Some Cities San Fran. Resurgam | Page 3

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Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam
By Hubert Howe Bancroft
Some Cities and San Francisco
There had been some discussion as to improving and beautifying the
city of San Francisco prior to the catastrophe of April 18th. Landscape
architects had been consulted, proposals considered, and preliminary
plans drawn. Therefore when on that day the city was swept by fire,
obviously it was the opportune moment for the requisite changes in the
rebuilding. For a brief period enthusiasm waxed warm. It helped to
mitigate the blow, this fencing with fate. Let the earth shake, and fires
burn, we will have here our city, better and more beautiful than
ever-and more valuable-an imperial city of steel it shall be, and thus
will we get even with the misfortunes of this day.
Reform in the rebuilding was needed, whatever should be the scale of
beauty or utility decided upon. Fifty years ago the elevating influences
of tasteful environment were not so highly appreciated as now, and all
large cities are fifty years old or more. All large cities, as a rule, had
their beginning with narrow, crooked streets and mean houses. In
Europe and Asia there are aggregations of humanity whose domiciles
have remained unchanged, one might almost say uncleansed, for
hundreds or thousands of years, or ever since their mythical beginning,
save only for the covering of the debris of dead centuries.
These ancient towns, mostly offspring of feudalism, begun under castle
walls and continued after walls and castle had crumbled, as their area
enlarged, with some improvement, perhaps, in the suburban parts, still
retained this patch of mediaevalism, until obliterated by war, or fire, or
later by modern progress. Look at Edinburgh, for example. With all its
Scotch thrift and neatness, there yet remains the ill-conditioned and
once filthy quarter, beside which rise the old-time ten-story houses
built into the hillside, while in the modern part of the city in sharp
contrast are broad streets and open squares and fine buildings.

In America the birth of towns is quite different. Here are no plantings
of trembling poverty under lordly walls, but bold pioneering,
forecasting agriculture and commerce; no Babel building, with "Go to,
let us build here a Cleveland or a Cincinnati," but rather, "Here for the
present we will abide." If, however, serfdom and mediaevalism were
absent in New World town-planting, so also were aestheticism or any
appreciation of the beautiful apart from the useful. Old cities require
reconstruction to make them what modern taste and intelligence
demand; settlements in their incipiency are dominated by their sturdy
founders, who usually have other things to think about than beauty and
adornment.
In this day