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Fascinating San Francisco By: Andrew Y. Wood |
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"O Warder of Two Continents!" Bret Harte San Francisco
1924 Foreword Enthroned on hills, San Francisco captivates the stranger who sees it
from the Bay by the vivacity of its landscape long before revealing any
of its intimate lures. Whether you approach in the early morning, when
gulls arc wheeling above the palette of tones of the Bay, or at night,
when illuminated ferryboats glide by like the yellow bannered halls of
fable, the buoyancy of San Francisco is manifest. It increases as you pass through the Ferry Building, the turnstile
behind the Golden Gate, whose blithe tower of the four clock dials is
reminiscent of the Giralda in Seville. In another moment you are in the surge of Market street, the long bazaar
and highroad of this port of all flags. An invisible presence dances
before your footsteps as you sense the animation of the street. It is
the spirit of San Francisco, weaving its debonair spell. Here Tetrazzini turns street singer and Jan Kubelik is a wandering
minstrel enchanting crowds at Lotta's Fountain under Christmas eve
stars. From Dana to Stevenson, from Harte to Mencken, San Francisco has
captured the hearts of a train of illustrious admirers. Rudyard Kipling,
master of the terse, has tooled a brisk drypoint of the city in a few
strokes. "San Francisco has only one drawback," he writes. "'Tis hard to
leave." Cradled as a drowsy Spanish pueblo, reared as a child of the mines, and
fed on all the exhilarants of the gold spangled days of the Argonauts,
San Francisco is like a dashing Western beauty with the eyes of an
exotic ancestry. Bristling with contradictions, the city presents the paradox of being
the most intensely American and yet the most cosmopolitan community on
the continent, with aspects as variable as the medley of alien tongues
heard on its streets. A festival of life is staged at this meeting place of the nations,
farthest outpost of Aryan civilization in its westward march. Inez Haynes Irwin in her Californiacs sounds a warning for the stranger
in San Francisco. "If you ever start for California with the intention of seeing anything
of the state," she admonishes, "do that before you enter San Francisco.
If you must land in San Francisco first, jump into a taxi, pull down the
curtain, drive through the city, breaking every speed law, to Third and
Townsend, sit in the station until a train some train, any train
pulls out, and go with it. If in crossing Market street you raise that
curtain as much as an inch, believe me, stranger, it's all off; you're
lost. You'll never leave San Francisco." This booklet aims to keep the curtain up. Inside the Gate If you turn a map showing the basin of San Francisco Bay so that the
Pacific Ocean is nearest your eye, you see a peninsula thrust out from
the California coast like a great boot. San Francisco stretches for six or seven miles across the toe of the
boot. Dominated by hills, the city is flanked by the Pacific on the west
and by the Bay on the north and east. To the northwest, joining ocean
and bay, is the Golden Gate, the only gap in the coastal mountains. Constantinople and Rio de Janeiro have been called the only maritime
cities that approach the natural beauty of situation of San Francisco.
The basin of the Bay, into which the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers
pour after watering the central garden valley of the state, is an
amphitheatre rimmed with peaks and ridges. The Bay spreads out below San Francisco like an animated poster keyed in
blue and silver, with Yerba Buena, Alcatraz and Angel islands tinted
details in the foreground. Across the gleaming water the roofs of
Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda are shingled with sun crystals, and in the
distance Tamalpais and Mt. Diablo bulk against a curtain of azure. Suavities of outline accent the horizons of San Francisco, where the
skyscrapers take on fantasy as they pile up on hills and recede into
vales. Most visitors cross the Bay and arrive at the city by way of the
Ferry Building, the gala tower of which has a clock at each point of the
compass... Continue reading book >>
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History |
Travel |
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