USA > California > San Francisco County > San Francisco > San Francisco and thereabout > Part 5
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
The city schools differ in no material respect from those of other American cities of corresponding pop- ulation. There are a number of manual training and industrial schools, notably the Wilmerding, the Lick School of Mechanical Arts, the Polytechnic High and the Cogswell Schools. There are three academic high schools, the Lowell, Mission and Girls', each sending annually many graduates to the University. A feature of the school department is the salaried School Board, consisting of men who devote themselves exclusively to the work, and who, in connection with the Superin-
52
SAN FRANCISCO AND . THEREABOUT
tendent of Schools, conduct all the public educational affairs of the city.
The museums of San Francisco are nearly all in an early stage of development. The largest is in Golden Gate Park, a gift of the Commissioners of the Midwinter Fair and is especially rich in archeology. The California Academy of Sciences maintains a free museum of natural history in its building on Market Street and has the most complete extant herbarium and study collection of birds of the Pacific Coast. This institution also gives monthly popular lectures on scientific subjects which are largely attended. Its printed proceedings are recognized among the im- portant contributions to science, and have an inter- national reputation. As one of the residuary legatees of the Lick estate, the Academy has an assured income, although not sufficient to properly carry on all its activities. The University of California maintains in the Ferry Building a small but interesting collection of Alaskan ethnology, most of which was presented to it by the Alaska Commercial Company. The same building also contains the mineralogical museum of the State Mining Bureau, and the agricultural and horticultural exhibitions of the State Board of Trade which has for many years undertaken to make the resources of California more widely known. The Pacific Commercial Museum, recently organized, also has its headquarters in the Ferry Building where it is installing a collection of the commercial products of the countries of the Pacific Ocean. Its work is out- lined somewhat on the plans of the Philadelphia Com- mercial Museum, and it aims to keep the merchants of San Francisco in touch with trade openings and developments in foreign countries.
Of local libraries but a passing word need be said. The large Public Library is temporarily quartered in the City Hall, while the Mechanics' Library, especially popular on account of its location near the business and shopping centers, has a building totally inadequate to
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY TIBBETS
TRINITY CHURCH.
.
53
HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
its needs. Plans are already maturing for a new build- ing. The Mercantile completes the list of general public or semi-public libraries. The Sutro Library is a wonderful repository containing many priceless illuminated codices, incunabula and other rare old editions, but it is at present stored where it is inacces- sible to the public. The Academy of Sciences has a valuable working library of scientific books, its collec- tion of journals and proceedings of other societies being especially noteworthy. The employees of Wells, Fargo and Company have an excellent circulating library and the Bohemian Club has a choice and well selected collection of books for its members.
The above somewhat dry review of the institutions of San Francisco seems essential to a proper under- standing of the city life of today. The present period of growth, the awakening of the city to new opportun- ities and new responsibilities, will no doubt lead to an enlargement of the various institutions of civic life. The nucleus of all good things is here and with the support and encouragement which is bound to follow the present wave of progress, there is no reason why libraries, museums, art galleries and all civic institu- tions for the advance of civilization and the betterment of humanity should not grow to their just proportions in the community.
THE BARBARY COAST
A GROUP of sailor men stood in the doorway of an outfitting store, talk- ing in loud thick voices. "You're just a good-for-nothing coot," cried one brawny fisted sea dog to a companion disappearing around the corner. The dim lights shone feebly down the dark street. Arc lamps on the docks illuminated the rigging of the many masts along shore. On the window of a saloony-looking restaurant was painted "Sanguinetti's," and three Bohemians doing the Barbary Coast entered. The master of ceremo- nies stood behind his counter-red-faced, bullet- headed, bull-necked, with one eye gone and the other betwixt a leer and a twinkle. He was in his shirt sleeves with a sort of apron tucked about his ample form. Two darkies strummed a banjo and guitar, singing the while hilarious coon songs. We stepped noiselessly over the sawdust floor to a table at one side and ordered clam chowder, spaghetti, chicken with garlic sauce, and rum omelette, with Italian entrées and a bottle of water-front claret for good cheer.
A buxom middle-aged lass of heroic build was so affected by the strenuous twanging of Old Black Joe that she got up and danced. Everybody joined in the songs; everybody talked to his or her neighbors, sans ceremony. There was an ex-policeman present with his best girl, the captain of a bay schooner, a tenderloin politician or two, and several misses who scarcely looked like school marms as they warbled coon songs and sipped maraschino.
After dining, we dropped into "Lucchetti's" next
MONTE
ALONG THE WATERFRONT.
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH SY TIBBETS
55
THE BARBARY COAST
door, where it is the custom to lead your partner through the mazes of the waltz when dinner is over and before going uptown to see the marionette show. One feels safer on the streets of this quarter at night when he elbows a good companion. No doubt there is no danger, but stories of sand-baggers, and of board- ing masters armed with hose pipe and knock-out drops for shanghaiing luckless wayfarers and smuggling them off to some deep-water ship outward bound, will crop up in the mind of the lonely pedestrian.
By day, the waterfront is a scene of romantic in- terest. Every weatherbeaten vagabond who walks the street is itching to tell you stories of the ends of the earth. Every grimy grog shop has its quota of yarn spinners who like nothing better than an excuse to talk and tipple from morn to dewy eve. Go where you will along those miles of docks, an endless rim of shipping reminds you of the lands across the sea; and every wedding guest is in the clutches of some ancient mariner.
Schooners with five masts all of a size, and with scanty upper rigging, are discharging pine from Puget Sound. English steel ships deep laden with coal from Wellington lie alongside the wharves. Yonder is a clumsy old square Sacramento River steamer with stern paddle wheel and double smokestacks. A rak- ish brig from the South Sea Islands crowds up along- side of a stumpy little green flat bottom sloop which plies on the bay.
Sparrows chatter on the dusty wharf and scarcely budge for the heavy dray, drawn by ponderous Nor- man horses that shake the planks beneath them as they thunder along. Donkey engines rattle and clat- ter at unloading coal into cars on bridges leading across the street to the huge grimy coal store-houses. Teamsters pass with big lumber trucks and wagons loaded with sacks of grain. A group of heavy-set, stolid coal passers shuffles by. Idle beach combers and wharf rats with sooty faces lounge on lumber piles and stare vacantly at the scene.
56
SAN FRANCISCO AND THEREABOUT
A vista through the shipping shows the steely blue water of the bay with a lavender-gray background of fog. There is a medley of schooners, scows, ten- ders and tugs along shore and a black, three-syksail Yankee clipper ship, the queen of them all, anchored out in the stream. A whirl of sawdust comes with the salt breeze; a tug toots as it passes, dock engines gasp and pant, vans rumble past, and thus commerce thrives on the grit of the waterfront.
Great grim steamers lie in narrow berths loading or discharging-the tramp from Liverpool, a Panama liner, monster boats for South America, a big black Australian mail ship and others for China or Japan. White transports with buff funnels striped with red, white and blue, tell of the Philippines. A steamer is just in from Nome with returning miners, and an- other is billed to sail in the afternoon for the inside passage to Alaska.
The most picturesque spot on the waterfront is Fisherman's Wharf. Here the Greek fishers moor their little decked boats rigged with graceful lateen sails. One must be up betimes to see them to advant- age, for the fisher folk are early birds. Their brown three-cornered sails may be seen dotting the bay at all hours, but the return of the fleet at sundown, like a flock of sea birds scudding on the wind to their roost, throws the spell of the Mediterranean over this far western haven. Although some years have elapsed, I still have vivid recollection of a conference at five in the morning with a captain and crew of one of these boats. The men were boozy and sleepy as we talked, in the little waterfront saloon, of our prospective trip to the Farallones, and they appeared so stupid that we had grave doubts concerning their ability to nav- igate a boat. We found the long double wharf crowded with perhaps a hundred fishing boats, pointed stem and stern, decked, and with their long cross booms on the masts making an unusual effect. A few bronzed fishermen in blue shirts, rubber hip boots, and
57
THE BARBARY COAST
bright sashes, were at work at the first peep of the sun, washing and hauling in a seine to dry or cleaning off the decks of their boats. The men proved to be skilled sailors despite the bad water-front whisky, and at the turn of the tide we sped away under a brisk head wind, bound out through the Golden Gate.
A CORNER OF CATHAY
A FEW blocks up Kearny Street from the corner of Market is a stretch of green popularly known as the Plaza, but officially designated Portsmouth Square. It lies upon the hill-slope to the west of Kearny, between Clay and Washington Streets, and its benches, scattered about under the greenery, are the receptacle for as motley an assembly of weather-beaten hulks of humanity as one is apt to chance upon in all San Francisco. The spot is teeming with memories of the early days. Here the American flag was first raised by Captain Montgomery of the sloop-of-war Portsmouth. Here the Vigilance Committee first took the law into its own hands. The Parker House, and afterward the Jenny Lind Theatre, stood on the site now occupied by the Hall of Justice, a fine new building with a clock tower, situated on Kearny Street just opposite the Plaza. In the days of '49 the town life centered about this square, and many public meetings of importance were held here during those intensely dramatic days.
Today Portsmouth Square is the lungs of China- town-the one breathing space in that strange Oriental city which crowds down upon the greenery of the lit- tle park. The graceful drinking fountain in its cen- ter, a memorial to Robert Louis Stevenson, reminds us that the genial story-teller was wont to linger here during some of his least happy days, and the little sermon upon the stone tablet is a perpetual inspira- tion for all outcasts of humanity who tarry before the quaint bronze symbol of a ship.
AN ALLEY IN CHINATOWN.
59
A CORNER OF CATHAY
Oh, that strange mysterious horde in the center of San Francisco, which is in the heart of the city and yet not of it, that packed mass of busy humanity, living in a civilization as ancient as the pyramids! look upon the silent procession of dark inscrutable faces with a feeling of awe. The settled content, the plodding self-reliance, the sense of antiquity over- shadows every countenance. Here is a fragment of one of the oldest and most conservative civilizations, grafted upon the newest and most radical. Certain innovations of up-to-date Americanism the Chinese have adopted. They have a telephone central station with native operators, and many of their buildings are illuminated with incandescent lamps, but these things are external and superficial. Two thousand years of arrested development is not conducive to a pliable mind. The Chinaman who uses the telephone, eats with chopsticks and goes before his joss with presents of food to propitiate the god and make his business prosper. His queue is as sacred to him as it was to his forefathers. He will run a sewing machine and drive a broken down plug hitched to a dilapidated laundry wagon, but when it comes to delivering vege- tables he swings two immense baskets from a pole across his shoulder, and runs mechanically along with a weight that would appall a white man.
The lover of the curious and the beautiful de- lights in the conservatism of the Chinese. Although their art as expressed in the handicrafts is not so grace- ful and spontaneous as that of the Japanese, it has a medieval quality, a frankness and simplicity com- bined with much dexterous handling and barbaric splendor, that makes it a vital expression, beside which our machine-made articles seem cheap and common- place.
The buildings of Chinatown are abandoned stores and dwellings of the white population, more or less made over by the addition of balconies and such other changes as the requirements or fancies of their
60
SAN FRANCISCO AND THEREABOUT
present owners may suggest. The restaurants and joss houses are particularly striking on account of their deep balconies, ornamented with carved wood- work brightly colored or gilded, and set off with im- mense lanterns and with big plants in china pots. About whatever these strange people do there is an elusive, indefinable touch, which is distinctively racial and picturesque. It may be nothing more than the bright splashes of long narrow strips of paper pasted upon buildings with inscriptions in the curious per- pendicular lettering of the people, but it serves at once to create an atmosphere.
Along Dupont Street, a block west of Kearny, the bazaars center, and many of them have marvelous displays of beautiful bric-a-brac. Silks, embroideries, carved ivories, antique lanterns and bronzes, orna- mented lacquer ware, hammered brasses, carved teak- wood chairs and tables, camphor-wood chests, sandal- wood boxes and fans, and chinaware of exquisite work- manship-cloisonné, Satsuma, Canton ware, and a bewildering variety of other gorgeous things make up the stock of these places. Spectacled merchants figure with the aid of the abacus and keep accounts by writ- ing in brown paper books with pointed brushes.
The crowd which passes along the street is prob- ably the most unusual to the average American of any within the confines of the United States. How the throng scuffles along in its thick-soled felted shoes, dark-visaged and blue cloaked! At first the almond- eyed, sallow-faced multitude looks like an undiffer- entiated mass of humanity, and the stranger despairs of finding any points in which one man varies from his neighbor. But as the type grows familiar the individual characteristics become more marked. A quaint little roly-poly woman passes, her black shiny hair brushed back over the tops of her ears and neatly rolled up in a knot on the back of her head, richly ornamented with a hammered gold clasp. Great pendant earrings of jade sway as she steps along on
61
A CORNER OF CATHAY
her high rocker shoes. Her loose black pantaloons show below the shiny black gown that comes to her knees or a trifle below. With her is a little boy who seems as if he belonged in a colored picture book of the days of Aladdin. His mild face looks like a full moon with eyes turned askew. He is clad in a gor- geous yellow silk jacket fastened across the breast with a silk loop, and his lavender pantaloons are tightly bound around the ankles. His queue is pieced out to the regulation length with braided red silk, and yet withal he is a picture of unconscious contentment as he toddles beside his mother. In the passing horde I distinguish an old man, bent, and wearing immense spectacles, his gray queue dangling sedately as he walks. A man picks his way through the crowd with a big wooden tray balanced on his head, and a little girl with broad flat nose and narrow eyes wears silver bracelets on her ankles. Yonder walks a withered little man with smiling face, slits of eyes, thin lips, sharp cheek bones and prominent ears. His head is covered with a stiff black skull cap surmounted by a red knotted ball, his slender hands are half concealed beneath the loose sleeves of his dark blue coat lined with light purple silk. His white stockings show above the low shoes. There are bare-footed coolies in straw sandals, wearing coarse clothes, and with dull besotted expressions on their saturnine faces, contrast- ing sharply with the refined features and graceful car- riage of the well-to-do merchants. All these and many more are to be seen upon the streets of San Francisco.
The time to get the full effect of Chinatown is at night when the streets are crowded with the toilers of the day and the lights of many lanterns add their touch of color to the scene. From a sequestered balcony comes the strange monotonous squeaking of a Chinese violin. The high sing-song voices of children sound from a distance. On following their call I find a group of funny little imps about a bon-fire in the gut-
62
SAN FRANCISCO AND THEREABOUT
ter. Their queues dangle and flop about as they play. They wear odd black caps and thick-soled, heavily embroidered slippers. Their bright jackets are fas- tened with cord loops and their trousers are bound about the ankles. A row of red Chinese candles and some punks are burning on the curb and these quaint little elves seem to be in high glee over their illumina- tion.
Across the way a restaurant is resplendent with big colored lanterns on its balconies and the sound of music from within tells of a dinner party in progress. The restaurant is entered through the kitchen, where strange bright yellow cakes and other mysterious delicacies are being prepared. The second floor is reserved for the common people and here are many men shoveling streams of rice from bowls to their mouths with the aid of chop-sticks. The aristocratic top floor is elegantly furnished with black teak-wood tables and carved chairs, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Decorations in the form of carved open-work screens adorn the partitions between rooms, and there are couches along the wall covered with straw mats, where, after eating, one can recline to smoke the pipe of peace.
A Chinese dinner party is a brilliant affair,-the black circular tables loaded down with confections in little dishes, the gorgeous silk robes of the men about the festive board, and the women, even more brilliantly attired, who are present but may not sit at table while the men are dining! I choose a retired corner in an adjacent room and order a cup of tea with roasted almonds, dried lichis, preserved cumquats and ginger, and some curious Chinese cakes, listening the while to the high-pitched sing-song voices of the revelers, the rapping of drums, clanging of cymbals and squeaking of fiddles, and imagining myself a disciple of Con- fucius in the heart of the Flowery Kingdom.
Returning again to the street, the bazaars are left behind with all their splendid art work, and plebian
.
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY TABER
ON A RESTAURANT BALCONY.
63
A CORNER OF CATHAY
food shops take their place. Pork is the meat of the people; little strings of meat which for want of a better name I may call bunches of slender sausages, hang temptingly in view. Dried fish dangle on strings. Eggs are suspended in open wire baskets. There are many strange vegetables which are unfamiliar to Caucasian eyes-melons, tubers and fruits which belong exclusively to the Orient. Down in basements barbers are at work tonsuring patient victims. A drug-store dispenses dried lizards, pulverized sharks' eggs and sliced deer horns, together with numerous herbs for the curing of disease and the driving out of evil spirits. Dr. Lum Yook Teen of Canton, China, advertises pills to cure the opium habit, and, be it noted, finds it profit- able to have his sign printed in English as well as Chinese. On a corner, a Chinese fruit vender has his stand and offers candied cocoanut shreds, and lichi nuts with brown shells as soft as paper which crush in at a touch and reveal the sticky sweetish dried pulp clinging to a pit in the center. He also has plates of dried abalones for sale-the meat of the beautiful ear- shells. There are lengths of green sugar-cane which the Chinese boys love to suck, and many other delica- cies exposed to view.
Shops are crowded together with displays of embroidered shoes and sandals, of long slender tobacco pipes, and opium pipes which look something like flutes, of dry-goods done up in neat little rolls and packages, and brass pots for the kitchen. In one window sits a spectacled jeweler, working away in the dim light at a hand-wrought ring. He has bits of carved jade and silver bracelets about him as evidences of his handiwork.
Off from the main business street of Chinatown extend many side lanes and dark alleys, packed with sallow-visaged Celestials. There are narrow passages and long dark stairways that one hesitates to venture upon. Other alleys are brilliantly illuminated but have barred doors and windows with little peep-holes
64
SAN FRANCISCO AND THEREABOUT
where lowering men with intense black eyes scan every one who approaches. These are the gambling dens. The nervous banging of doors sounds constantly as men pass in and out and the heavy bolts are turned to exclude the police. A fat dowager in a shiny black dress stands in the shadow of an alley and peers out with a sinister look on her face. At a street corner a crowd is reading a red bulletin pasted upon the wall.
During one of my nocturnal rambles through Chinatown I was fortunate enough to witness the annual ceremony of feeding the poor dead. It was held in Sullivan Alley, so named, no doubt because it is in- habited exclusively by the Chinese, and Irishmen, as well as all other people of pale complexions, are ex- pressly warned off by sign and guard. A crowd of Celestials pushed in and out through the doorway in the high fence that made the alley private. Now and then a man would come with a covered pewter dish of food which he was bearing from the restaurant to some one within, or a waiter would pass, balancing a tray on his head with a whole meal in pewter pots. The narrow street was aglow with solid rows of lanterns suspended from both the lower and the upper balconies. At the end of the alley stood a gaudy booth decorated with flowers, in- scriptions and banners. A band of musicians, lav- ishly dressed in colored silks, dispensed wild music; banging drums and clashing cymbals broke in upon the strange cadences of shrill pipes and squeaky fiddles. Around the corner of the alley was a great screen painted with three immense figures of josses, fiercely grotesque. Before them a table spread with rare altar cloths richly embroidered was loaded with confections and flowers. Candles and incense burned before the shrine. Four priests in vivid scarlet robes with gold embroidered squares on their backs, and elaborately embroidered trimmings of white and silver in front, their heads covered with stiff black caps surmounted by large gold knots, faced the tables and bowed in stately fashion to the tune of the strenuous music.
65
A CORNER OF CATHAY
Ladies dressed in gorgeous costumes with their black hair plastered back, leaned over balconies in the glow of lanterns, and watched the scene. Stolid crowds of men with expressionless faces packed the alley, coming and going in a never-ending stream. The odor of sandal-wood incense, the rythmic whine and clash of the music, the Oriental horde in the softened light of lanterns, made a picture which seemed more appro- priate to a court of Cathay in the long forgotten centuries than to a scene in an American metropolis of this late day of steam and electricity.
So much for the street scenes! On entering those dark portals which lead up or down by crooked ways into the labyrinths of rooms, a new phase of Chinatown is disclosed. Here in garrets and cellars human beings are stowed away, stacks of bunks holding the packed mass of humanity. In stifling subterranean chambers opium fiends lie in beastial filth and dream of bliss.
Even the theatre is honey-combed with such dark and devious tunnels where the actors live. The white visitor gropes his way to the stage through crooked lanes bordered by dingy closets of rooms whence floats the dried-apple odor of burning pellets of opium, and those other undefinable but eminently distinctive smells which only Chinatown can generate.
Once upon the stage, attention is divided between the great sea of faces in the pit-silent, wrapt, dark, mysterious faces that grin and gaze as the action changes, but make no sound-and the action of the play. In the boxes sit the women, apart from the crowd. Seats are placed at the side of the stage for our accom- modation and the play goes unconcernedly on. The musicians, at the back of the stage, keep up an infernal bang and clatter, mingled with shrill twangings, pipings and squeakings in monotonous iteration. Men imper- sonating women step mincingly about in their high, awkward shoes, singing in falsetto voices, daintily swinging fans, and pursing up their painted lips to simulate the charms of the gentler sex. The emperor
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.