by Gary Kamiya
There is really no place in San Francisco that conjures up the madness of the Gold Rush city, but the weird pedestrian overpass that spans Kearny Street and connects the square with the ugly Hilton Hotel at least is a good place to see where it all started. The bridge is a monstrosity and a profanation, but its strange location above the street jars one’s customary perspective enough to allow the past to appear for a moment, like the Bay Bridge emerging from heavy fog.
Here is how the authors of the Annals describe the Plaza:
Take the plaza, on a fine day, for a picture of the people. All races were represented. There were hordes of long pig-tailed, blear-eyed, rank-smelling Chinese, with their yellow faces and blue garbs; single dandy black fellows, of nearly as bad an odor, who strutted as only the negro can strut, in holiday clothes and clean white shirt; a few diminutive fiery-eyed Malays, from the western archipelago, and some handsome Kanakas from the Sandwich Islands; jet-black, straight-featured Abyssinians; hideously tattooed New Zealanders; Feejee sailors and even the secluded Japanese, short, thick, clumsy, ever-bowing, jacketed fellows; the people of the many races of Hindoo land; Russians with furs and sables; a stray, turbaned, stately Turk or two, and occasionally a half-naked shivering Indian; multitudes of the Spanish race from every country of the Americas, partly pure, partly crossed with red blood,—Chileans, Peruvians and Mexicans, all with different shades of the same swarthy complexion … proud of their beards and moustaches, their grease, dirt and eternal gaudy serapes or darker cloaks; Spaniards from the mother country, more dignified, polite and pompous than even their old colonial brethren; “greasers,” too, like them; great numbers of tall, goat-chinned, smooth-cheeked, oily-locked, lank-visaged, tobacco-chewing, large-limbed and featured, rough, care-worn, careless Americans from every State of the Union … bands of gay, easy-principled, philosophical Germans, Italians and Frenchmen of every cut and figure, their faces covered with hair, and with strange habiliments on their persons, and among whom might be particularly remarked numbers of thick-lipped, hook-nosed, ox-eyed, cunning, oily Jews.
This passage not only gives a sense of the dizzying variety of races, nationalities, and ethnic groups that filled the streets of San Francisco in 1849, it also reveals the unpleasant prejudices of its Anglo-Saxon authors—who were, it should be noted, educated and upstanding citizens. Most of their fellow Americans shared at least some of their benighted views, particularly toward “greasers”—an attitude that would make it easy for them to justify stealing the land of the Californios whose former country they had barged into.
This crazy cast—the Chilean Rosales described them as resembling a throng of revelers “celebrating a vast and noisy masquerade ball”—rushed about through the city’s streets pursuing various activities, almost all of them having to do with the making of money. Class distinctions meant nothing. Bayard Taylor noted, “Lawyers, physicians and ex-professors dug cellars, drove ox-teams, sawed wood, and carried luggage; while men who had been Army privates, sailors, cooks, or day laborers were at the head of profitable establishments and not infrequently assisted in some of the minor details of government.” Another observer wrote, “A graduate of Yale considers it no disgrace to sell peanuts on the Plaza.”
But San Francisco’s principal occupation, “the life and soul of the place,” was gambling. The metastasizing city by the cove made Las Vegas look like a convent. Its streets and alleys were packed with dozens if not hundreds of shanties and tents used as gambling houses, most with saloons. Gambling went on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The El Dorado started out as nothing but a 15-by-25 foot canvas tent, but its owners raked in so much money that they quickly erected a building. Like the other top houses, it boasted glittering chandeliers, live music, and beautiful women, whose fleshy charms were amply displayed. On their walls hung what one discerning viewer described as “French paintings of great merit, but of which female nudity alone forms the subject.” (For decades, this leering artistic tradition lived on in the 1930s-era bar called the Gold Dust Lounge on Powell off Union Square. Sadly, despite a spirited defense by the bar’s patrons and other connoisseurs of the city’s rapidly vanishing stock of semi-sleazy old joints, the Gold Dust was recently closed down—though it was relocated to Fisherman’s Wharf. The landlords’ spokesman said, “Just because they claim that Janis Joplin once vomited there doesn’t make it historic”—a statement that, if true, would invalidate the entire premise of this book.) The bright lights, strong drinks, erotic allure, and convivial atmosphere of the gambling dens contrasted sharply with the miserable hovels where most 49ers lived. For the innocent young churchgoing Americans who had flooded into San Francisco, many of whom had never been away from home before, these “hells” were sinful, shocking—and irresistible.
Miners who had returned from the diggings were inexorably drawn into the gambling houses, where they frequently lost in a night what it had taken them months of backbreaking labor to gain. They joined fresh-faced boys of good families, and whores, and ruffians, and everybody in between. To escape San Francisco without at least taking a flyer in a gambling hell was to have missed an essential part of the elephant.
Gambling went hand in hand with another favorite San Francisco pastime, drinking. Undeterred by the fact that whiskey cost $30 a quart, the new San Franciscans imbibed the way they did most things: as if there was no tomorrow. In one of the wittier books about the Gold Rush, Mountains and Molehills, the English adventurer Frank Marryat wrote, with a noticeable lack of moral disapproval, “Drinking is carried on to an incredible extent here; not that there is much drunkenness, but a vast quantity of liquor is daily consumed. From the time the habitual drinker in San Francisco takes his morning gin-cocktail to stimulate an appetite for breakfast, he supplies himself throughout the day with an indefinite number of racy little spiritous compounds that have the effect of keeping him always more or less primed.”
A city full of hot-blooded male adventurers in the flower of youth, far from the censorious eyes of authority figures, who had been supplying themselves throughout the day with an “indefinite number of racy little spiritous compounds”—surely one of the most mouth-watering descriptions of a taste ever penned—was a city sorely in need of women. But women of any kind, particularly “respectable” ones, were rare at first. In the first half of 1849, only 200 of the 10,000 immigrants who arrived in California were women. But the red-light districts of the world did their best to fill the need.
The first prostitutes to arrive in Gold Rush San Francisco, in 1848, were almost all from Mexico and Central and South America. They set up shop in a tent city on the southern slope of Telegraph Hill called Chiletown. Their American sisters began to arrive in numbers in the summer of 1849, when the first Cape Horn ships made harbor. Until then, there had been so few women in the city that a reported sighting of one would empty a saloon. Not surprisingly, they could make a staggering $200 a night. In Mud, Blood, and Gold: San Francisco in 1849, historian Rand Richards estimates that the total population of San Francisco at the end of 1849 was 20,000 to 25,000, of which only 1,100 to 1,200 were women—700 of them prostitutes. “Women were so scarce that men would take off their hats to the lewd women of the town,” an observer wrote, although Spanish-speaking women were not afforded the same respect. (“The lewdness of fallen white women is shocking enough to witness, but it is far exceeded by the disgusting practices of these tawny visaged creatures” was a typical comment.)
This tolerant, even welcoming, attitude toward “the fair but frail,” as prostitutes were euphemistically called, is displayed in an item that ran in May 1850 in the Alta California, the daily newspaper (California’s first) that was born from the merger of the California Star and the Californian. Beneath arguably the best headline ever penned by a San Francisco editor, “Enlargement of Society,” the story said, “We are pleased to notice by the arrival from sea Saturday, the appearance of some 50 or 60 of the fairer sex in full bloom.” But only four months later the editors apparently
decided that the enlargement of society had persisted for an unhealthily long time, for they dumped a bucket of rhetorical ice water over themselves and their readers. “We must confess our regret at the perfect freedom and unseemly manner in which the abandoned females … are permitted to display themselves in our public saloons and streets.”
Prostitution helped inaugurate the proud San Francisco tradition of cosmopolitanism. By the end of 1852, it was said that there was not a single country in the world that was not represented in San Francisco by at least one prostitute—a fitting start for the city in which the United Nations charter was signed.
The few “honest women” in San Francisco were treated as virtual goddesses. Men would swarm around them, tip their hats to them, vie with one another to carry them in their arms above the mud. Any man rash enough to do anything indecent would have been instantly killed. One woman whose husband died got three marriage proposals in a week. Children were even rarer and more treasured. Grizzled miners would stop what they were doing, tears in their eyes, just to look at a child or tousle its hair. (One of San Francisco’s first literary stars, Bret Harte, wrote about such miners in his most famous story, “The Luck of Roaring Camp.”)
For the vast majority of 49ers were not loners, nor—despite their temporary predilection for booze and gambling—hardened reprobates. They were ordinary young men. Some had fled stifling lives or trouble of one sort or another, but most just came to get rich, or at least to make more money than they could at home, and have an adventure while doing it. Very few of them planned to stay in California. They had left mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues behind. They intended to return to them as soon as they had made their pile. And now that they found themselves at the other end of the continent, many of them were desperately lonely. Their poignant letters home are filled with worried questions about their loved ones, confessions of how homesick they are—and plaintive appeals to write.
Mail was the lifeline, the only connection the men in San Francisco had with the people they had left behind. As J. S. Holliday notes in his classic study The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience, the exchange of letters between them “began a dynamic process by which the entire nation was emotionally involved in the rush to California.” In October 1849, the San Francisco post office was buried in 45,000 letters. In one month in the peak year of 1852, 45,000 letters came into San Francisco on ships and 40,000 went out. So desperate were San Franciscans for mail that they would stand in line all night at the post office when the Pacific Mail steamer was due.
It was inevitable that such a place would produce violently different reactions—sometimes in the same person. The 49er Isaac Baker wrote, “San Francisco. ‘A beautiful country, romantic scenery, excellent harbor, a fine climate and plenty of game. This is the place for me in the winter season,’ thinks I as I came on deck and looked around on the morning after we anchored. ‘It’s the most degraded, immoral, uncivilized and dirty place that can be imagined, and the sooner we are away from here the better for us,’ were my thoughts five minutes after being landed on shore!”
Not a few visitors shared Baker’s second opinion. In an almost absurdly bitter diatribe bearing the thumb-on-the-scales title The Land of Gold: Reality vs. Fiction, Hinton Rowan Helper wrote of California, “We know of no country in which there is so much corruption, villainy, outlawry, intemperance, licentiousness, and every variety of crime, folly and meanness. Words fail us to express the shameful depravity and unexampled turpitude of California society.” His opinion of San Francisco was equally glowing: “Degradation, profligacy and vice confront us at every step … Nature wears a repulsive and haggard expression.” With ponderous sarcasm, Helper concluded, “I may not be a competent judge, but this much I will say, that I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtesans, here in San Francisco, than in any other place I have ever visited; and it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are attainable in America.”
Little did the unhelpful Helper know that the lines he intended as a mortal insult to San Francisco would be so proudly embraced by its citizens that they would practically end up inscribed on City Hall.
Chapter 27
The Balcony
Larsen Peak, Golden Gate Heights, 14th and 15th Avenues
I don’t remember the first time I saw Larsen Peak. It was probably while driving down Lincoln Way with my dad when I was a kid. I vaguely remember thinking, “That’s a weird hill.” When I moved to San Francisco and began exploring the city, I noticed it again while wandering around in Golden Gate Park. It looked just as weird. But I never felt moved to go up there. It was a strange, steep peak rising up for no good reason out of the Sunset District, that vast flat stucco twilight zone that runs down to the end of the continent. Its rounded top had a Dr. Seuss–like clump of trees, and it was half covered with a bunch of ticky-tacky Daly City–style houses.
In those youthful days, I went for straight beauty. I had not yet learned to appreciate the charms of the banal. That led me to ignore not only Larsen Peak but also the entire western part of the city, with the exception of the beach and Golden Gate Park. It was only when I started doing the Knowledge that I began to truly explore the city’s west side.
San Francisco is really two cities, East San Francisco and West San Francisco. Its biggest hills—Mount Sutro, Twin Peaks, Mount Davidson, Diamond Heights—form the dividing line. The western part of the city is foggy, windy, mostly flat, and covered with acre after acre of modest middle-class houses. It belongs to the ocean. And it is an acquired taste.
If San Francisco were a beach town like Los Angeles or Honolulu—sunstunned, hot, hedonistic, its beachfront architecture exuding a decaying Coney Island charm—its west side would be more immediately seductive. But San Francisco is not a beach town. Its west side is the coldest, foggiest, and windiest part of the city. Nor does the Sunset feel like a beach neighborhood. With the exception of a few zany, ramshackle houses on the Great Highway, its architecture is sober, solid, and uninspired. There are some art deco gems here and there, but mostly it’s cookie-cutter stucco boxes. And a lot of it is just plain ugly. Nineteenth Avenue, the Sunset’s main arterial, is as unlovely as they come.
And yet, the Sunset runs down to the Pacific. It is where America ends. You can see the ocean when you step out your door. The fog that sweeps over the avenues is wetter and closer to the source. The long, straight east-west streets aim at the horizon. The entire neighborhood is an infinity pool.
So it’s a very odd place, the Sunset, simultaneously dumpy and glorious. I have come to appreciate that strange cocktail. And nowhere is it mixed more piquantly than in Golden Gate Heights, the anomalous little range of dune-covered hills that ends with Larsen Peak.
The four hills that make up Golden Gate Heights—Larsen Peak (officially known as Grandview Park), Rocky Outcrop, Golden Gate Heights Park, and Hawk Hill—offer superb views, but they are remarkable for another reason. They are the most dramatic remaining examples of the great sand drifts that once covered half of San Francisco. As such, they are a unique link with the city’s pre-human terrain. To wander through the sand dunes that run down the western side of Golden Gate Heights Park is to walk across a tiny landscape that has remained largely unchanged for thousands of years.
The sand in those dunes originates in an unexpected place. Some of it comes from the sandstone cliffs at Fort Funston. But much of it comes from, of all places, the Sierra Nevada. During the last ice age, glaciers ground down granite rocks in the great range, and the resulting sediment was carried to the coast by the great rivers that were created when the ice melted. Deposited offshore, the sand was eventually carried back onto the continental shelf. The prevailing winds blew untold volumes of it across San Francisco, creating the greatest dune system on the west coast and driving the 49ers mad. Considering that
their lust for gold resulted in the devastation of California’s rivers and foothills, which were torn apart by hydraulic mining, the Sierra sand that was blown in their face is a case of what goes around, comes around.
As it swept across San Francisco, the sand piled up when it hit obstacles. Golden Gate Heights, whose bedrock is made up of radiolarian chert, was such an obstacle. The thickest chert in San Francisco is located on the exposed crags that jut out off 14th Avenue, below a huge Spanish-castle-style house.
The vibe up here is completely odd. Five hundred steep feet below, the Sunset stretches off monotonously toward the majestic Pacific. Anonymous pastel houses look out at Point Reyes. A few yards farther south, at the corner of 12th Avenue and Quintara, the surreality reaches a Magritte-like pitch. A viciously beautiful outcropping of jagged chert stands on the corner, right next to some boxy 1950s houses that look too square for the Eisenhower administration. It’s Tyrannosaurus rex meets Leave It to Beaver.
But climb the stairs to the 666-foot top of Larsen Peak—named after a kindly Dane who ran a dairy farm near here—and you can toss out your surreal cocktail, which is starting to get warm and flat, and pop the iced Dom Pérignon.
Golden Gate Heights is closer to the ocean than any other range of hills in town. It is the city’s seafront balcony. And the view from Larsen Peak, intricate and vast, is one of the finest in San Francisco. To the north, the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge are almost directly lined up, with the complex mountains of northern Marin and Sonoma behind them. The towers of downtown gleam in the afternoon light. Across a disconcertingly deep gorge to the immediate east looms heavily wooded Mount Sutro, where Ishi, the last “wild” Indian in North America, roamed during his poignant final years. To the north is the great green rectangle of Golden Gate Park, running down to the sea in all its magnificent artificiality. Beyond the Presidio is the Golden Gate strait, hidden by a bump in the terrain, an invisible gorge. Past that are the imposing Marin Headlands and dreamlike Bolinas. To the south is Fort Funston, where the city peters out amid sandy cliffs. To the west stretches the flat Sunset—restored, from this height, to its native grandeur but marred by 19th Avenue and its gas stations. And at the end of the city, the sea.
