USA > California > San Francisco County > San Francisco > A history of the city of San Francisco; and incidentally of the state of California > Part 27
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1
greatly embarrassed by the drought of 1877), $400,000. The value of the estates of D. D. Colton and Wm. Watt has not been published. All these men were poor when they arrived in California; all were men of rare business capacity and industry, save O'Brien, and he was a general favorite among his acquaintance; all had the reputation of keeping their contracts; and all were public spirited save Reese, though he was liberal enough to purchase Francis Lieber's library at a cost. of $3,000 for the State University. The loss of so many millionaires by a city of three hundred thousand inhabitants, within a year, is an evidence that the claim of exceptional abundance of that class of popu- lation has much foundation.
SEC. 227. Eighteen Years. The distinguishing feature of The Silver Era, the period from the begin- ning of 1861 till the present time, has been the in- fluence of the mines of Nevada, which, by their divi- dends and the selling of their shares in the stock boards, have done much to enrich San Francisco, and give character to her business. No other product of her tributary area is equal in value, or belongs to her so much as the silver. The wheat, gold, wool, wine. and fruit must yield precedence to the metal of the Comstock. By the boldness with which she invested her capital, and her power in attracting those who had made fortunes elsewhere without her help, she became the owner of nearly everything worth owning in the silver mines, which were then worked mainly for her benefit. Three great "pay chutes," as they
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are styled by the miners, each containing several large and distinct but related masses of rich ore, were found and worked out with an energy, skill and ex- cellence of mechanical appliances, to which the great mining industry of Potosí, Cerro Pasco, Guanajuato and Zacatecas had made no approach. The first of these pay chutes to be exhausted so far, commencing at the surface in the Gould and Curry mine, and run- ning downwards and southwards, through the Savage and Hale and Norcross, yielded $40,000,000 gross before 1869. The second in the order of date of ex- haustion, beginning at the surface in what is now the Consolidated Imperial, and running southwards and downwards through the Yellow Jacket, Kentuck, Crown Point and Belcher, yielded $90,000,000 before 1874. The third and greatest pay chute so far worked made its appearance in the Ophir at the surface, and after having been lost for more than ten years was again struck three hundred yards distant in the Consolidated Virginia, and has yielded $110,- 000,000. The bottom of the ore body in this pay chute has not been reached, and the miners are search- ing for new ore bodies in each of the others. In the summer of 1878 a body of rich ore was found in the Sierra Nevada, and is supposed to be the beginning of a new bonanza, and of a still larger production of bullion. The average annual yield of the silver mines for the five years preceding July, 1878, was $35,000,000; the dividends more than half as much, the assessments half as much as the. dividends, the
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average daily fluctuations several millions, and the average annual sales in the mining stock boards, $200,000,000. Most of the San Franciscans are in- tensely interested in the rise and fall of the silver stocks, while relatively few read the market reports of the sales of wheat.
The speculation in mining shares became the most prominent business in San Francisco, and as a field for the investment of money had more frequent and greater fluctuations than those of any other stock market, making and marring many fortunes in a day. The excitement is more attractive than that of the gambling table, because it is accompanied by the pro- duction of immense quantities of bullion, and there are times when the opening of new ore bodies add to the national wealth, and enable buyer and seller alike to make good profits on their transactions.
The district south of the line of Bush street gained fifteen or twenty fold; Kearny and Market streets rose from relative insignificance to leading positions in retail business; and California near Montgomery became the chief center of the money market. The construction of eight street railroads gave cheap and speedy access to the suburbs, and added five perhaps ten times as much as their cost to the value of the land in the city, giving to extensive districts, previ- ously suburban, an urban character. The concentra- tion of street railroad terminations at the end of Market street, the slips there enabling ferry-boats to make quick landings, the half-hourly trips across the
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bay, the reduction of the single fares to fifteen cents, the sale of commutation tickets, and the construc- tion of the wharf, the steam railroads, the street rail- roads, and the artificial harbor at Oakland, contributed to raise that town to a city of forty thousand inhabit- ants, in very intimate suburban relations with the metropolis.
The population of the state had increased to 850,000 in 1878, and the annual gain since 1860 was not less than ten per cent., or more than three times as much as the average gain in the United States. After a large part of the damage done by refusing to sell the federal land in the mineral regions had become irrep- arable, the policy was modified, without, however, enabling settlers to acquire titles under the same lib- eral conditions as in the agricultural districts. As the gold yield declined, many of the miners became farm- ers, and others discouraged by the high expense of transporting their grain and fruit to market, moved from the Sierra Nevada to the valleys and coast mount- ains. The counties near San Francisco and those on the southern coast, attracted most of the new settlers. California ceased to be mainly a money-making resort, and became a health and pleasure resort. As the "Westminister Review" said, after having been the treasury, she became the garden of the world. The enterprise of her inhabitants, the activity of her busi- ness, the fertility of her soil, and the genial warmth of her climate, enabled her to make her valleys bloom suddenly with most beautiful and luxuriant perennial
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verdure. Her markets had the most abundant and varied supply of home-grown fruit to be found any- where. The resources of the state were carefully studied; the geology, botany, zoology, meteorology and scenery, were diligently compared with those of other countries, explained in comprehensive books, and made the subject of frequent comment in the public journals. The construction of two thousand miles of railroad within her borders, the completion of the iron track across the continent, the establishment of lines of steamers to China and Australia, contributed vastly to her trade, prosperity and population.
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HISTORY OF SAN FRANCISCO.
CHAPTER VII.
GENERALITIES.
SECTION 228. Natural Site. The site of San Fran- cisco has been changed wonderfully within thirty years. In 1846 the only place apparently suitable for town purposes was an area of perhaps forty acres surrounding Portsmouth square. Elsewhere no considerable expanse of land level or nearly level was to be found without going to the presidio in one direction, or the Mission in the other. Hill and ravine, chaparral and sand, high rocky bluff, mud flat and swamp, covered thousands of acres now densely populated, and seeming by their flat or gently sloping surface to have been admirably fitted by nature to be the heart of a great city. But the hand of art is hidden in this vast plain. Eastward from the line of First street, between Folsom and Broadway, are three hundred and twenty acres now covered by houses occupied for purposes of commerce and manufactures, but in 1848 occupied by the anchorage of Yerba Buena cove. North of Broadway, including North Beach, there are forty acres, and south of Folsom street, includ- ing part of Mission cove, there are one hundred and fifty acres of ground made in the bay. A swamp head- ing near the corner of Mission and Seventh streets ran for a mile eastward to the bay, with an average width of three hundred yards, and a parallel marsh, not so wide, had its head near the crossing of Mission and Eightlı streets. These were called swamps; but they
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seem to have been for part of their area at least, subter- ranean lakes, from forty to eighty feet deep, covered by a crust of peat eight or ten feet thick. These marshes, with another along the border of Mission creek, had an area of three hundred acres and are now filled in. About eight hundred acres that were swamp and bay in 1868 are now solid land, and are occupied for business purposes.
The peat in the marshes that had their heads near the site of the new city hall was strong enough to sustain a small house or a loaded wagon, though a man, by swing- ing himself from side to side, or by jumping upon it, could give it a perceptible shiver. There were weak places in it, however, and a cow which in searching for sweet pasture undertook to jump from one hard spot to what appeared to be another, made a mistake, for it gave way under her, and a gentleman hunting near by was surprised to see her go down, and still more to observe that she did not come up again. A puddle of muddy water was all that remained to indicate her burial place. After that the hunter did not jump about in the swamp so boldly as before. Many ludicrous scenes occurred in filling up the swamps. When streets were first made the weight of the sand pressed the peat down, so that the water stood where the surface was dry before. Some- times the sand broke through, carrying down the peat under it, leaving nothing but water or thin mud near the surface. More than once a contractor had put on enough sand to raise the street to the official grade, and gave notice to the city engineer to inspect the work, but
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in the lapse of a day between the notice and inspection, the sand had sunk down six or eight feet; and, when at last a permanent bottom had been reached, the heavy sand had crowded under the light peat at the sides of the street and lifted it up eight or ten feet above its original level, in muddy ridges full of hideous cracks. Not only was the peat crowded up by the sand in this way, but it was also pushed sidewise, so that houses and fences built upon it were carried away from their orig- inal position and tilted up at singular angles by the up- heaval.
While San Francisco was unfortunate in having such wide areas of marsh and mud flat along her water front, she had some compensation in the possession of numer- ous and high sand hills. It having become evident that it would pay to fill in water lots, even when a man with a horse and cart was paid fifteen dollars per day, James Cunningham saw that here was the place for a steam shovel, or steam paddy, as it was commonly termed. This was a scoop which at one move would dig up a cubic yard of sand or gravel (equivalent to a ton and a half in weight, and nearly twice as much as could be hauled by a single horse in a cart), then swing it round by a crane over a railway car into which the load was discharged. The steam paddy was at work from 1852 till 1854, and from 1859 till 1873 almost constantly, sometimes moving two thousand five hundred tons in a day, and for a while two were employed.
The steam shovel could not work anywhere save in sand, but there were five thousand acres of it that
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needed leveling, though over a considerable part of this area the work could be done more cheaply with horse and cart. The steam paddy could not be used with ad- vantage unless the sand was to be carried a considerable distance. Market street, for half a mile from the water, was a wide ridge of sand, part of the way sixty feet above the present level, and nothing but the steam paddy and railroad could have moved it without ruinous ex- pense.
SEC. 229. Grades. In 1850, under urgent pressure from citizens who wanted to build and needed some offi- cial guidance for fixing the level of their houses, the city council, without ordering any careful study of the city's topography or future interests, adopted grades for the most busy streets, and under this order, Montgomery, from Pine to Pacific; Kearny, from Sutter to Pacific; Dupont, from Clay to Broadway; Stockton, from Clay to North Beach, and Powell, from Broadway to North Beach, were graded at various times from 1850 to 1853. Most of these streets, as well as the cross streets from Commercial to Broadway inclusive, were planked soon after the grading was finished. Oregon fir planks, three or four inches thick, furnished a cheap material for a smooth and strong road-bed that could be put down quickly at little expense, and taken up readily whenever, as frequently happened, any digging in the street was necessary; and though not permanent, still it could be replaced at the end of five years for less than the inter- est on the extra cost of any stone pavement.
If the shore line had remained where it was in 1850,
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the grade then adopted would have been sufficient; but the filling in of Yerba Buena cove, and the pushing of the water front from near its natural position between Montgomery and Sansome on Clay to a place a thou- sand feet farther east, made it necessary, for purposes of drainage, to raise the levels of many of the streets as first established. In 1853, the city council under- took to provide for the future by a comprehensive sys- tem, and employed Milo Hoadley and W. P. Hum- phreys to prepare a system of grades. The table pre- sented by them was adopted by the council on the twenty-sixth of August; and though changed afterwards in many minor points, it was well devised, for the greater part of the area which it covered, and especially in what was then the business part of the city, where there was general discontent because the levels were raised above the former official grades, in many places as much as five feet. This new grade of 1853 imposed a heavy expense upon those who had already built of brick, and so many citizens were dissatified that another board of engineers was organized to revise the table. The new board refused to alter "the Hoadley grades," as they were called, in those places where they most seriously affected the value of buildings. On the hills great changes were made by the new board. Hoadley had proposed more cutting of rock than the lot-owners could afford. He required the removal of one hundred and thirty-nine vertical feet at the intersection of Mont- gomery and Union streets, and one hundred and thirty- three feet at the crossing of Kearny and Greenwich.
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The summit of Telegraph hill, in the middle of the block bounded by Filbert, Greenwich, Kearny and Mont- gomery streets, would have to be cut down two hundred feet to bring it to the level of the surrounding streets. The lots there were then worth about ten cents a square foot, and the grading, as proposed by Hoadley, would cost from three to six dollars per square foot. It was his idea that this work would be done in the course of years, and that the rock taken from the hill would be in demand for filling water lots and for ballast. It was then considered especially important to provide ballast, for ships came full and went away empty, and the time when they would come empty and go away full, as they now do, was considered too remote for any business cal- culation. The new board of engineers was however not entirely adverse to deep cutting, for it required an excavation on Sansome street of forty feet at Vallejo, one hundred and twenty at Green, thirty-four at Union, and fifty-six at Filbert. The grades thus recommended were accepted by the council, and have with slight changes been adhered to since, though after a lapse of more than twenty years Sansome street has not yet been cut through the base of Telegraph hill on the modified grade.
SEC. 230. Amount of Grading. No official table shows the amount of grading actually done. The depth of the cutting was calculated from the center of the street crossing, which was in many places on a steep hill-side. The council determined the grades of the streets, and the lot-owners, for their own convenience,
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were compelled to put their lots on the same level with the street in front of them. About one fourth of the area was in streets. We may assume that the present level of three thousand acres is on the average nine feet above or below the natural surface of the ground, and these figures imply the transfer of twenty-one million cubic yards from hill to hollow.
A necessary result of the change of grade after houses had been erected, was that they had to be adapted to the new level. In some cases, new stories were put under or upon old houses, which, though only one or two stories high when first built, are three or four stories high now. In the business part of the city, a large pro- portion of the houses were raised to conform to the Hoadley grade, and as many of them were large struct- ures of brick, this raising was no small undertaking. A machine based on the principle of the hydraulic press, for lifting up houses, was invented and used for raising about nine hundred brick houses in San Francisco, one of them covering an area of one hundred and thirty- seven and one half feet square.
SEC. 231. Sources of Buildings. Common rumor tells us of the sources of the money invested in many of the prominent buildings of San Francisco. The Crown Point and Belcher bonanza furnished Mr. Sharon with the means for becoming the owner of the Palace hotel. Baldwin's hotel was the result of lucky speculations in Ophir and Mexican stock. The Nevada block was built with bullion from the Consolidated Virginia. The two buildings on the eastern corners of Pine and Mont-
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gomery grew out of the Gould and Curry and Savage bonanza. Three brothers, who had worked the Sierra Buttes gold quartz mine with success, became proprietors of the Cosmopolitan hotel. Hayward's building at No. 419 California street, was built with the profits of the Hayward gold quartz mine at Sutter creek. Pierce's building at No. 317 California street was washed out of the blue gravel hydraulic claim at Smartsville. Watts's building on the south-east corner of Clay and Kearny was stamped out of the auriferous quartz of the Eureka mine at Grass Valley. The large wooden building on the north-west corner of Stockton and O'Farrell, was built with money saved from the Plato mine, now part of the Consolidated Imperial. The foundation for the Occi- dental hotel was laid in the first foundry established in San Francisco. The Nucleus building, on the east cor- ner of Market and Third, was, if not made out of the profits of the first steam-shovel, at least built by its im- porter, who did a large part of the grading of the city. The law firm of Halleck, Peachy & Billings obtained much of the money to pay for Montgomery Block out of their business as counsel in cases before the United States land commission. The rents from a couple of lots bought in 1847 by a private soldier in Stevenson's regi- ment for about thirty dollars, furnished the means for putting up the Russ House. The Lick House was in like manner the outgrowth of a small but fortunate in- vestment in town lots before the gold discovery. Fried- lander erected the building on the north-eastern corner of California and Sansome streets, out of the profits of
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wheat speculation. The Odd Fellows' Hall, on the north- west corner of Montgomery and Summer streets was built by J. W. Tucker, who had made his money out of a fashionable jewelry store, when great profits were charged in his business. Bancroft's building owes its existence to a large business in books and stationery. The house on the north-east corner of California and Leidesdorff streets was built by the Pacific insurance com- pany, which was bankrupted by the Chicago fire in 1871. Certain people had so much confidence in Stephen A. Wright, who had opened a shop as a banker, that they deposited one hundred and fifty thousand dollars with him in 1854, and he made a permanent investment for them by putting up the brick and granite building on the north-west corner of Montgomery and Jackson streets. So long as they did not demand their principal, all went well, but when the financial panic came in February, 1855, nothing was left for them-save the privilege of looking at the architectural pile which belonged to somebody else. The house of the Real Estate Associates, at 228 Montgomery, was made out of the profits of buy- ing land in large lots, dividing it up into small ones, putting houses on them, and selling them at a credit. The buildings of the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the Pacific Exchange are monuments of the passion of San Franciscans for taking the chances in wild specula- tion. The houses at 400 and 420 Montgomery street were erected by Samuel Brannan in 1853 out of profits of real estate investments, and were then considered ornaments of the city and.signal evidences of confidence
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in her future prosperity and importance. W. T. Sher- man brought the capital from St. Louis to build the house on the north-east corner of Montgomery and Jack- son for the bank of Lucas, Turner & Co., of which he was the manager. The Mercantile Library building was paid for by a grand lottery, authorized by statute in violation of the constitution, but no worse in prin- ciple, though larger in scale, than the raffles frequently held at church fairs. The Central Pacific railroad com- pany built the house on the north corner of Fourth and Townsend streets; and four of the residence palaces on California street, not far from Mason, were built by di- rectors of the same company, in which three of them accumulated nearly all their wealth. On Taylor street, between Washington and Clay are a couple of magnifi- cent dwellings built out of profits on money managed with capacity. The buildings erected by associated cap- ital, such as those of banking and charitable institutions are numerous.
SEC. 232. The Press. After the return of its editor from the mines, whither they went in the first excite- ment, the "Californian " resumed publication on the fif- teenth of August, 1848, and having been consolidated with the "Star," appeared on the eighteenth of Novem- ber as the "Star and Californian." On the fourth of January, 1849, it changed its name to the " Alta Cali- fornia." It was published as a weekly till December 10, then appeared three times a week, and on the twenty- second of January became a daily, anticipating a rival which appeared as a daily on the twenty-third. In
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1851 the "Herald," and in 1854 the "Chronicle," took considerable shares of business from the " Alta," but both lost much of their favor with the public in May, 1856, because they did not sustain the movement for a vigilance committee, and both of them died in conse- quence of the losses then sustained, while the "Alta," by advocating the popular side, became very profitable. The " Bulletin " began on the eighth of October, 1855, speedily gained a large circulation, and has enjoyed a steady prosperity ever since. The "Morning Call" was founded on the first of December, 1856, as the first permanent cheap daily journal. The present "Chronicle," not related in any manner to the old " Chron- icle" which died in 1858, appeared as an advertising sheet for the theaters in 1865, and having been success- ful for three years was developed into a general news- paper. The "Examiner" dates from 1862, and the "Evening Post" from 1871. These are the daily English journals devoted to general news that have sur- vived; and there are besides more than a score of others, weekly, or devoted to special branches of business, or foreign-German, French, Italian, Scandinavian, Span- ish, Chinese; and not less than two hundred have started and expired. In ability, learning, careful editing, and enterprise in collecting news, the San Francisco press compares not unfavorably with that of other American cities.
SEC. 233. Amusements. San Francisco has devoted a considerable share of her attention to the pursuit of pleasure. The greater part of the territory of which
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she is the metropolis is poor in resources for enjoyment. Large areas in Nevada, Arizona, Southern California, Oregon and Idaho are occupied by deserts; western Ore- gon and Washington are enveloped for much of the year in rain or mist; the mining counties of California are declining as their placers are exhausted; the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys suffer with intense heat in the summer, and have not been satisfactorily protected against flood and drought. Partly for these reasons, most of the luxury of the slope has collected in and about San Francisco. The people from the wide region between the British and Mexican lines west of the Rocky mountains have come hither for twenty years to seek compensation for the toils and privations of frontier life, and have contributed much to refine and enrich the city. From early times the theaters have been large, good, and relatively numerous. Celebrated actors and singers came half around the world to share the golden harvest of California. The chill temperature of the evenings throughout the year stimulated dancing, which is more common in San Francisco than in any other city. The German, French, and Italian population cach contributed features of its own to the general character. Concerts, masquerades, picnics, processions, and excur- sions were frequent.
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