Vignettes Of San Francisco - free ebook by Almira Morey

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Vignettes Of San Francisco

Almira Morey

46 chapters

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46 chapters

VIGNETTES OF SAN FRANCISCO

VIGNETTES OF SAN FRANCISCO

VIGNETTES OF SAN FRANCISCO As Pilgrims go to Rome At the Ferry The Union-Street Car The Latin Meets the Oriental The Pepper and Salt Man The Bay on Sunday Morning Safe on the Sidewalk Port O’Missing Men Market St. Scintillations Cafeterias The Open Board of Trade The San Francisco Police A Marine View Hilly-Cum-Go I’ll Get It Changed, Lady Fillmore Street In the Lobby of the St. Francis The Garbage Man’s Little Girl The Palace Zoe’s Garden Children on the Sidewalk Feet That Pass on Market St. Wh

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As Pilgrims go to Rome

As Pilgrims go to Rome

In the same way that the poets have loved Rome and made their pilgrimages there—as good Moslems travel toward Mecca, so there are some of us who have come to San Francisco. Then when we arrive and find it all that we have dreamed, our love for it becomes its highest tribute. And I don’t know why it is sacrilege to mention Rome and San Francisco in the same breath. As for me I greatly prefer San Francisco, although I have never been to Rome. I love San Francisco for its youth. Other cities have b

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At the Ferry

At the Ferry

The shrill of newsboys, the bass of older venders, the call of taxis, trolleys that proceed all day in ordered sequence, the wide swing of traffic on the Embarcadero, a tang of salt in the air, the atmosphere of flowers for sale, hoarse call of ferries in the bay like politicians who have spoken too much in the open air and lost their voices, the beautifully ordered hurry and bustle and expectancy of people on their way somewhere, and over it all the mentor of the police. “Help pass the time ple

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The Union-Street Car

The Union-Street Car

It is surprising how many people patronize the shabby little thing. But then it waits right where those who leave the ferry may see it first as though it were the most important car in town, and I have a fancy the big cars humor it a bit and give it first place. Besides, it goes anywhere in the city, Chinatown, the Hall of Justice, the Chamber of Commerce, the Barbary Coast, St. Francis Church—sinners, saints and merchants may travel its way—Portsmouth Square, Telegraph Hill, Little Italy, Russi

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The Latin Meets the Oriental

The Latin Meets the Oriental

In that spot where Chinatown merges into the Latin quarter there must be, I think, a Director of Delightful Situations who holds dominion there. For instance, can you imagine anything more subtle than a group of large fat women haranguing, in Italian-American, a poor thin Chinaman over some bargains in vegetables? In a place which marks the line of cleavage between the two quarters is a picture store containing in its window religious pictures, enlarged family photographs of Filipinos, and, of c

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The Pepper and Salt Man

The Pepper and Salt Man

He was a man, I should say about sixty years old, a most uninteresting age, and a homely, weather-beaten fellow too, when you stopped to look at him. His suit was pepper-and-salt, and he was just like his suit. Good as gold, I have no doubt, a roomer of whom his landlady could say: “He comes and he goes and is never a speck of trouble.” Still, he might have been as good as Saint Anthony but no one would ever have noticed him except for what happened. What happened wasn’t so much either but it wa

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The Bay on Sunday Morning

The Bay on Sunday Morning

Perhaps to go to Fort Mason on a sunny Sunday morning, that beautiful relaxed moment of the whole week, and there to sit with others who have no autos to go gallivanting in, and to sit idly gazing off at the bay. That’s not bad. To read a little and doze a bit, but mostly to gaze out to sea and dream. A big foreign steamer in port, perhaps a Scandinavian boat, inert, enormous, helpless, while the little tugs chatter, around it and finally get hold of it, and tug it slowly around with its nose po

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Safe on the Sidewalk

Safe on the Sidewalk

Are there others, I wonder, who feel as I do about crossing the street? There must be. Now I, when I cross, say Market street at Third, I run. I take my life and my bundles in my hand and run, darting swift glances to the left and to the right. It looks “hick.” I know it looks “hick.” And I care. But I prefer to be alive and countrified than sophisticated in an ambulance and so I run. At corners, too. I think corners are worse. For there the machines may turn around and chase me, which they ofte

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Port O’Missing Men

Port O’Missing Men

They say that San Francisco is known all over as the Port o’ Missing Men. That it is a city where a man may lose himself if he chooses, and that by the same token it is a good place to look for “my wandering boy tonight.” I can believe all this especially on Third street. Third street should be called by some other name or it should have a nickname. If it were in Seattle it would be known as “skid row.” Third street doesn’t describe it at all. When I see a lot of men like that, wanderers, family

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Market St. Scintillations

Market St. Scintillations

Oh, the things our eyes discover as we walk along on Market street. Such a medley—infinite, incongruous, comical, pathetic, motley and sublime. Harding in a window with “pure buttermilk.” He’ll be in more difficult situations before he is done, I’m thinking. An electric fan above him that keeps the buttermilk “pure” and flies the American flag in crepe paper. “Crabs to take home.” They are freshly cooked, very large and forty cents apiece. I decide that some I shall really buy one and take it ho

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Cafeterias

Cafeterias

This is not to hurt the feelings of anyone, for some people are very sensitive about cafeterias. They are cafeteria wise, they have a cafeteria class consciousness. Such people are to be admired. They have accurate minds which enable them to choose a well-balanced meal at minimum cost. Lacking that sort of mind, I do not get on well in cafeterias. As sure as I equip myself with a tray and silver in a napkin and become one of the long procession, I lose all sense of proportion, and come out at th

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The Open Board of Trade

The Open Board of Trade

Months ago one of The Journal readers suggested a story to be found down on Market street near the Hobart building. Many times since when passing there I have thought that those street hawkers must have a certain picturesque and even humorous value, and hoping to find it I have stopped to listen. But the moment I stop they win me with their everlasting logic, and then blessed if I can write them up. They have the same effect upon others. I have seen chambers of commerce and stock exchangers and

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The San Francisco Police

The San Francisco Police

The San Francisco police are the handsomest and most-willing-to-flirt policemen in the United States, if not in the world. What a surly lot, the New York policemen. They treat one as though he were a blackguard for merely asking some direction. “What car shall I take for the New Jersey Central Ferry?” we ask. “Zippity-ip,” he snaps, moving off. “What did you say?” we ask in timid desperation. “Zippity-ip,” he yells, shaking his fist at us. But ask a San Francisco policeman the way and how differ

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A Marine View

A Marine View

Russian Hill had always seemed economically remote to me as an abiding place until recently I was invited out where some people were living in a modest apartment with a good view of the bay. And when they suggested that I try to get an apartment over there I decided to do it. It was a beautiful morning when I started out. There stood Russian Hill and as Gibraltar bristles with armaments so it glittered with windows facing the sea and one of them for me. Perhaps I could get a few rooms from a nic

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Hilly-Cum-Go

Hilly-Cum-Go

This is a story for children, because they will know it’s only fooling, while grown-up people will believe it’s true. The cable car isn’t a car at all, children, but is a hilly-cum-go, a species of rocking horse and a grown-up kiddie-kar. It is a native of and peculiar to San Francisco, and is a loyal member of the N. S. G. W. It has relatives in the South, and the electric dinkie that rolls up and down between Venice and Santa Monica is its first cousin. Some say that it is distantly related to

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I’ll Get It Changed, Lady

I’ll Get It Changed, Lady

This expressman was a regular San Franciscan. And there is such a thing, you know, as a regular San Franciscan. He is a native son and more. His speech betrays him. He calls a “car” a “cahh,” and when he’s surprised he says: “Yeah”! He has a permanent laugh in his eyes, and the only thing he gets mad about is prohibition. But the particular thing that I started to say of him is that money is to him a thing to spend. Money is an incident to life, that’s all. He said it would be a “dollar, six-bit

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Fillmore Street

Fillmore Street

I walk along on Fillmore street. I try to walk very fast with eyes straight ahead. One needs a strong will to take a-walking on Fillmore street and keep from spending all his money. In fact it is better to have no money at all for then one is tempted to hold on to it. Everything in the world is in the windows on Fillmore street—everything. There isn’t a phase of human activity that isn’t represented. Every nation has left its stamp. Spain—tamales and enchiladas. France—a pastry shop. Italy—spagh

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In the Lobby of the St. Francis

In the Lobby of the St. Francis

There is something about having money enough to stay at the St. Francis, and to dine there and to wear smart clothes there that makes people step out and act sure of themselves. Even when they can’t afford it, and their stay there is a splurge or an outing, they act just as sure and stepping. And as for the people to whom the St. Francis is but an incident they act sure because they were born that way. Never in my life have I seen such sure, well-dressed women as in the lobby of the St. Francis.

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The Garbage Man’s Little Girl

The Garbage Man’s Little Girl

This vignette is written because it can’t help itself and carries with it a hope that someone who reads it may know a little girl whose father is a garbage man. Suppose that you can’t think of anyone just now who is a daughter to a garbage man, it is best to read this just the same for you never know when you may meet her. When you do, tell her not to care too much when the children at school tease her about her father and cry—“Phew—phew, here comes the gar-bidge-Garrr-bidge-Garrr-bidge.” Tell h

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The Palace

The Palace

Someone was telling me of an old couple who lost everything they owned at the time of the fire, and that they were very brave about it and never broke down, and even helped others, but that when someone came running up and said: “The Palace is on fire,” they both sat down on the curb and gave way completely to grief. And they say that after the fire the first piece of publicity which was given to the world as a proof that San Francisco would come back, was that the Palace would be rebuilt immedi

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Zoe’s Garden

Zoe’s Garden

Zoe says emphatically that it is not her garden, but everybody’s garden. But it is her garden because she tends it, and every morning goes around among her flowers lovingly, giving a little dig of dirt here, and tying some frail sisters up there and then, with her scissors, clipping, snipping and nipping away. Yes, it is Zoe’s garden. Anything that has spunk to grow is welcome in this essentially San Franciscan garden. And no one is allowed to bully the others. Big burly geraniums and proud dahl

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Children on the Sidewalk

Children on the Sidewalk

When you were a little girl, when you were a little boy, where did you play? Was it in a barn? Was it a city park? Did you hunt gophers on the plains of Iowa? Perhaps it was in a California poppy field. Perhaps a graveyard. I played in one, and remember very vividly the grave of Josephine Sarah Huthinson who died at the age of 11 months, and had a little lamb on the top of her stone and an inscription: “Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” Many deli

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Feet That Pass on Market St.

Feet That Pass on Market St.

There is something about walking along Market street with the procession of people that passes all day, ah, how shall I express it? It is thrilling and it is amusing; it is cosmic and it is puny. It is often ridiculous and always sublime. Sometimes when we are in most of a hurry the consciousness of the procession will come to us. It is as though we were one of a moving crowd that never began and will never end. At such times we listen to the sound of their feet, the steady, unceasing step by st

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Where the Centuries Meet

Where the Centuries Meet

She was a tourist and she had just finished Sing Fat’s. As she passed out of the door she said smugly to her companion—“I don’t see anything so wonderful here.” I was standing right there and said I: “Madame, if you have been through Sing Fat’s and have failed, to see anything wonderful then you should go home and give yourself the Benet test which is used to test the intelligence of children.” Oh, of course, I didn’t say this so that the lady could hear. The bravest speeches we humans make are

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Bags or Sacks

Bags or Sacks

“Do you like cafeterias?” I asked. “Don’t know,” he answered, “I’ve never played them.” “What religion do you follow?” another man asked me. In a mining camp they told me to take such and such a “trail.” The point is, that we did not talk that way where I came from. Of course, I hasten to say, we doubtless talked some other way just as peculiar. And if I could detect our colloquialisms I would write a lot about them but alas I can’t. I was in the West two years before I noticed that a “trolley”

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Portsmouth Square

Portsmouth Square

“To be honest, to be kind.” Loiterers, vagabonds, slow-going Orientals, poets and blackguards, all day long come and drink at Stevenson’s fountain. Some of them look up and read it all and some only get as far as “to earn a little, to spend a little less”—. Small-footed Chinese women pass, humping along on their stumps and their babies running along beside have larger feet than the mothers who bore them, Bench warmers gaze after them with lazy curiosity. A fat Italian granddaddy washes a kiddie’

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Miracles

Miracles

If man or woman be at all sensitive to life, he must react to the commonplace much as Whitman did. Such a person may be hurrying along about his business with perhaps no time for reflection and yet in a flash, the miracle of life will come to him through the slightest happening. A little girl on the ferry sitting with her mother takes from her small prim bag a set of doll clothes, and fondles them and smoothes them much like a pullet with her first chickens. The sight of those square, little, gi

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Impulses and Prohibitions

Impulses and Prohibitions

One day last week a man—a regular man, neither a decided proletarian nor a typical bourgeois—but just a man was walking along. He was dressed in average clothes, he was shaved and carried a suit case and didn’t look out of work and was evidently going somewhere. He was walking along with this suit case—it was on Larkin near McAllister about two o’clock on one of those superb days of last week—and he came to a place where there was a stretch of grass near the sidewalk. I think he was hot and the

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Stopping at the Fairmont

Stopping at the Fairmont

It is best to say at the very beginning that if one is tremendously wealthy he will not enjoy this dissertation on staying at high class hotels. If one has more than two bathrooms in his home and can afford chicken when it is not Sunday and turkey when it is not Christmas and could stay at the Fairmont all winter if he preferred, then these words will mean nothing to him. She has gone, this friend of mine. All winter she has been staying at the Fairmont. Much of the time I, too, have been stayin

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San Francisco Sings

San Francisco Sings

Some Cities roar and others hum, but San Francisco sings. Especially on Saturday at noon and downtown. Saturday noon in San Francisco is like nothing else anywhere but Saturday noon in San Francisco. And Saturday noon is like the noon of no other day but Saturday. On Sunday they’re off. On Saturday noon everybody’s on the street. There are more flowers on Saturday noon. On the street stands great plumes of gold acacia, riots of daffodils, banks of violets, white, waxy camellias and branches of J

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Van Ness Avenue

Van Ness Avenue

Van Ness avenue is sole. Nowhere in the wide world does the proud and culminating automobile own and dominate such a wide and sweeping display boulevard. The automobile, what a magnificent animal it is, long, low, luxurious, purring softly, full of a great reserve, ready to dart forward, not to the cruel touch of a spur or bit, but to the magic touch of a button. It is the culminating achievement of this period of the machine age. The airplane, clumsy and awkward as yet, belongs for its consumma

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The Blind Men and the Elephant

The Blind Men and the Elephant

You live in San Francisco and I live in San Francisco, and so does the man who owns the peanut wagon on the corner, and none of us live in the same San Francisco—funny. We’re like the blind men who each gave a different version of the elephant. To some, San Francisco is always eight o’clock in the morning or six o’clock at night, swinging on the straps homeward, swallow their dinners and to a show in the evening. Such people never have wandered through Golden Gate Park of an afternoon or sunned

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You’re Getting Queer

You’re Getting Queer

Everyone ought to have—well, what is it that everyone ought to have? No, not a machine, not necessarily a garden and not even a camera. Everyone ought to have children. If not children of their own, then borrowed ones or nieces or nephews or the neighbor’s kids. Everyone ought to have children. People who have no children anywhere in their environment to whom they can talk intimately soon become queer and lop-sided. They may not always realize it but others will find them awkward and stilted and

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The Ferry and Real Boats

The Ferry and Real Boats

As a matter of fact the ferry isn’t a boat at all. It is more like a house or a street car or a park full of pretty benches. It doesn’t sail, it only plies, plies between two given points at stated intervals, and could anything be more dull. Nothing is more prosaic than a ferry unless it be an ironing board. Even a barge is superior, and a barge doesn’t pretend to be a boat. A barge goes somewhere and it gets mussed up by the real salt sea, and so do flat, old scows, honest and rough and sea-goi

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A Whiff of Acacia

A Whiff of Acacia

In Connecticut now, and in Illinois and in Utah too, it is lilac time. Lilac time—I’ll stop, if you please, to say the words over lovingly. In San Francisco now the lilacs are in bloom but it is not lilac time. In Golden Gate Park the rhododendrons are blossomed into gorgeous mounds of color but they are not an event in San Francisco, only an incident. In “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” set in the mountains of Virginia, they are the dominant background. Poppies and lupine and many others are th

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It Takes All Sorts

It Takes All Sorts

“Hey, hey,” called the tall, nervous man with the fat, little wife, waving his arms at the conductor for fear he would be carried past his corner. “It takes all sorts of people to make a world,” remarked the sensible-looking woman beside me. It is not the first time that I have been impressed with the philosophy of those words. Who said them first, I wonder. “It takes all sorts of people to make a world.” That is, if we only had one sort or even a number of sorts we would have no world. To make

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The Fog in San Francisco

The Fog in San Francisco

Sunsets in the desert, spring in New England, black-green oaks lying on tawny hills in Marin County, fields of cotton on red soil in Georgia, surf on the rocks of Maine, moonlight on Mobile Bay, and the way the fog comes upon San Francisco on summer afternoons. Sometimes when all its hills lie sparkling in the sunshine and children play on the sidewalks, young fellows whistle, business autos go zippity-ip around the corners, and the whole city is out of doors or hanging out of the windows, then

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A Block on Ashbury Heights

A Block on Ashbury Heights

Sometimes in the afternoons when the mothers are out shopping and the youngsters have not yet returned from school our block looks so deserted and wind-swept and dull. The houses are so much alike. They all sit there in a row with their poker faces like close-mouthed Yankees refusing to divulge any secrets. But from the bow-windows where I sit and type, in spite of their silence the house fronts have become individualized into so many human stories. I never stop to look out but somehow the stori

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The Greek Grocer

The Greek Grocer

He had just opened a store on our street and in a Lady Bountiful spirit of helping him out, I went in to do a little trading. I told him I would like a can of baked beans. Baked beans, but he didn’t seem to understand. So pointing over the counter where they were in plain sight, I said with all my teeth and tongue: “Baaked Beens.” He followed my finger. “Oh,” he said correcting me, “You min Purrk ind Bins.” That was the beginning and for weeks that Greek has been correcting my pronunciation. The

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Billboards or Art

Billboards or Art

If you like billboards you are not artistic. Take it or leave it. That’s the criterion. It’s not my verdict. Ask those who know, the literary clubs, the art clubs and our distinguished guests from Europe. I can remember away back when Pierre Loti visited this country and was so shocked at the glaring billboards that marred the beauty of New York harbor and blinded his continental eyes with their gaudy colors. Now, I would like to be both artistic and fond of billboards. I can’t be both. So I cho

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Golden Gate Park

Golden Gate Park

Enter slowly, by foot is much the better way, and join the long, loitering procession. Black-green foliage, the curious old-green of trees that never wither and never resurrect. Something very foreign or is it San Francisco? Cubist effects of the horizontally-lined cypress, vertical lines of the eucalyptus, and the soft, down-dropping of the willow trees and pepper. Women on the benches tatting, reading, resting. A retired Kansan widower passes, glances sidewise. Well, no harm in looking at a co

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Extra Fresh

Extra Fresh

Some one in San Francisco keeps hens. Not only hens, but a rooster. I distinctly heard him crow. It was in the very early morning, and like Tennyson’s “Queen of the May”—lying broad awake—“I did not hear the dog howl, mother, but I did hear this crow.” It is Ralph Waldo Trine, I think, who says that “So long as there remaineth in it the crow of a cock or the lay of a hen a city is not a city.” But I would not base the citifiedness of a city upon the mere crow of a cock any more than on the censu

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On the California-Street Car

On the California-Street Car

She was a little black girl about four years old, riding with her mother on the observation seat of the California street car. She was a little black girl and didn’t know the difference—she might have been as white as milk for all she knew. She was poor but daintily dressed beside being very neat. The rest of us in the car were grown-up and white—well-dressed people who looked as though we knew a lot. We were all riding along; we and the little black girl with her mother, when suddenly we came o

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Western Yarns

Western Yarns

The men around the corner store at home were forever telling stories about the big yarns that Were told in the West. One of the favorites was that ancient one of the Western town that was so healthy they had to kill a man to start a graveyard. Having been brought up on this tradition of Western yarns, I have been surprised since living here never to have heard a single story that didn’t sound perfectly reasonable. But it has dawned on me recently that the “Yarns” are true. Therefore, they are no

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Mr. Mazzini and Dante

Mr. Mazzini and Dante

Mr. Mazzini will never be rich. He takes too much time for philosophy and gossiping with the women, and he loves a joke too well, and his heart is too kind. He is a universal type, as old as the world is old, Theocritus knew him well. “You pick me out some good cantaloupes,” I said with deadly tact, and Mr. Mazzini answered that it couldn’t be done and that melons were like men, that there was no sure way of picking them out for their kindness of heart. Then he took time over the melons to tell

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On the Nob of Nob Hill

On the Nob of Nob Hill

On the very nob of Nob Hill there is the ruin of a mansion which was the Whittell home. In ruins it still is a mansion. In ruins it is grander than any place around because it belonged to the grand days. There is an enclosed garden in the rear after the fashion of old Spanish gardens in Monterey. And between the boards that cover a door in the high wall, one may peek and catch a glimpse of hollyhocks in a row and roses running wild, trellises of green lattice and ghosts of beautiful ladies havin

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