Part 14 (1/2)

But give an Easterner six months of it, and he, too, learns to exist without a chill in a steady temperature a little lower than that to which he is accustomed at home. After that one goes about with perfect indifference to the temperature. Summer and winter San Francisco women wear light tailor-made clothes, and men wear the same fall-weight suits all the year around.

Except for the modern buildings, the fruit of the last ten years, the town presented at first sight to the newcomer a disreputable appearance.

Most of the buildings were low and of wood. In the middle period of the 70's, when a great part of San Francisco was building, there was some atrocious architecture perpetrated. In that time, too, every one put bow windows on his house, to catch all of the morning sunlight that was coming through the fog, and those little houses, with bow windows and fancy work all down their fronts, were characteristic of the middle cla.s.s residence districts.

Then the Italians, who tumbled over Telegraph Hill, had built as they listed and with little regard for streets, and their houses hung crazily on a side hill which was little less than a precipice. For the most part the Chinese, although they occupied an abandoned business district, had remade the houses Chinese fas.h.i.+on, and the Mexicans and Spaniards had added to their houses those little balconies without which life is not life to a Spaniard.

The hills are steep beyond conception. Where Vallejo Street ran up Russian Hill it progressed for four blocks by regular steps like a flight of stairs.

With these hills, with the strangeness of the architecture, and with the green gray tinge over everything, the city fell always into vistas and pictures, a setting for the romance which hung over everything, which has always hung over life in San Francisco since the padres came and gathered the Indians about Mission Dolores.

And it was a city of romance and a gateway to adventure. It opened out on the mysterious Pacific, the untamed ocean, and most of China, j.a.pan, the South Sea Islands, Lower California, the west coast of Central America, Australia that came to this country pa.s.sed in through the Golden Gate. There was a sprinkling, too, of Alaska and Siberia.

From his windows on Russian Hill one saw always something strange and suggestive creeping through the mists of the bay. It would be a South Sea Island brig, bringing in copra, to take out cottons and idols; a Chinese junk with fan-like sails, back from an expedition after sharks'

livers; an old whaler, which seemed to drip oil, back from a year of cruising in the Arctic. Even, the tramp windjammers were deep-chested craft, capable of rounding the Horn or of circ.u.mnavigating the globe; and they came in streaked and picturesque from their long voyaging.

A MIXTURE OF RACES.

In the orange colored dawn which always comes through the mists of that bay, the fis.h.i.+ng fleet would crawl in under triangular lateen sails, for the fishermen of San Francis...o...b..y are all Neapolitans, who have brought their costumes and sail with lateen rigs shaped like the ear of a horse when the wind fills them and stained an orange brown.

The ”smelting pot of the races” Stevenson called the region along the water front, for here the people of all these craft met, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Lascars, Kanakas, Alaska Indians, black Gilbert Islanders, Spanish-Americans, wanderers and sailors from all the world, who came in and out from among the queer craft to lose themselves in the disreputable shanties and saloons. The Barbary Coast was a veritable bit of Satan's realm. The place was made up of three solid blocks of dance halls, for the delectation of the sailors of the world. Within those streets of peril the respectable never set foot; behind the swinging doors of those saloons anything might be happening, crime was as common here as drink, and much went on of which the law was blankly ignorant.

Not far removed from this haunt of crime was the world-famous Chinatown, a district six blocks long and two wide, and housing when at its fullest some 30,000 Chinese. Old business houses at first, the new inmates added to them, rebuilt them, ran out their own balconies and entrances, and gave them that feeling of huddled irregularity which makes all Chinese built dwellings fall naturally into pictures. Not only this, they burrowed to a depth equal to three stories under the ground, and through this ran pa.s.sages in which the Chinese transacted their dark and devious affairs--as the smuggling of opium, the traffic in slave girls and the settlement of their difficulties, by murder if they saw fit. The law was powerless to prevent or discover and convict the murderers.

Chinatown is gone; the Barbary Coast is gone; the haunts of crime have been swept by the devouring flames, and if the citizens can prevent they will never be restored. The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest-hearted, most pleasure-loving city of this continent, and in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate and have caught its flavor of the Arabian Nights feel that it can never be the same. When it rises out of its ashes it will probably doubtless resemble other modern cities and have lost its old strange flavor.

CHAPTER XII.

Life in the Metropolis of the Pacific

Brought up in a bountiful country, where no one really has to work very hard to live, nurtured on adventure, scion of a free and merry stock, the real, native Californian is a distinctive type; as far from the Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southern is from the Yankee. He is easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be unmoral rather than immoral in his personal habits, and above all easy to meet and to know.

Above all there is an art sense all through the populace which sets it off from any other part of the country. This sense is almost Latin in its strength, and the Californian owes it to the leaven of Latin blood.

THE 'FRISCO RESTAURANTS.

With such a people life was always gay. If they did not show it on the streets, as do the people of Paris, it was because the winds made open cafes disagreeable at all seasons of the year. The gayety went on indoors or out on the hundreds of estates that fringed the city. It was noted for its restaurants. Perhaps people who cared not how they spent their money could get the best they wished, but for a dollar down to as low as fifteen cents the restaurants furnished the best fare to be had anywhere at the price.

The country all about produced everything that a cook needs, and that in abundance--the bay was an almost untapped fish-pond, the fruit farms came up to the very edge of the town, and the surrounding country produced in abundance fine meats, all cereals and all vegetables.

But the chefs who came from France in the early days and liked this land of plenty were the head and front of it. They pa.s.sed their art to other Frenchmen or to the clever Chinese. Most of the French chefs at the biggest restaurants were born in Canton, China. Later the Italians, learning of this country where good food is appreciated, came and brought their own style. Householders always dined out one or two nights of the week, and boarding houses were scarce, for the unattached preferred the restaurants. The eating was usually better than the surroundings.

THE FAMOUS POODLE DOG.