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THE CITY THAT WAS
THE CITY THAT WAS 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 3000 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
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