Slike strani
PDF
ePub

CHAPTER XI.

SAN FRANCISCO.

Superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est.

-Virgil.

To the Greeks, Delphi was the centre of the earth; to Jews and Christians, Jerusalem; to Californians, San Francisco.

Pastoral San Francisco was but a hamlet. Though a seaport, it had little to do with the sea, and was more like a cluster of houses in the country than a commercial town. The presidio maintained the dignity of government and war, and the mission the dignity of religion, so that for the traffickers at the cove little dignity remained or was required. Even when the galvanic shock of gold-discovery struck the place, it did not immediately assume large proportions, but rather stood stupified for a moment before setting out on its broad pathway of progress.

Hence it was that during the winter of 1848-9 the place did not grow much, nor was it very large_by the end of 1849. The principal buildings were clustered around the plaza, or Portsmouth square; brick structures were few, and there was not one really substantial building in the place. The greater part of the town consisted of tents and small shanties made out of packing-boxes, with some not very good houses of more pretentious construction. The few travelled streets were little better than mire during the rains, while the sidewalks were made of barrel staves and narrow pieces of board.

STREETS AND BUILDINGS

261

The autumn of 1850 saw quite a city-like settlement round Yerba Buena cove. Prices of most necessities and some luxuries had come down within the reach of the masses, but were still high enough. Several new journals were started, such as the Pacific News and Commercial Bulletin. The El Dorado gamblinghouse, from a canvas tent, had become a fine threestory brick building. The bay was noisy with steamers, many of which were transformed sailing boats, with old boilers which burst with the slightest provocation.

The fire of 1850 put an end to many irregularities. People then began to build in a more substantial manner. The fire of 1851, however, made a clean sweep of all that had been done, and the city began to assume a more regular appearance. Brick houses and planked streets took the place of the huddled huts and tents of the previous years. The bay was alive with shipping; by midsummer over a hundred steamers had entered and departed.

"Old things are passing away," sighed the meditative man, by old things referring to things two years old. The hills were being cut down and the hollows filled up. Montgomery street, which was the original high-water mark, was now in the heart of the city, and Sansome street, which had been filled up between Jackson and California streets, was the new water line. The water lots between Montgomery and Sansome were first piled, and then filled in. South of California, the steam excavator was busy scooping up the sand-hills, and dropping them into the low places along the border of the cove. A rail-track was laidon Battery street, along which cars were seen flying back and forth all day, dumping their loads into the water, the conductor, mounted on the foremost truck, lustily blowing his horn to give warning of approach.

The space bounded by Montgomery, Pacific, Jackson, and Kearny streets was, in the spring of 1851, a hollow filled with little wooden huts planted promiscuously, with numberless recesses and fastnesses filled

with Chilians-men, women, and children. The place was called Little Chile. The women appeared to be always washing, but the vocation of the men was a puzzle to the passers-by. Neither the scenery of the place nor its surroundings were very pleasant, particularly in hot weather. On one side was a slimy bog, and on the other rubbish heaps and sinks of offal. Notwithstanding, it was home to them, and from their filthy quarters they might be seen emerging on Sundays, the men washed and clean-shirted, and the women arrayed in smiling faces and bright-colored apparel. They could work and wallow patiently through the week provided they could enjoy a little recreation and fresh air on Sunday. Whenever a vessel arrived from a home port, the camping ground presented a lively appearance. Round the chief hut or tienda lounged dirty men in parti-colored serapes and round-crowned straw hats, smoking, drinking, and betting at monte. Most of these were either on their way to, or had lately returned from, the mines.

Walk Kearney street at night from California street to the Plaza. The shops are all closed, all but the saloons, mostly attended by a French or Spanish woman, and Cheap John auction stores, whose cries in husky voice and bad breath strive to roar above the jingling bells, before each door, where every one tries to ring down his neighbor. Passing along you step aside to avoid some reeling drunkard running into you, and as you approach the plaza, the blazing light from the thickly planted saloons glows in the thick, murky air without, and strains of mingled music from different bands fall upon the ear. Pouring in and out of temples dedicated to Bacchus and to Fortuna, are crowds of people of every hue, and tongue, and character under heaven.

Building in the autumn of 1853 was active, and the structures were of a much more durable character than was the custom to rear hitherto. Most of the

STYLE AND QUALITY OF BUILDINGS.

263

houses for business purposes, both in the cities and in county towns, and mining camps, were of brick, not high but well built. In San Francisco even private dwellings were many of them of brick, but owing to the rains of winter and the fogs of summer brick residences were never popular. A few years later, after having thoroughly tested them, no one built dwellings of brick; there are now wooden dwellings in San Francisco which cost the owners to build $300,000, and not a single fine residence of brick or stone can be found in the city. It is not the cold or dampness, for brick buildings can be made as warm and dry as frame, though this climate does not require very warm houses. San Franciscans do not care to have their houses too warm; nor with all the fogs and rains is it considered a very damp climate. The fear of earthquakes at one time exercised the strongest influence against brick dwellings; this, while there was no existing necessity for them, and they were in addition more costly, and plainer, with fewer facilities for elaborate ornamentation which characterizes modern private houses in this country, caused a prejudice against them to spring up, and the fashion for frame houses was formed, which still remains. At one time, however, there was quite a movement in the direction of brick dwellings of a plain but comfortable character, some of which may yet be seen at North Beach, South Park, and scattered at intermediate points. Montgomery Block, by Halleck, Peachy, and Billings was the largest building of the season.

"I can well remember," says William Van Voorhies, in an address before the California Pioneers, on the 9th of September, 1853, "and I am not by many years one of the 'oldest inhabitants,' when the bay of San Francisco afforded ample room and verge enough for the easy and unobstructed passage of the largest class mail steamers anywhere between Clark and Rincon points; when one could make one's way from the summit of Telegraph hill to the old Parker

house by winding down its bare sides, now Broadway and Pacific streets, and leaping the slough, now Jackson street, wading through the bay, now Montgomery street, up a sand bank, now Washington street, to an open space, now Kearney street and the Plaza, thence fifty paces south to the point of destination. I can well remember, also, when an unobtrusive casa, compared with the immense structures which now rise heavenward here and there at magnificent distances, was all that, in the way of internal, or for that matter, external improvements, met the eye; when the Parker house, the old Portsmouth house, the United States hotel, Howard's store, the venerable adobe on the Plaza, then a custom-house, afterwards a broker's shop, and now no more, with one or two other shanties, looked to us immigrants of '49 like palaces; when seraped natives chased the wild bullock over the surrounding hills, satisfying a lean lank traffic, not commerce, with the offering of a hide or horn; when a Chinese was a lusus naturæ, and a woman on the street-which was an imaginary line drawn in red and blue ink on paste-board-an absolute and unmitigated wonder."

Without

The pile-driver, both the man and the machine, was an institution of San Francisco's babyhood. the driving of piles, the water-lots of the cove could not be reclaimed, and without their reclamation ownership was of little avail. The manner of it was in this wise from one end of a lumbering scow rose, high in the air, two perpendicular beams, between which played a large lump of iron. A primitive steamengine, standing back of the upright beams, drove the machinery. On or near the spot destined to be reclaimed floated hundreds of piles, that is, young trees, from twelve to eighteen inches in diameter, cut thirty or forty feet in length, carefully trimmed and sharpened at one end. With its claws, which were attached to the end of a chain, the machine seized one of these floating logs near the large end, and with a wheezing

« PrejšnjaNaprej »