From it the modern city dates. It was the plaza of the old Spanish town,
and within this plaza Commodore Montgomery of the American sloop-of-war
_Portsmouth_ first raised the Stars and Stripes--in the strenuous days
of the Mexican war. After that the stirring days of gold-times with the
vigilantes conducting hangings on the flat roofs of the neighboring
houses of adobe. Portsmouth square indeed has played its part in the
history of San Francisco.
"Portsmouth square," you begin to say, "Portsmouth square--was it not
Portsmouth square that Stevenson--"
Precisely so. There are still some of the shop-keepers about that
ancient plaza who can recall the thin figure of the poet and dreamer who
loafed lazy days in that open space--hobnobbing with sailors and the
strange dark-skinned vagabond folk from overseas. There is a single
monument in the square today--a smooth monolith upon whose top there
rests a ship, its sails full-bellied to the wind but which never reaches
a port. Upon the smooth surface of that stone you may read:
TO REMEMBER
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
To be honest To be
kind--To earn a lit-
tle To spend a lit-
tle less--to make
upon the whole a
family happier for
his presence--To re-
nounce when that shall
be necessary and not
be embittered--To
keep a few friends but
these without capitula-
tion--Above all on
the same grim condition
to keep friends
with himself--Here is
a task for all that a
man has of fortitude
and delicacy
That is the lesson that Portsmouth square gives to the wanderers who
drag themselves today to its benches--the words that come as a sermon
from one who knew and who pitied wrecked humanity.
There are other great squares of San Francisco--and filled with
interest--perhaps none other more so than Union square, in the heart of
the fine retail section with its theaters and hotels and clubs. Of these
last there is none more famous than the Bohemian. More showy clubs has
San Francisco. The Pacific Union in its great brown-stone house upon the
very crest of Nob Hill, where in other days the bonanza millionaires
were wont to build their high houses so that they might look across the
housetops and see the highways in from the sea, has a home unsurpassed
by any other in the whole land. But the Bohemian does not get its fame
from its fine town club-house. Its "jinks" held in August in a great
cluster of giant redwood trees off in the wonderful California hills are
world-renowned. In the old days all that was necessary for a man to be a
Bohemian, beyond the prime requisite of being a good fellow, was that he
be able to sing a song, to tell a story or to write a verse. In these
days the Bohemian Club, like many other institutions that were simple in
the beginning, has waxed prosperous. Some of its members have rather
elaborate cottages in among the redwoods and go back and forth in
automobiles. But much of the old spirit remains. It is the spirit which
the San Franciscan tells you gave first American recognition to such an
artist as Luisa Tetrazzini, which many years ago gave such a welcome to
the then famous Lotta that the generous actress in a burst of generous
enthusiasm returned with the gift to the city of the Lotta fountain--at
one of the most famous of the Market street corners. It is the spirit
which makes San Francisco give to art or literature the quickest
appreciation of any city in America. It is, in fact, the same spirit
that gives to San Francisco the reputation of having the gayest night
life of any city in the world--with the possible exception of Paris.
Night life in a city means the intoxication of many lights, the creature
comfort of good restaurants. San Francisco does not lack either. When
the last glimmer of day has disappeared out over the Golden Gate, Market
street, Powell street, all the highways and the byways that lead into
them are ablaze with the incandescent glories of electricity. Commerce
and the city's lighting boards vie with one another in the splendor of
their offerings.
And as for the restaurants--San Francisco boasts of twelve hundred
hotels, alone. Each hotel has presumably at least one restaurant. And
some of the finest of the eating-places of the city at the Golden Gate
are solely restaurants. As a matter of real fact, San Francisco is the
greatest restaurant city on the continent--in proportion to her
population even greater than New York. In New York and more recently in
Chicago the so-called "kitchenette apartment" has come into great vogue
among tiny folks--two or three rooms, a bath and a very slightly
enlarged clothes-press in which a small gas or electric stove, a sink
and a refrigerator suffices for the preparation of light breakfasts and
lunches. Dinners are taken out. In San Francisco the "kitchenettes" are
omitted in thousands of apartments. All the meals are eaten in public
dining-rooms and the restaurants thrive wonderfully. The soft climate
does much to make this possible.
Living in these new apartments of San Francisco is a comparatively
simple matter. Your capital investment for house-keeping may be small. A
few chairs, a table or two, some linen--you are ready to begin.
Beds?
Bless your soul, the builder of the apartment house solved that problem
for you. Your bed is a masterpiece of architecture which lets down from
the wall, _à la Pullman_. By day it goes up against the wall again and
an ingenious arrangement of wall-shutters enables the bedding to air
throughout the entire day. In some cases the beds will let down either
within, or without, to a sleeping-porch, for your real San Franciscan
has a healthy sort of an animal love for living and sleeping in the
open. The glories of the open California country that lie within an hour
or two of the city tempt him into it each month of the year, and he is
impeccable in his horseback riding, his fishing and his shooting.
To return to the restaurants--a decided contrast to that rough life in
the open which he really loves--here is one, quite typical of the city.
It is gay, almost garish with color and with light. Its cabaret almost
amounts to an operatic performance and its proprietor will tell you with
no little pride that he was presenting this form of restaurant
entertainment long months before the idea ever reached New York. He will
also tell you that he changes the entire scheme of decoration each three
months--the San Franciscan mind is as volatile as it is appreciative.
Little Jap girls pass through the crowded tables bringing you hot tea
biscuits of a most delicious sort. Other girls, this time in Neapolitan
dress, are distributing flowers. The head-waiter bends over you and
suggests the salad with which you start your dinner, for it seems to be
the fashion in San Francisco restaurants to eat your salad before your
soup. The restaurant is a gay place, crowded. Late-comers must find
their way elsewhere. And the food is surprisingly good.
But we best remember a little restaurant just back of the California
market in Pine street--into which we stumbled of a Saturday night just
about dinner-time. It was an unpretentious place, with two musicians
fiddling for dear life in a tiny balcony. But the _table d'hôte_--price
one dollar, with a bottle of California wine after the fashion of all
San Francisco _table d'hôtes_--was perfection, the special dishes which
the waiter suggested even finer. _Soupe l'oignon_ that might linger in
the mind for a long time, a marvelous combination salad, chicken _bonne
femme_--which translated meant a chicken pulled apart, then cooked with
artichokes in a _casserole_, the whole smothered with a wonderful brown
gravy--there was a dinner, absolute in its simplicity yet leaving
nothing whatsoever to be wished. And a long time later we read that
Maurice Baring, author and globe-trotter, had visited the place and
pronounced its cookery the finest that he had ever tasted.
[Illustration: The Mission Dolores--San Francisco]
There are dozens of such little places in San Francisco--named after the
fashion of its shops in grotesque or poetic fashion--and they are almost
all of them good. There is little excuse for anything else in a town
whose very cosmopolitanism proclaims real cooks in the making, whose
wharves are rubbed by smack and schooner bringing in the food treasures
of the sea, whose farms are vast truck gardens for the land, whose
markets run riot in the richest of edibles. Your San Franciscan is
nothing if not an epicure. It is hardly fair, however, to assume that he
is a glutton or that he merely lives to eat. For he is, in reality, so
very much more--optimistic, generous, brave--and how he does delight to
experiment. California is still in the throes of what seems to be a
social and political earthquake, with each shake growing a little more
rough than its predecessor. She has just overturned most of her
political ideals for the first fifty years of her life. She delights in
politics. She really lives. San Francisco, standing between those two
great schools of thought, the University of California at Berkeley, and
Leland Stanford University at Palo Alto, prides herself upon her growing
intellectuality. From the folk who dally with advanced thought of every
sort down to those who are merely puzzled and dissatisfied, the
population of this Californian metropolis demands a new order of things.
That as much as anything else explains the recent political revolutions.
Since the great fire, the plans for those revolutions have been under
progress.
The mention of that fire--if you make any pretense to diplomacy you must
never call it an earthquake around the Golden Gate--brings us back to
the San Francisco of today. You look up and down Market street for
traces of that fire--and in vain. The city looks modern, after the
fashion of cities of the American west, but its buildings do not seem to
have arisen simultaneously after the scourge that leveled
them--simultaneously. But turn off from Market street, to the south
through Second or Third streets or north through any of the parallel
throughfares that lead out of that same main-stem of San Francisco.
Now the fullness of that disaster--which was not more to you at the time
than the brilliancy of newspaper dispatches--comes home to you for the
first time. In the rear of your hotel is an open square of melancholy
ruins, below it a corner plat still waste, others beyond in rapid
succession. On the side streets, fragments of "party-walls," a bit of
crumbling arch, a stout standing chimney remind you of the San Francisco
that was and that can never be again. When you go out Market street, you
may see where stood the pretentious City Hall--today a stretch of
foundation-leveled ruins with a single surviving dome still devoted to
the business of the Hall of Records. Still, to get the fullness of the
disaster you must make your way into San Francisco's wonderful Golden
Gate Park, past the single standing marble doorway of the old Towne
house--a pathetic reminder of one of the great houses of the old San
Francisco--and straight up to the crest of the high lifted Strawberry
Hill. On that hill there stood until the eighteenth of April, 1906, a
solid two-storied stone observatory. It seemed to be placed there for
all time, but today it vaguely suggests the Coliseum of Rome--a half
circle of its double row of arches still standing but the weird ruin
bringing back the most tragic five minutes that an American city has
ever spent. Or if you will go a little farther, an hour on a
quick-moving suburban train will bring you to Palo Alto and the remains
of Leland Stanford University, that remarkable institution whose museum
formerly held whole cases of Mrs. Stanford's gowns and a _papier-mache_
reproduction of a breakfast once eaten by a member of her family.
It must be discouraging to try to bring order out of the chaos that was
wreaked there. The great library, which was wrecked within a month of
its completion, and the gymnasium have never been rebuilt, although the
dome of the latter is still held aloft on stout steel supports. The
chapel, which was Mrs. Stanford's great pride and for which she made so
many sacrifices still rears its crossing. Nave and transepts, to say
nothing of the marvelous mosaics, were leveled in the twinkling of that
April dawn. The long vistas of arched pergolas, the triumph of the
master, Richardson, still remain. And the ruin done in that catastrophe
to the high-sprung arch he placed over the main entrance to the
quadrangle has been in part eradicated.
For Leland Stanford University today represents one of the bravest
attempts ever made in this land to repair an all but irreparable loss.
It has never lost either faith and hope, and so the visitor to its
campus today will see the beginnings toward a complete replacement of
the buildings of what was one of the "show universities" of the land.
With a patience that must have been infinite, the stones of the old
chapel have been sorted out of the ruin--even fragments of the intricate
mosaics have been carefully saved--numbered and placed in sequence for
re-erection. Already the steel frame of nave and transepts is up again
and the tedious work of erecting the masonry walls upon it begun. Leland
Stanford has, quite naturally, caught the spirit of San Francisco--the
city that would not be defeated.
To analyze that spirit in a sweeping paragraph is all but impossible.
Incident upon incident will show it in all its phases. For instance,
there was in San Francisco on the morning of the earthquake a
sober-minded German citizen who had put his all into a new business--a
business that had just begun to prove the wisdom of his investment. When
Nature awoke from her long sleep and stretching began to rock the city
by the Golden Gate the German rushed upstairs to where his wife and
daughter slept. He found them in one another's arms and frantic with
terror.
"Papa! Papa!" they shrieked. "We are going to die. It is the end of the
world--the business is gone. We are going to die!"
He smiled quietly at them.
"Well, what of it?" he asked quietly. "We die together--and in San
Francisco."
A keen-witted business man once boasted that he could capitalize
sentiment, express the spirit of the human soul in mere dollars and
cents. What price could he give for a love and loyalty of that sort?
That was, and still is, the affection that every San Franciscan from the
ferry-house back to the farthest crest of the uppermost hill gives to
his city--it is the thing that makes her one of the few American towns
that possess distinctive personality.
A young matron told us of her own experience on the morning of the fire.
"Of course it was exciting," she said, "with the smoke rolling up upon
us from downtown, and the rumors repeating themselves that the disaster
was world-wide, that Chicago was in ruins and New York swallowed by a
tidal wave, but there was nothing unreal about a single bit of it. I
bundled my children together and hurried toward the Presidio--my
knowledge of army men assured me that there could be no danger there. I
took the little tent handed me and set up my crude house-keeping in it.
It still seemed very real and not so very difficult.
"But when those odd little newspapers--that had been printed over in
Oakland--came, and I saw the first of their head-lines 'San Francisco in
Ruins' then it came upon me that our city, my city, was no more, and it
was all over. It was all the most unreal thing in the world and I cried
all that night, not for a single loss beyond that of the San Francisco
that I had loved. But the next morning they told me how they had
telegraphed East for all the architects in sight, and that morning I
began planning a new house just as if it had been a pet idea for months
and months and months...."
* * * * *
Out of such men and women a great city is ever builded. San Francisco
may be wild and harum-scarum, and a great deal of its wildness is
painfully exaggerated, but it is a mighty power in itself. Your San
Franciscan is rightly proud of the progress made since the great
disaster. More than $375,000,000--a sum approximating the cost of the
Panama canal--has already been spent in rebuilding the city, and now,
like a man who has spent his last dollar on a final substantial meal,
the western metropolis calls for cake and scrapes up an additional
$18,000,000 for a World's Fair "to beat everything that has gone
before." That takes financing--of a high order. It takes something more.
It has taken a real spirit--enthusiasm and love and courage--to build a
new San Francisco that shall gradually obliterate the poignant memories
of the city that was.
20
BELFAST IN AMERICA
Concerning Toronto it may be said that she combines in a somewhat
unusual fashion British conservatism and American enterprise. Her neat
streets are lined with solid and substantial buildings such as delight
the heart of the true Briton wherever he may find them; and yet she has
among these "the tallest skyscraper of the British Empire," although the
sixteen stories of its altitude would be laughed to scorn by many a
second-class American city.
Still, many a first-class American city could hardly afford to laugh at
the growth of Toronto, particularly in recent years. She prides herself
that she had doubled her population each fifteen years of her history
and here is a geometrical problem of growth that becomes vastly more
difficult with each oncoming twelvemonth. At the close of the second war
of the United States with England, just a century ago, Toronto was a
mere hamlet. Beyond it was an unknown wilderness. The town was known as
York in those days, and although Governor Simcoe had already chosen the
place to be the capital of Upper Canada, it was a struggling little
place. Still, it must have struggled manfully, for in 1817 it was
granted self-government and in 1834, having garnered in some nine
thousand permanent residents, it was vested with a Mayor and the other
appurtenances of a real city. Since then it has grown apace, until today
in population and in financial resource it is very close upon the heels
of Montreal, for so many years the undisputed metropolis of the
Dominion.
But perhaps the spur that has advanced Toronto has been the knowledge
that west of her is Winnipeg, and that Winnipeg has been doubling her
population each decade. And west of Winnipeg is Calgary, west of
Calgary, Vancouver; all growing apace until it is a rash man who today
can prophesy which will be the largest city of the Dominion of Canada, a
dozen years hence. The Canadian cities have certainly been growing in
the American fashion--to use that word in its broadest sense.
And yet the strangest fact of all is that Toronto grows--not more
American, but more British year by year. Within the past twelve or
thirteen years this has become most marked. She has grown from a
Canadian town, with many marked American characteristics, into a town
markedly English in many, many ways. Now consider for a moment the whys
and the wherefores of this.
We have already told of the rapid progress of Toronto, now what of the
folk who came to make it? In the beginning there were the
Loyalists--"Tories" we call them in our histories; "United Empire
Loyalists," as their Canadian descendants prefer to know them--who fled
from the Colonies at the time of the Revolution and who found it quite
impossible to return. In this way some of the old English names of
Virginia have been perpetuated in Toronto, and you may find in one of
the older residential sections, a great house known as Beverly, whose
doors, whose windows, whose fireplaces, whose every detail are exact
replicas of the Beverly House in Virginia which said good-by to its
proprietors a century and a half ago.
Those Loyalists laid the foundations of Toronto of today. The
municipality of Toronto of today is, as you shall see, most progressive
in the very fibers of its being, ranking with such cities as Des Moines
and Cleveland and Boston as among the best governed upon the North
American continent. Such civic progress was not drawn from the cities
of England or of Scotland or of Ireland. And Toronto was a well
organized and governed municipality, while Glasgow and Manchester were
hardly yet emerging from an almost feudal servility. Because in Toronto
the old New England town-meeting idea worked to its logical triumph. The
Loyalists who had left their great houses of Salem and of Boston brought
more to the wildernesses of Upper Canada than merely fine clothes or
family plate.
To this social foundation of the town came, as stock for her growth
through the remaining three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the folk
of the north of Ireland. The southern counties of the Emerald Island
gave to America and gave generously--to New York and to Boston; to New
Brunswick and to Lower Canada. The men from the north of Ireland went to
Toronto and the nearby cities of what is now the Province of Ontario.
And when Toronto became a real city they began to call her the Belfast
of America. For such she was. She was a very citadel of Protestantism.
Her folk transplanted, found that they would worship God in their
austere churches without having the reproachful phrase of "dissenter"
constantly whipped in their faces. Toronto meant toleration. So came the
Ulster men to their new Belfast. For more than sixty years they came--a
great migrating army. And if you would know the way they took root give
heed to a single illustration.
One of these Irishmen had founded a retail store in the growing little
city of Toronto. It thrived--tremendously. News of its success went back
to the little north-of-Ireland village from whence its owner came.
"Timothy Eaton's doin' well in America," was the word that passed
through his old county. Timothy Eaton and those who came after him took
good care of their kith and kin. For the Eaton business did prosper.
Today the firm has two great stores--one in Toronto and one in
Winnipeg--and they are not only among the largest in North America but
among the largest in the world.
This is but one instance of the way that Toronto has grown. And when,
after sixty years of steady immigration there was little of kith and kin
left to come from Ireland, there began a migration from the other side
of the Irish channel, a new chapter in the growth of Toronto was opened.
No one seems to know just how the tide of English emigration started,
but it is a fact that it had its beginning about the time of the end of
the Boer war. It is no less a fact that within ten or fifteen years it
has attained proportions comparable with the sixty years of Irish
immigration. The agents of the Canadian government and of her railroads
have shown that it pays to advertise.
There is good reason for this immigration--of course. Canada, with no
little wisdom, has given great preference to the English as settlers.
She has not wished to change her religions, her language or her customs.
The English, in turn, have responded royally to the invitation to come
to her broad acres and her great cities. The steamship piers, at Quebec
and Montreal in the summer and at Halifax and St. Johns in the winter,
are steadily thronged with the newcomers, and they do not speak the
strange tongues that one hears at Ellis island in the city of New York.
They bring no strange customs or strange religions to the growing young
nation that prides herself upon her ability to combine conservatism and
progress.