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San Francisco, CA
July 17, 2018
Yesterday we started ab ovo, remembering that San Francisco emerged from the earth…and from the Pacific floor.
Today, we recall that it also came from the Sierra mines…and that it clings by the grace of God to its precarious perch on the edge of the world, hoping not to slide off like a raindrop from a windshield.
We know the feeling.
David, Ken, and I spent this afternoon scaling the precipitous bluffs of the Presidio Golf Course, former site of the exclusive San Francisco Country Club.
As the ambient fog lifted, the eager Pacific pressed persistently against the wave-worn curves of this verdant urban oasis…and the fickle coast pressed ambivalently back, like cocktail party interplay between an inebriated Senator and the freshly unveiled daughter of a Saudi ambassador.
As the course yielded to the surf, we yielded to the course…and to my younger son, who walked off with the low round despite playing unfamiliar links with rented ladies clubs.
Preceding our afternoon assault on San Francisco’s military birthplace was a morning homage to its sacramental one. After a Gallic breakfast at Le Marais in the Marina, David and I made a pilgrimage to Mission San Francisco de Asís.
Two decades had passed since I’d last visited Mission Delores. The adobe mission is the oldest structure in San Francisco, and is unique among the 21 California missions for being the only one to survive intact throughout its 242-year history.
Within its walls prominent early San Franciscans (actually, Yerba Buenans) are interred…including William Leidesdorff, José Moraga, and the Noe family.
Pope Pius XII raised the newer, neighboring church to basilica status in 1952…thirty-four years after it was rebuilt following destruction of the original church in 1906. The expansive interior is somewhat dark and a bit ominous, but offers appealing stained glass depictions of all California missions above shrines of a half dozen saints.
Behind the original mission is a small cemetery bearing remains of assorted early San Franciscans. This is one of only two extant local cemeteries from which remains were not removed to the necropolis of Colma, just south of the City line. The other is in the Presidio.
Which brings us back to our story, lying where we left it yesterday…like a dead Gaul on the field of Alesia.
With flanks established on the Presidio bluffs and the Mission Dolores flats, by 1835 the center of San Francisco’s lines began to form in between…around the small mud plaza, rancid tent dwellings, and decrepit wooden shacks abutting what was once Yerba Buena Cove.
Like an earnest athlete who suddenly discovers steroids, the village for half a century grew slowly, steadily, and inconspicuously. Then, in half a year, it burst spectacularly at its seams, to almost grotesque, unrecognizable proportions.
The stage was set in 1846, when John Sloat claimed California for the united States, John Fremont named the Golden Gate for the Byzantine Golden Horn, and Washington Bartlett re-christened the small village with a moniker that assured its fame by associating it with its bay.
Earlier that year, Captain John Montgomery sailed the sloop Portsmouth thru the Golden Gate and raised the American flag in the main square, which was subsequently named for the ship that brought him to the place by which he would be immortalized.
Montgomery was an inadvertent witness to, and conscious beneficiary of, the simultaneous Bear Flag revolt…during which the California Republic was proclaimed at Sonoma a few years before it became one of the united States (a decision it might re-think were the proposition raised today).
Disregarding imposing hills that pocked the young San Francisco landscape like acne on a teen face, Jasper O’Farrell laid a rigid street grid with a stubbornness that produced the straight, steep inclines that have thrilled or intimidated hooves and feet, carriages and cars, from that day to this.
Not till 27 years later did Andrew Hallidie adapt to Nob Hill the rope systems he’d originally used to suspend viaducts over the American River and carry loads across Comstock mines.
In San Francisco, the cables would be underground, pulling new carriages in which engineers, financiers, and rail magnates of the Sierra Bonanza rode comfortably to their new mansions on the crest of Clay Street.
The year after O’Farrell laid his grid and Bartlett bestowed the town’s new name, James Marshall discovered gold at John Sutter’s American River mill.
Après ça, le déluge…
San Francisco’s population exploded in 1849, growing by a factor of thirty.
Mark Twain ostensibly defined a gold mine as a hole in the ground with a liar standing over it. Fibs and fabrications, falsehood and fraud ran rampant thru the foothills of the Mother Lode and the muddy streets of nascent San Francisco.
In the camps all slept with only one eye closed…the other peering thru the darkness and over wary shoulders for approaching knives or receding gold.
In the bawdy City, no one seemed to sleep, and about the only thing offered for free was advice…and in a land of opportunists, advice given freely can be very expensive.
Those who took it often sold incipient mining stakes to those who gave it, frequently based on rumors the latter had spread implying impending government take-overs, barren mineral veins, or promises of future partnerships in phantom ventures.
The abandoned ships and wharves of gullible gold prospectors eventually filled the coves and inlets that underlie the modern Financial District, while the speculative sandlots of the 1850s funneled more than 80% of San Francisco wealth to fewer than 5% of San Francisco males.
Much of that wealth flowed back to the Sierra, as alpine rivers were lifted from their beds and into wooden plumes, hydraulic mining flushed individual panners from their stakes, and mountainsides were removed to seduce coquettish gold while sending a Sahara of silt across the Central Valley and to the bay.
One of my jobs when a civil engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge was to supervise efforts to dredge from the Larkspur and Sausalito ferry channels the Gold Rush sediment that continues to coat and clog the bottom of trans-bay navigation lanes.
In an ominous portent of events 55 years later, the City burned to the ground six times in the 18 months after the initial Sierra surge. With apologies to the capitals of Georgia and Arizona, no city warrants the Phoenix on its seal more than Baghdad-by-the-Bay.
That emblem remains pertinent.
We returned to the Presidio this evening for dinner and drinks at Sessions, where we met another friend of almost thirty years.
Patrick O’Loughlin, with his wife Sheryl and their two sons, lost their home in the Sonoma fires last Fall.
He recounted their disoriented disbelief as midnight fires approached, how they ran from bedroom to garage grasping what they could as the flames arrived, and how they fled with their lives under a hellish hue of orange skies accompanied by screeching sirens, whirling chopper blades, and shifting containment lines.
Within hours their house and all possessions within helped fuel a blizzard of ash that coated Sonoma County like manure on a Spring Break pick-up line.
Patrick and Sheryl’s good humor and positive perspective, from that day to this, have remained impressively intact.
Their family was safe, they found new lodging, and he was relieved to know the antediluvian clubhouse at his Santa Rosa golf course had at long last returned to dust…with the clubs he’d been longing to replace adding to the pile.
The discussion was a reminder that as rough as things may seem, we have many blessings. I am heartened by our friends’ optimistic outlook and that, after (or because of) their harrowing experience, they feel the same.
To commemorate the volunteer fire fighters who saved the San Francisco from earlier flames, the City in 1933 allotted a bequest from Lillie Hitchcock Coit to construct in her honor a monument atop Telegraph Hill.
In addition to that familiar San Francisco landmark, she left as a touching tribute in Washington Square the statue of two firemen clutching a rescued child.
Rita and I lived for a time in the shadow of Coit Tower, in a Kearny Street loft complex we simultaneously managed on behalf of owner Joe Freitas, a great guy but unfortunate District Attorney who succumbed to the Dan White “Twinkie Defense” in the 1978 murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
We lived amongst many characters in North Beach and on Telegraph Hill, but nothing like the kaleidoscope of eccentrics and entertainers, actors and artists, charlatans and criminals, of late 19th century San Francisco.
Monuments struggle to preserve their horse-drawn memories in our hashtag digital age.
Ina Coolbrith and George Sterling have their parks on Russian Hill, Robert Louis Stevenson his ship in Portsmouth Square, Ambrose Bierce his alley behind the Examiner building, and Lotta Crabtree her eponymous fountain on Market at Kearny and Geary, where in 1996 I witnessed from a respectful distance the dwindling remnants of 1906 survivors who gathered there at 5:13a each April 18 to commemorate the quake that defined their childhood.
Even we Breens have a commemorative alley just off Civic Center Plaza, appropriately proximate to the site of this week’s nuptials…a small street that reflects the understated undertow beneath the irresistible tide of our humble charm.
This was the era of Joshua Norton, a Jewish merchant who arrived in San Francisco in 1849, by 1854 became fabulously wealthy and widely respected, lost his fortune and dignity in a failed attempt to corner the rice market, and re-emerged from poverty and disgrace as Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.
Emperor Norton issued and redeemed his own currency, attended and was recognized at California state legislative sessions, wore an imperial uniform provided by the City from which he ruled, affirmed his lunacy by predicting bridges would conquer the bay, corresponded reciprocally with President, Czar, and Kaiser…and sat each season with his mongrel dogs Bummer and Lazarus in prestigious orchestra seats reserved for them by the Grand Opera House.
To pay for such frivolity amid an ongoing burst of extravagance, San Francisco relied to such an extent on the iron works of Potrero Hill, the gold mines of the Sierra, the imperial benefaction of foreign conquest, and the political graft of transcontinental rails that the City motto became, and is still, “Oro en Paz, Fierro en Guerra”.
After substantial silver veins were discovered amid the gold deposits of the Nevada Comstock, Virginia City became a virtual suburb of San Francisco.
One of the early commuters was Elias “Lucky” Baldwin, who invested a small amount in Comstock stock, turned it into a large amount, tried to sell before an extended voyage to Asia, forgot he had kept in his pocket the key to his safe, was therefore unable to sell the certificates locked therein, returned to find the stock had multiplied, and thereby inadvertently magnified a fortune and acquired a nickname.
His luck turned in 1898 when his Baldwin Hotel and Theater, the most fabulous west of Chicago, burned (uninsured) to the ground.
He sold the land to James Flood, another Comstock magnate who erected the flatiron Flood Building that now stands at Hallidie Plaza beside the Powell Street cable car terminus.
If Baldwin was lucky in life, Flood was lucky in legacy. Not only his eponymous building at the base of Powell Street, but also his titular mansion at the top of Nob Hill, survived the great quake and fire of 1906.
The first brownstone west of the Mississippi, the Flood Mansion is now home to the Pacific-Union Club, sitting across from the Mark Hopkins, Stanford Court, and Fairmont Hotels, and across Huntington Park from Grace Cathedral.
Mark Hopkins died before witnessing the elaborate palace his widow would ultimately complete and then, her point made, immediately vacate.
Leland Stanford erected for his wife a mansion to which he eased her access by funding the California Street cable car line.
Unlike the widow Hopkins, Jane Stanford became more parsimonious in her later years, devoting every penny to establishing a university that preserved the memory of a son who died too young.
Stanford’s partner and later nemesis, Collins P. Huntington, held court at an ornate residence on a site memorialized by the park that now bears his name.
Across Taylor Street from Huntington Park, Grace Cathedral, with its Nôtre Dame design, De Rosen mosaics, Chartres labyrinth, and replicas of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, occupies the site of Charles Crocker’s erstwhile estate.
Crocker consolidated his property despite the admirable recalcitrance of one Nicholas Yung. This German immigrant had settled on a small plot adjacent to Crocker’s lot, and refused to budge as the tycoon raised his bid and applied his pressure for Yung to sell.
Crocker, like others of The Big Four, was accustomed to getting his way.
So…
To the northeast of his new regal chateau then rising from the height of Nob Hill, Crocker erected a forty foot wall around three sides of Yung’s humble home…evicting light, vistas, and eventually Yung himself from the remaining piece of Crocker’s puzzle.
To the west of the Crocker Spite Fence, the City stretched its legs…wandering over Russian Hill, into what became the Western Addition and Pacific Heights, and cooling its heals in newly-established Golden Gate Park before making a final push to the sea.
From the Ocean to the Bay, and from Fort Point to Candlestick Point, San Francisco had begun to spread across the top of its little peninsula like a thumbnail on a thumb.
The nail would continue to grow until, one early morning in the spring of 1906…
…it was clipped.
JD
