A Short History of San Francisco by Tom Cole

Author:Tom Cole [Cole, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

GOOD TIMES IN BAD

San Francisco has always been a city buffeted by the unexpected. But even in the worst of times it scarcely lets up in its “intensified pursuit of human happiness.” So, in its years of economic decline, following the disappointment of the railway, and in the decades following, when it regained its monetary muscle and strode confidently toward a new century, San Francisco kept right on polishing its reputation for excitement and devotion to life’s finer things.

“The climate of California deals kindly with excess,” wrote visiting Rudyard Kipling. He found San Francisco “a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.” San Francisco society had a “captivating rush and whirl. Recklessness is in the air.”

This was the age of the free lunch, when, wrote Kipling, “You paid for a drink and you got as much as you wanted to eat…For something under a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously even though he be bankrupt.” All evidence points to quite a few who spent more than a rupee. “The native pours his vanity into himself at unholy hours,” Kipling wrote. “Drinking is more than an institution, it is a religion.”

If drinking was a religion, there was ample opportunity to practice. From the fabulous Palace Bar, with its troop of solicitous tenders, to the surreal Cobweb Palace on Meigg’s Wharf, where a patron might share his drink with a half-tame monkey, the town housed an amazing number and variety of taverns and eateries.

San Franciscans thronged to Mayes Oyster House for Eastern oysters and fresh fish (and still do). “Lucky” Baldwin’s Hotel at Powell and Market, with its $25,000 lobby clock and its posh dining room, was a rival of the Palace. Less fancy was the What Cheer House, a gustatory celebration of the American virtues of simplicity and quantity. The Fior D’Italia was (and still is) a favorite of the Italian community. In not a few of San Francisco’s restaurants, the well-heeled diner could retire upstairs with a bottle of vintage bubbly and perhaps enjoy a high-stakes poker game or the company of a delightful young lady “from the finest Eastern finishing school.”

At night, Kearny Street was a genteel thoroughfare of light and color, its restaurants and bars filled, its pavement delicately trodden by the ladies who so impressed Rudyard Kipling. Barely out of sight of Kearny Street’s “large-boned, deep-chested, delicate-handed women, and long, elastic, well-built boys”—San Francisco’s middle classes—was Morton Street (now chaste Maiden Lane), an alley of cut-rate depravity ruled by one Iodoform Kate.

On weekends, San Franciscans visited one of the city’s many beer halls, took refreshment and admired the seals from the Cliff House, or made family outings to the new park. A favorite of all ages was spectacular Woodward’s Gardens, a pre-Disneyland extravaganza of gardens, exotic animals, rides, and uplifting art exhibits, owned by the What Cheer House’s Robert Woodward. Woodward’s Gardens, located at Mission and 14th Street, was a San Francisco landmark until 1883.

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