Some Cities San Fran. Resurgam | Page 5

is the mother of many cities, directing the destiny of
nations, from the Iron Gate to the Golden Horn. Vienna has been made
brilliantly modern since 1858. Beside the sufferings of Constantinople
our little calamity seems tame. Seven times during the last half century
the city has been swept by fire, not to mention earthquakes, or
pestilence, which on one occasion took with it three hundred thousand
lives. Yet all the while it grows in magnificence faster than the
invisible enemies of Mohammed can destroy it. But for these purifying
fires the city would still be one of narrow, filthy streets and vile smells,
reeking with malaria. The Golden Horn of the Bosporus possesses no
greater natural advantages than the Golden Gate of San Francisco, nor
even so great. The industrial potentialities of the former are not to be
compared with those of the latter, while for healthful airs and charming
environment we have all that earth can give, and therewith should be
content.
Cities have been made as the marquis of Bute made Cardiff, by
constructing a dock, and ship canal, and converting the ancient castle
into a modern palace. Many towns have been started as railway stations,
but few of them attained importance. Steamboat landings have been
more fortunate. Some cities owe their origin to war, some to commerce,
and not a few to manufactures. Fanaticism has played a part, as in India
and parts of Africa, where are nestings of half-savage humanity with a
touch of the heavenly in the air. Less disciplined are these than
zion-towns, but nearer the happiness of insensibility-the white-marbled
and jeweled Taj Mahal, Agra on the Jumna, and Delhi, making
immortal Jehan the builder, with his pearl mosque and palace housing
the thirty-million-dollar peacock throne; Benares, on the Ganges, a
series of terraces and long stone steps extending upward from the holy
water, while rising yet higher in the background are temples, towers,
mosques, and palaces, all in oriental splendor. Algiers, likewise, an

amphitheatre in form, might give San Francisco lessons in terrace
construction, having hillsides covered with them, the scene made yet
more striking by the dazzling white of the houses. After the place
became French, the streets were widened and arcades established in the
lower part.
In fact, the French believe in the utility of beauty, and in Paris at least
they make it pay. The entire expenses of the municipal government,
including police and public works, are met by the spendings of visitors.
To their dissolute monarchs were due such creations as the Tuileries,
the Louvre, and Versailles. Have we not dissolute millionaires enough
to give us at least one fine city?
London and Paris stand out in bold contrast, the one for utility, the
other for beauty. Both are adepts in their respective arts. The city
proper of London has better buildings and cleaner streets than when St.
Paul was erected; otherwise it is much the same. Elsewhere in London,
however, are spacious parks and imposing palaces, with now and then a
fine bit of something to look out upon, as the bridges of the murky
Thames, the Parliament houses, the Abbey, Somerset house, and
Piccadilly, perhaps. Children may play at the Zoo, while grown-ups sit
in hired chairs under the trees.
Three times London was destroyed by the plague, and five times by fire,
that of 1666 lasting four days, and covering thrice the area of the San
Francisco conflagration; yet it was rebuilt better than before in three
and a half years. Always the city is improved in the rebuilding; how
much, depends upon the intelligence and enterprise of the people.
Paris is brilliant with everything that takes the eye-palaces, arches, Bon
Marche shops, arcades, colonnades, great open spaces adorned with
statues, forest parks, elysian driveways, and broad boulevards cut
through mediaeval quarters in every direction, as well for air as for
protection from the canaille blockaded in the narrow streets. San
Francisco may have some canaille of her own to boast of one of these
days; canaille engendered from the scum of Europe and Asia, and
educated at our expense for our destruction. Over and over, these two
cities, each a world metropolis, have been renovated and reconstructed,
the work in fact going on continuously.
For some of the most effective of our urban elaborations we must go
back to the first of city builders of whom we have knowledge. The

Assyrians made terraces, nature teaching them. On the level plain
building ground was raised forty feet for effect. Like all artists of
precivilization, the Assyrians placed adornment before convenience, as
appeared in Nineveh on the Tigris and Babylon on the Euphrates. At
Thebes and Palmyra it was the same, their palaces of alabaster, if one
chooses to believe what is said, covering, some of them, a