhow. Romance is a commodity that was extremely plentiful last week or
last year or last century, but for the moment they are entirely out of
it, and can't say with any degree of certainty when a fresh stock will
be coming in. This is largely true of all the formerly romantic cities I
know anything about, and it appears to be especially true of San
Francisco. Romance invariably acquires added value after it has
vanished; in this respect it is very much like a history-making epoch.
An epoch rarely seems to create any great amount of excitement when it
is in process of epoching, or at least the excitement is only temporary
and soon abates. Afterward we look back upon it with a feeling of
longing, but when it was actually coming to pass we took it--after the
first shock of surprise--as a matter of course.
No doubt our children and our children's children will read in the
text-books that the first decade of the twentieth century was
distinguished as the age when the auto and tango came into use, and
people learned to fly, and grown men wore bracelet watches and carried
their handkerchiefs up their cuffs; and they will repine because they,
too, did not live in those stirring times. But we of the present
generation who recently passed through these experiences have already
accepted them without undue excitement, just as our forefathers in their
day accepted the submarine cable, the galvanic battery and the congress
gaiter.
[Illustration: EVEN THE PLACE WHERE THE TURKEY TROT ORIGINATED WAS
TROTLESS AND QUIET]
Age and antiquity give an added value to everything except an egg. In my
own case I know how it was with regard to the Egyptian scarab. For years
I felt that I could never rest satisfied until I had gone to Egypt and
had personally broken into the tomb of some sleeping Pharaoh or some
crumbly old Rameses, and with my own hands had ravished from it a
mummified specimen of that fabled beetle which the ancients worshiped
and buried with them in their tombs. But not long ago I made the
discovery that, in coloring, habits, customs and general walk and
conversation, the scarab of the Egyptians was none other than the
common tumblebug of the Southern dirt roads. Right there was where I
lost interest in the scarab. He was no novelty to me--not after that he
wasn't. As a boy I had known him intimately.
So, when I was repeatedly assured that the old-time romance had vanished
from San Francisco, and with it the atmosphere that bred Bohemianism and
developed literature and art, and kept alive the spirit of the
Forty-niner times, and all that, I made my own allowances. Those who
mourned for the fire-blasted past may have been right, in a measure.
Certainly the old-time Chinatown isn't there any more--or, at any rate,
isn't there in its physical aspects. The rebuilt Chinatown of San
Francisco, though infinitely larger, isn't so picturesque really or so
Chinesey looking as New York's Chinatown.
I did not dare to give utterance to this treasonable statement until I
was well away from San Francisco, but it is true all the same. I cruised
the shores of the far-famed and much-written-about Barbary Coast; and
it seemed to me that in its dun-colored tiresomeness and in its
miserable transparent counterfeit of joy it was up to the general
metropolitan average--that it was just as tiresome and humdrum as the
avowedly wicked section of any city always is.
However, I was told that I had arrived just one week too late to see the
Barbary Coast at its best--meaning by that its worst; for during the
week before the police, growing virtuous, had put the crusher on the
dance-halls and the hobble on the tango-twisters. Even the place where
the turkey trot originated--a place that would naturally be a shrine to
a New Yorker--was trotless and quiet--in mourning for its firstborn.
The so-called French restaurants, which for years gave an unwholesome
savor to certain phases of San Francisco life, had likewise been
sterilized and purified. I wished I might have got there before the
housecleaning took place; but, even so, I should probably have been
disappointed. What makes the vice of ancient Babylon seem by contrast
more seductive to us than the vice of the Bowery is that Babylon is gone
and the Bowery isn't.
Likewise the night life of San Francisco, of which in times past I had
read so much, was disillusionizing, because it wasn't visible to the
naked eye. On this proposition Los Angeles puts it all over San
Francisco; for this, though, there is an easy explanation. Los Angeles
boasts what is said to be the completest trolley system in the world;
undoubtedly it is the noisiest in the world. The tracks seem to run
through every street; there is a curve at every corner, I think, and a
switch in the middle of every block. Every thirty seconds or so a car
comes along, and it always comes at top speed and takes the curve
without slackening up; and the motorman is always clanging his gong in a
whole-souled manner that would entitle him to membership in the Swiss
Bellringers.
Naturally the folks in Los Angeles stay up late--they can't figure on
doing much sleeping anyhow; but either San Francisco has fewer trolley
cars to the acre or else the motormen are not quite so musically
inclined, and people may get to bed at a Christian hour. Most of them do
it, too, if I am one to judge. At night in San Francisco I didn't see a
single owl lunch wagon or meet a single beggar. Newsboys were remarkably
scarce and taxicabs seemed to be few and far between. These things help
to make any other city; without them San Francisco still manages to be a
city--another proof of her individuality.
The old romance of the Old San Francisco may be dead and buried--the
residents unite in saying that it is, and they ought to know; but, even
so, New San Francisco may well brag today of a greater romance than any
it ever knew--the romance of achievement. Somebody said not long ago
that the greatest of all monuments to American pluck was San Francisco
rebuilt; but if there was pluck in it there was romance too. And there
is romance, plenty of it, in the exposition these people have planned
and are now carrying out to commemorate the opening of the Panama
Canal.
To begin with, citizens of San Francisco and of the state of California
are paying the whole bill themselves--they did not ask the Federal
Government to contribute a red cent of the millions being spent and that
will be spent, and to date the Federal Government has not contributed a
red cent either. Climatic conditions are in their favor. Other
expositions have had to contend with hot weather--sometimes with beastly
hot weather; those other expositions could not open up until well into
the spring, and they closed perforce with the coming of cold weather in
the fall. But San Francisco is never very hot and never really cold, and
California becomes an out-of-door land as soon as the rains end; so this
fair will be actively and continuously in operation for nine months
instead of being limited to four or five months as the period of its
greatest activities.
Then, again, there is another advantage--the exposition grounds are
situated well within the city; the site is within easy riding distance
of the civic center and not miles away from the middle of town, as has
been the case in certain other instances in this country where big
expositions were held. It is a place admirably devised by Nature for the
purposes to which it is now being put--a six-hundred-acre tract
stretching along the water-front, with the Presidio at its farther end,
the high hills behind it, and in front of it the exquisite panorama of
the Golden Gate, with emerald islands rising beyond; and Berkeley and
Oakland just across the way; and on beyond, northward across the
narrowing portals of the harbor, the big green mountain of Tamalpais,
rising sheer out of the sea.
Moreover, the president of the exposition and his aides promised that
the whole thing, down to the minutest detail, would be completed and
ready months before the date set for opening the gates--which furnishes
another strikingly novel note in expositions, if their words come true;
and they declared that, for beauty of conception and harmony of design,
their exposition of 1915 would surpass any exposition ever seen in this
country or in any other country. Probably they are right. I know that,
when I was there, the view from the first rise back of the grounds,
looking down upon that long flat where men by thousands were toiling,
and building after building was rising, made a picture sufficiently
inspiring to warm the enthusiasm and brisken the imagination of any man,
be he alien or native.
There isn't any doubt, though, that the people of San Francisco are
going to have their hands full when the exposition visitors begin to
pile in. By that I do not mean that the housing and feeding
accommodations and the transit facilities will be deficient; but it is
going to be a most overpoweringly big job to educate the pilgrims up to
the point where they will call San Francisco by its full name. All true
San Franciscans are very touchy on this point--touchy as hedgehogs, they
are; the prejudice extends to all classes, with the possible exception
of the Chinese.
I heard a story of a seafaring person, ignorant and newly arrived, who
drifted into a waterfront saloon, called for a simple glass of beer and
spoke a few casual words of greeting to the barkeeper--and woke up the
next morning in the hospital with a very bad headache and a bandage
round his throbbing brows. It developed that he had three times in rapid
succession referred to the city as Frisco, and on being warned against
this practice had inquired:
"Well, wot do you want me to call her--plain Fris?"
That was the last straw. The barkeeper took a bung-starter and felled
him as flat as a felled seam--and all present agreed that it served him
right.
An even worse breach of etiquette on the part of the outlander is to
intimate that an earthquake preceded the great fire. That is positively
the unforgivable sin! In any quarter of the city you could get many
subscriptions for a fund to buy something with silver handles on it for
any man who would insist upon talking of earthquakes. To make my meaning
clearer, I will state that there are only two objects of general use in
the civilized world that have silver handles on them, and one of them is
a loving cup; but this article would not be a loving cup. A native will
willingly concede that there was a fire, which burned its memories deep
into the consciousness of the city that recovered from it with such
splendid courage and such inconceivable rapidity; but by common consent
there was nothing else. It does not take the stranger long to get this
point of view, either.
If I were in charge of the publicity work of the San Francisco Fair I
should advertise two attractions that would surely appeal to all the
women in this country, and to most of the men. In my press work I would
dwell at length upon the fact that in this part of California a woman
may wear any weight and any style of clothes--spring clothes, summer
clothes, fall clothes or winter clothes--and not only be perfectly
comfortable while so doing, but be in the fashion besides; and to be in
the fashion is a thing calculated to make a woman comfortable whether
she otherwise is or not.
To see a group of four women promenading a San Francisco street on a
pleasant morning is to be reminded of that ballet representing the Four
Seasons, which we used to see in the second act of every well-regulated
extravaganza. The woman nearest the walls has on her furs--it is always
cool in the shade; the one next to her is wearing the very latest
wrinkles in spring garniture; the third one, let us say, is dressed in
the especially becoming frock she bought last October; and the one on
the outside, where the sun shines the brightest, is as summery in her
white ducks and her white slippers as though she had just stepped off
the cover of the August number of a magazine. There is something, too,
about the salt-laden breezes of San Francisco that gives women wonderful
complexions; that detail, properly press-agented, ought to fetch the
entire female population of the United States.
[Illustration: THE WOMAN NEAREST THE WALL HAS ON HER FURS--IT IS ALWAYS
COOL IN THE SHADE]
For drawing the men, I would exploit the great cardinal fact that
nowhere in the country--not even in Norfolk or Baltimore or New
Orleans--can you get better things to eat than in San Francisco. For its
size, I believe there are more good clubs and more good restaurants
right there than in any other spot on the habitable globe. Particularly
in the preparation of the typical dishes of the Coast do the San
Francisco cooks excel; their cuisine is based on a sane American
foundation, with a delectable suggestion of the Spanish in it, and
sometimes with a traceable suggestion of the best there is in the
Italian and the Chinese schools of cookery.
To one whose taste in oysters has been developed by eating the
full-chested bi-valve of the Eastern seaboard and the deep-lunged,
long-bodied product of the Louisiana bayous, the native oyster does not
greatly appeal. A lot has been written and printed about the California
oyster, but in my opinion he will always have considerable difficulty in
living up to his press notices. It takes about a thousand of him to make
a quart and about a hundred of him to make a taste. Even then he doesn't
taste much like a real oyster, but more like an infinitesimal scrap of
sponge where a real oyster camped out overnight once.
There is a dream of a little fish, however, called a sand dab--he is a
tiny, flounder-shaped titbit hailing from deep water; and for eating
purposes he is probably the best fish that swims--better even than the
pompano of the Gulf--and when you say that you are saying about all
there is to be said for a fish. And the big crabs of the Pacific side
are the hereditary princes of the crab family. They look like
spread-eagles; and properly prepared they taste like Heaven. I often
wonder what the crabsters buy one-half so precious as the stuff they
sell--which is a quotation from Omar, with original interpolations by
me. The domestic cheese of the Sierras is not without its attractions
also, whether you eat it fresh or whether you keep it until its general
aspect and prevalent atmosphere are such as to satisfy even one of those
epicurean cheese-eaters who think that no cheese is fit to eat until you
can't.