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TITLE: THE CITY THAT WAS
AUTHOR: WILL IRWIN
EBOOK: E01474 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

This is a recast of a newspaper article of the same title published in
The Sun April 21, 1906, three days after the Visitation came upon San
Francisco. It is here published by special permission of The Sun. For
the title, I am indebted to Franklin Matthews.	W.I.

The City That Was
A requiem of Old San Francisco

By Will Irwin

"I'd rather be a busted lamp post on Battery Street, San Francisco,
than the Waldorf-Astoria." - Willie Britt.

The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest hearted, most
pleasure loving city of the western continent, and in many ways the most
interesting and romantic, is a horde of refugees living among ruins. It
may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar
city by the Golden Gate, have caught its flavor of the Arabian Nights,
feel that it can never be the same. It is as though a pretty, frivolous
woman had passed through a great tragedy. She survives, but she is
sobered and different. If it rises out of the ashes it must be a modern
city, much like other cities and without its old atmosphere.

San Francisco lay on a series of hills and the lowlands between. These
hills are really the end of the Coast Range of mountains, which stretch
southward between the interior valleys and the Pacific Ocean. Behind it
is the ocean; but the greater part of the town fronts on two sides on
San Francisco Bay, a body of water always tinged with gold from the
great washings of the mountain, usually overhung with a haze, and of
magnificent color changes. Across the bay to the north lies Mount
Tamalpais, about 3,000 feet high, and so close that ferries from the
waterfront take one in less than half an hour to the little towns of
Sausalito and Belvidere, at its foot.

Tamalpais is a wooded mountain, with ample slopes, and from it on the
north stretch away ridges of forest land, the outposts of the great
Northern woods of Sequoia sempervirens. This mountain and the
mountainous country to the south bring the real forest closer to San
Francisco than to any other American city. Within the last few years men
have killed deer on the slopes of Tamalpais and looked down to see the
cable cars crawling up the hills of San Francisco to the south. In the
suburbs coyotes still stole in and robbed hen roosts by night. The
people lived much out of doors. There is no time of the year, except a
short part of the rainy season, when the weather keeps one from the
fields. The slopes of Tamalpais are crowded with little villas dotted
through the woods, and these minor estates run far up into the redwood
country. The deep coves of Belvidere, sheltered by the wind from
Tamalpais, held a colony of "arks" or houseboats, where people lived in
the rather disagreeable summer months, coming over to business every day
by ferry. Everything there invites out of doors.

The climate of California is peculiar; it is hard to give an impression
of it. In the region about San Francisco, all the forces of nature work
on their own laws. There is no thunder and lightning; there is no snow,
except a flurry once in five or six years; there are perhaps half a
dozen nights in the winter when the thermometer drops low enough so that
in the morning there is a little film of ice on exposed water. Neither
is there any hot weather. Yet most Easterners remaining in San Francisco
for a few days remember that they were always chilly.

For the Gate is a big funnel, drawing in the winds and the mists which
cool off the great, hot interior valleys of the San Joaquin and
Sacramento. So the west wind blows steadily ten months of the year; and
almost all the mornings are foggy. This keeps the temperature steady at
about 55 degrees - a little cool for the comfort of an unacclimated
person, especially indoors. Californians, used to it, hardly ever think
of making fires in their houses except in a few days of the winter
season, and then they rely mainly upon fireplaces. This is like the
custom of the Venetians and the Florentines.

Give an Easterner six months of it, however, and he, too, learns to
exist without chill in a steady temperature a little lower than that to
which he was accustomed at home. After that one goes about with perfect
indifference to the temperature. Summer and winter, San Francisco women
wear light tailor-made clothes, and men wear the same fall-weight suits
all the year around. There is no such thing as a change of clothing for
the seasons. And after becoming acclimated these people find it hard to
bear the changes from hot to cold in the normal regions of the earth.
Perhaps once in two or three years there comes a day when there is no
fog, no wind, and a high temperature in the coast district. Then follows
hot weather, perhaps up in the eighties, and Californians grumble,
swelter and rustle for summer clothes. These rare hot days are the only
times when one sees women in light dresses on the streets of San
Francisco.

Along in early May the rains cease. At that time everything is green and
bright, and the great golden poppies, as large as the saucer of an
after-dinner coffee cup, are blossoming everywhere. Tamalpais is green
to its top; everything is washed and bright. By late May a yellow tinge
is creeping over the hills. This is followed by a golden June and a
brown July and August. The hills are burned and dry. The fog comes in
heavily, too; and normally this is the most disagreeable season of the
year. September brings a day or two of gentle rain; and then a change,
as sweet and mysterious as the breaking of spring in the East, passes
over the hills. The green grows through the brown and the flowers begin
to come out.

As a matter of fact, the unpleasantness of summer is modified by the
certainty that one can go anywhere without fear of rain. And in all the
coast mountains, especially the seaward slopes, the dews and the shelter
of the giant underbrush hold the water, so that these areas are green
and pleasant all summer.

In a normal year the rains begin to fall heavily in November; there will
be three or four days of steady downpour and then a clear and green
week. December is also likely to be rainy; and in this month people
enjoy the sensation of gathering for Christmas the mistletoe which grows
profusely on the live oaks, while the poppies are beginning to blossom
at their feet. By the end of January the gentle rains come lighter. In
the long spaces between these winter storms, there is a temperature and
a feeling in the air much like that of Indian summer in the East.
January is the month when the roses are at their brightest.

So much for the strange climate, which invites out of doors and which
has played its part in making the character of the people. The externals
of the city are - or were, for they are no more - just as curious. One
usually entered San Francisco by way of the Bay. Across its yellow
flood, covered with the fleets from the strange seas of the Pacific, San
Francisco presented itself in a hill panorama. Probably no other city of
the world, excepting perhaps Naples, could be so viewed at first sight.
It rose above the passenger, as he reached dockage, in a succession of
hill terraces. At one side was Telegraph Hill, the end of the peninsula,
a height so abrupt that it had a one hundred and fifty foot sheer cliff
on its seaward frontage. Further along lay Nob Hill, crowned with the
Mark Hopkins mansion, which had the effect of a citadel, and in later
years by the great, white Fairmount. Further along was Russian Hill, the
highest point. Below was the business district, whose low site caused
all the trouble.

Except for the modern buildings, the fruit of the last ten years, the
town presented at first sight a disreputable appearance. Most of the
buildings were low and of wood. In the middle period of the '70's, when,
a great part of San Francisco was building, the newly-rich perpetrated
some atrocious architecture. In that time, too every one put bow windows
on his house to catch all of the morning sunlight that was coming
through the fog; and those little houses, with bow windows and fancy
work all down their fronts, were characteristic of the middle class
residence districts.

Then the Italians, who tumbled over Telegraph Hill, had built as they
listed and with little regard for streets, and their houses hung crazily
on a side hill which was little less than a precipice. The Chinese,
although they occupied an abandoned business district, had remade their
dwellings Chinese fashion, and the Mexicans and Spaniards had added to
their houses those little balconies without which life is not life to a
Spaniard.

Yet the most characteristic thing after all was the coloring. The sea
fog had a trick of painting every exposed object a sea gray which had a
tinge of dull green in it. This, under the leaden sky of a San Francisco
morning, had a depressing effect on first sight and afterward became a
delight to the eye. For the color was soft, gentle and infinitely
attractive in mass.

The hills are steep beyond conception. Where Vallejo street ran up
Russian Hill it progressed for four blocks by regular steps like a
flight of stairs. It is unnecessary to say that no teams ever came up
this street or any other like it, and grass grew long among the paving
stones until the Italians who live thereabouts took advantage of this
herbage to pasture a cow or two. At the end of four blocks, the pavers
had given it up and the last stage to the summit was a winding path. On
the 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,

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