The City That Was | Page 6

very top,
a colony of artists lived in little villas of houses whose windows got the
whole panorama of the bay. Luckily for these people, a cable car scaled
the hill on the other side, so that it was not much of a climb to home.
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 through the Golden
Gate entered China, Japan, the South Sea Islands, Lower California, the
west coast of Central America, Australia. 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 after sharks' livers; an old whaler,
which seemed to drip oil, home from a year of cruising in the Arctic.
Even the tramp windjammers were deep-chested craft, capable of
rounding the Horn or of circumnavigating the globe; and they came in
streaked and picturesque from their long voyaging.
In the orange colored dawn which always comes through the mists of
that bay, the fishing fleet would crawl in under triangular lateen sails;
for the fishermen of San Francisco Bay are all Neapolitans who have
brought their customs and sail with lateen rigs stained an orange brown
and shaped, when the wind fills them, like the ear of a horse.
Along the waterfront the people of these craft met. "The smelting pot of
the races," Stevenson called it; and this was always the city of his soul.
There were black Gilbert Islanders, almost indistinguishable from
negroes; lighter Kanakas from Hawaii or Samoa; Lascars in turbans;
thickset Russian sailors, wild Chinese with unbraided hair; Italian
fishermen in tam o' shanters, loud shirts and blue sashes; Greeks,
Alaska Indians, little bay Spanish-Americans, together with men of all
the European races. These came in and out from among the queer craft,
to lose themselves in the disreputable, tumble-down, but always
mysterious shanties and small saloons. In the back rooms of these
saloons South Sea Island traders and captains, fresh from the lands of
romance, whaling masters, people who were trying to get up treasure
expeditions, filibusters, Alaskan miners, used to meet and trade
adventures.
There was another element, less picturesque and equally characteristic,
along the waterfront. San Francisco was the back eddy of European
civilization - one end of the world. The drifters came there and stopped,
lingered a while to live by their wits in a country where living after a

fashion has always been marvellously cheap. These people haunted the
waterfront and the Barbary Coast by night, and lay by day on the grass
in Portsmouth Square.
The square, the old plaza about which the city was built, Spanish
fashion, had seen many things. There in the first burst of the early days
the vigilance committee used to hold its hangings. There, in the time of
the sand lot troubles, Dennis Kearney, who nearly pulled the town
down about his ears, used to make his orations which set the unruly to
rioting. In later years Chinatown lay on one side of it and the Latin
quarter and the "Barbary Coast" on the other.
On this square the drifters lay all day long and told strange yams.
Stevenson lounged there with them in his time and learned the things
which he wove into "The Wrecker" and his South Sea stories; and now
in the centre of the square there stands the beautiful Stevenson
monument. In later years the authorities put up a municipal building on
one side of this square and prevented the loungers, for decency's sake,
from lying on the grass. Since then some of the peculiar character of
the old plaza has gone.
The Barbary Coast was a loud bit of hell. No one knows who coined
the name. The place was simply three blocks of solid dance halls, there
for the delight of the sailors of the world. On a fine busy night every
door blared loud dance music from orchestras, steam pianos and
gramaphones, and the cumulative effect of the sound which reached the
street was chaos and pandemonium. Almost anything might be
happening behind the swinging doors. For a fine and picturesque
bundle of names characteristic of the place, a police story of three or
four years ago is typical. Hell broke out in the Eye Wink Dance Hall.