Taking The Air In San Francisco

________________________________________________
Title:     Taking The Air In San Francisco
Author: Robert Cortes Holliday [More Titles by Holliday]

A few days ago, in the warm and brilliant winter sunlight there, I was strolling along the Embarcadero. Now all my life I have been very fond of roving the streets....

And that confession reminds me:

I one time heard a minister (a clergyman of considerable force of eloquence) preach a sermon against streets. His idea seemed to be that streets were not good for one--that they were very bad places. He admonished mothers to keep their children "off the streets." He regarded it as very reprehensible in a wife for her to "gad the streets." The footpad (he said) plied the street at night, while the righteous were at home in bed. What so sad as "a child of the streets"? If we wished to describe a worthless canine we called it a "street dog." The outcast has his home in the streets. The drunkard makes his bed in the street. It was painful (I gathered) for a civilized being to hear the "language of the street." And so on.

But I very much fear that the eloquence of this gentleman was greater than his Christianity. If we are to love our neighbors as we do ourselves, we will find him in greatest variety in the streets. If we are to give away our cloak, the beneficiary, I should think, would be a citizen much accustomed to the streets. And, as far as I can make out, there is more rejoicing in heaven over the arrival of a sister who has "walked the streets" than attends the reception of a nun.

Certainly I admit that roaming the streets (like everything else) can doubtless be overdone. Nevertheless, to most people, people of ordinary ways of life (like myself), I highly recommend the practice, as a most healthful exercise, as a pleasant course of profitable education, as a source of endless amusement, and as a Christian virtue. The trouble, I think, with most of us is not that we see too much of the streets but that we do not see as well as we might the streets we happen to be on. We do not read as we run.

So I would write an article In Praise of Streets.

As I was saying (when that minister switched me off), I was strolling along the Embarcadero. Among all the different sorts of streets there are none I think more beguiling than those which lie along the water front of a town or a city. The water-front streets of all seaport cities, of course, partake very much of the same character. Particularly in the picturesque aspect of the shop windows.

Here along the rim of San Francisco Bay you pass the sparkling pier buildings (now and then of Spanish mission architecture) of the Toyo Kisen Kaisha Oriental S. S. Co., of the American Hawaiian S. S. Co., the Kosmos Line, and the Pacific-Alaska Navigation Co., among others. While on New York's West Street you see the structures of the White Star Line, the Cunard Line, the Red Star Line, erected in masonry of a sort of mammoth and glorified garage architecture, funnels and masts peeping over the top; and further down the frame sheds of the Morgan Line, the Clyde Steam Ship Company, Savannah Line, Lackawanna Rail Road, Hoboken Ferry, and so on. But the tastes of the sailor man as a shopper appear to be very much the same whether he is along the London docks, on West Street, by Boston piers or here on the Embarcadero. In this the West and the East do meet.

The æsthetic taste of the water front inclines, very decidedly, to the ornate. As (presumably) a present to a lady and a decoration for the home the favorite object seems to be a heavy china plate. A romantic landscape, or a moonlight scene, or perhaps a still life study of portly roses is "hand painted" in very thick pigment on its face. Its rim is plaited in effect, like the edge of a fancy pie, and through numerous openings in this rim is run a heavy ribbon by which to hang it on the wall.

Next in prominence in the window displays of water-front bazaars is the set of bleary-colored glass ware (upper edges bound in gold) which I take to be designed for the purpose of serving punch, or perhaps lemonade--a large bowl of warty surface, with a number of cups to match hanging from hooks at its brim.

The water front obviously is strong for the amenities, the arts and the refinements of life. Bottles of perfume (with huge bows of ribbon at their necks) are in great abundance in its shop windows; as also are packets of boudoir soap (Dawn Lilac seems to be the favorite), toilet powders, silk initial handkerchiefs, opera glasses, ladies' garters of very fluffy design, feminine combs ornamented with birds in gilt, exceedingly high stand-up collars for gentlemen, banjos, guitars, mandolins, accordions (of a great variety of sizes), harmonicas, playing cards, dice and poker chips.

As for the rest of the display, it is a multifarious collection: rubber hip-boots, hair clippers, money belts, brogans, bandana handkerchiefs, binoculars, tobacco pouches, spools of thread, pitch-black plug tobacco, hand searchlights, heavy underwear, woolen sox, razor strops, tin watches, shaving brushes, elaborately carved pipes, trays of heavy rings, and here and there some quaint curiosity, such as a little model of a sailing ship in a bottle which it could not have entered through the mouth, or some such oddity as that.

One old friend of mine on West Street I missed on the Embarcadero. And that is (very battered and worn are the specimens of him which remain as the last of his noble race) the cigar-store wooden Indian.

And (I much regret) neither on the Embarcadero nor on any other water front in America do we have the rich costume ball effects that you find about the docks of London. There (as you remember) about the East India and the West India docks may be observed tall, dark visaged figures in loosely flowing robes and brilliant turbans solemnly pushing along high laden trucks and, high above on the decks of ships, hauling away at ropes.

But on the shore side of the San Francisco water front, my fancy was much taken by the salt sea savor of the signs of the houses of entertainment--signs reminiscent of the jovial days of briny romance, echoed in the chantey in "Treasure Island," which has as its refrain:

Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum.

I passed, among others, the Marine Café, the Navy Café, the Admiral Café, the Harbor Bar, and the Ferry Café.

I did not turn up Market Street, but went on around the nose of the peninsula, which is the foundation of San Francisco. I passed a three-masted ship, the Lizzie Vance, lying by her wharf, with men aloft in her rigging. Then I clambered up endless relays of rickety wooden stairs mounting Telegraph Hill. On either side of the ladder-like steps, ramshackle cabins bedecked with lines of fluttering "wash." Like the celebrated editor of Puck, H. C. Bunner, I might say that in my travels I've missed many a cathedral but I never missed a slum.

I went along through the Latin Quarter, slid down the steep slope of Kearny Street, and found myself wandering into that quaint little park, Portsmouth Square, where R. L. S. in his most stressful days lounged in the sun and listened to the tales of the vagabonds of the Seven Seas. Somewhat bigger than tiny Gramercy Park, hardly as large as little Madison Square, this park. In the center of the bit of rolling lawn, before a towering screen of rustling trees, the graceful little stone ship, buoyant on its curling stone wave, rides atop its tall stone pedestal graved "To Remember Robert Louis Stevenson," and on the face of which is cut that most fragrant of creeds, which (as everyone knows) begins: "To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence" ...

Behind the bench on which I rested was the establishment, so proclaimed the legend printed on its front, of Wing Sun, Funeral Director. For, as you know, Portsmouth Square is embraced on one side by prosperous Chinatown, and on the other by the Italian quarter of San Francisco. And the races, Latin and Oriental, mingle in the little park to take the air.

What here is still more colorful and picturesque, frequently there is a striking and amusing mixture of races in the costume of an individual figure. A Manchu lady, it may be, of waxen, enigmatic features, draped in flowing black silken trousers, hobbles along on high-heeled, pearl-colored American shoes. And there a slim reed of an Oriental maiden, with a complexion like a California orange, whisks by in the smartest of tailored suits--without a hat, her gleaming black hair done in Chinese fashion, long ornamented rods thrust through it, a vivid pendant of bright blossoms at one side of the head.

Sitting there, I thought of the nature of public parks and what pleasant places they are.

Splendid thing, elaborate park "systems," whereby you may go for miles through a grimy city, and move among groves and meadows and bosky dells, with inspiriting glimpses of mirror-like ponds and flashing streams all the way. And of course I enjoy the great parks of a great city.

But more appealing to me than the gorgeous spectacle of Hyde Park, or Van Cortlandt, or Fairmont, or Jackson, or Forest Park are the little places tucked here and there in the seething caldron of the town. These are a lovely department of the streets--they are the little parlors of the streets. Here calls are made, and infants sun themselves--they have, these parklets, their social and their domestic life, under the democratic heavens.

Now soon is a time to watch with joy these plots of open space in the city's rushing life. Spring is more winsome on Boston Common and at Union Square than in the country. A tuft of green shoots seen against canyon walls of steel and stone--one must be in the city to savor the tenderness of spring.

And when summer comes and (in our eastern climate) all the town swelters under a blanket of gritty dust and heavy heat, then one comes upon one of these small areas of greenery with the refreshment of spirit with which at the meal hour one greets the appearance of a nice, cool, green salad.

I arose from my seat in Portsmouth Square and wandered off for the rest of the day through the Streets.

[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: Taking The Air In San Francisco

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN