Cool Gray City of Love
Page 24
The paradox of Golden Gate Park is that its wildness is almost completely man-made. (North Lake, part of the semi-natural Chain of Lakes and one of the most beautiful spots in the park, is an exception.) Every inch of the park had to be won, in a grinding battle that lasted years. The loss of San Francisco’s great sand dunes, a natural marvel misguidedly seen as a barren desert, is tragic. But cities always violate nature. And what replaced those dunes is a second nature of singular grace. In a city whose very existence represents a complicated, sometimes failed, but ultimately triumphant negotiation between man and the world, Golden Gate Park is the crowning glory.
Chapter 31
Hill of Hate
Pacific Union Club (the former Flood Mansion);
California between Mason and Cushman Streets
On California Street, on the summit of Nob Hill next to Huntington Park, stands an imposing brownstone mansion that houses the city’s most exclusive private club, the Pacific Union. I’ve lived in the neighborhood for almost 30 years, my kids grew up playing in Huntington Park, I’ve walked past that mansion hundreds of times, but I have no idea what, if anything, goes on in there. I’ve never even seen anyone go in or out besides tradesmen. Behind those thick stone walls, the club’s aging all-male members may be partying as inanely as Bertie Wooster and his fellow Drones, but it’s impossible for a passing plebian to know. The brown-stone’s blank walls, curtained windows, and general aura of “tradesmen use back door” are an invisible moat. The one time I dared to walk up the club’s stairs and peer in its portcullis-like entrance, I felt like Frodo trying to sneak into Mordor.
Still, the unfortunately acronymed PU Club has an anachronistic charm. Sitting on a bench in Huntington Park on a spring Sunday, with dogs and their owners milling around the splashing tortoise fountain, sunbathers lying on the lawn, and kids playing in the sandbox, the idea that just across Cushman Street retired captains of industry are drinking sherry and reading freshly ironed papers is reassuring in a retrograde sort of way, like stumbling upon a store that specializes in ascots.
But the bluebloods on Nob Hill did not always rest so easy in their club chairs. For years, the mansions on the summit inspired not bemused curiosity but venomous rage. Rabble-rousers in the depths pointed up at the hubristic towers that lined California Street and vowed to hang their inhabitants. On more than one occasion, angry mobs stormed the heights, like medieval armies besieging a lofty castle. Only one of those detested castles still stands: the brownstone on California Street. The great fire of ’06 destroyed the others. It is a fossil, the only tangible evidence of a vanished archaeological strata of hatred.
The brownstone was built by silver. In 1859, vast deposits of silver-nitrate ore were discovered on the slope of barren Mount Davidson in Nevada Territory. The Comstock Lode, as it was called, turned out to be rich beyond belief. Over the next 20 years, the mines near Virginia City produced over $350 million ($6 billion today), the greatest mining bonanza in history.
Almost all that money flowed directly to San Francisco. San Francisco investors capitalized and controlled the Comstock mines and mills, and reaped staggering profits from the tons of silver ore miners dug out of the earth. By the mid-’60s, the city was experiencing its biggest building boom since the Gold Rush.
The bonanza fueled a delirious orgy of stock speculation. San Francisco had always been a gambler’s town, but during silver’s 15-year heyday, virtually the entire population succumbed to a gambling mania unlike any it had seen before or would ever see again. What made speculating in mining stocks so addictive was that their values fluctuated so wildly. A rumor that a new vein had been found could cause the value of a mine’s stock to go up 10 times; it could plummet a week later. As a result, anyone could make a fortune literally overnight, and many did. The entire city buzzed with tales of chambermaids who bought the rooming houses they had worked in a few weeks earlier and of former ditchdiggers riding down newly fashionable Kearny Street in opulent carriages. Between January and May 1872, the market value of the shares traded on the San Francisco exchange went from $17 million to $81 million.
But the market was rigged. A few powerful men—bankers, brokers, and owners—had inside information about what was happening in the mines, and they used it to manipulate the market. When the bubble burst in June 1872 and stocks crashed, losing $60 million in value in 10 days, thousands of small investors were bankrupted, but insiders made vast fortunes.
The game’s fundamental corruption had been exposed, but so long as there were profits to be made, people ignored it. Another bonanza led to another frenzy of speculation. San Franciscans dreamed of a future of universal prosperity. But in 1875, the biggest crash of all wiped out the West Coast’s leading bank, the Bank of California, and permanently burst the bubble. (After the bank failed, founder William Ralston mysteriously died while swimming off Aquatic Park.) By 1877, according to John Hittell’s 1878 History of San Francisco, the two leading mines had lost $140 million in three years, or $1,000 for every white adult in the city.
A keen-eyed Scottish observer who had arrived in San Francisco in 1879 described this great transfer of wealth in starkly geographical terms. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “From Nob Hill, looking down upon the business wards of the city, we can decry a building with a little belfry, and that is the stock exchange, the heart of San Francisco; a great pump we might call it, continually pumping up the savings of the lower quarters into the pockets of the millionaires upon the hill.” Treasure Island, indeed.
Four of those millionaires—John Mackay, James Fair, William O’Brien, and James Flood, the so-called Silver Kings—controlled the biggest Com-stock mines. Of the four, Flood was the shrewdest. He was the ablest at manipulating the market. He became the most detested by a public that had once worshipped him. He was the man who built the brownstone mansion on California Street.
Like his fellow Silver Kings, Flood had risen from obscurity. Wisely deciding that the most bulletproof scheme in San Francisco was anything involving liquor, Flood and fellow Irishman William O’Brien opened a saloon, which they called the Auction Lunch. It quickly became popular, known for its excellent free lunch (for years, most saloons in San Francisco offered lavish free lunches) and first-rate drinks. O’Brien carved corned beef and ham in one corner, while the nattily dressed Flood presided over the bar.
Flood was shrewd and insatiably ambitious. He picked up bits of information from brokers who stopped in for a drink and began to cautiously play the market. Soon he become wealthy and decided to quit bartending and open a brokerage house around the corner. He and O’Brien met Fair and MacKay, formed a firm, and in 1872 bought some unproductive properties in the Comstock called the Consolidated Virginia Mine. Exploratory tunnels revealed the richest layers of silver ore ever discovered. In the blink of an eye, the four partners became unbelievably rich.
The former corned beef carver and the former cocktail mixer had completely different ways of spending their vast wealth. O’Brien, a modest man known as “the jolly millionaire,” spent his days in the back room of McGovern’s Saloon, playing a card game called pedro with old cronies from his first days in California. But Flood had more lavish tastes, and he wanted the public to notice them. He liked to drive through the city’s streets in the finest carriages, their sides polished until they shone, with coachmen in plum-colored livery. In 1878 this Donald Trump precursor built a palace in Menlo Park called Linden Towers, a fantasia of white turrets and gables, topped with a 150-foot tower, that became known as “Flood’s wedding cake.”
Flood was richer than God, but like many of San Francisco’s nouveau riche, he lacked social polish. As Hittell observed, “Nowhere else will such bad manners be found in families possessing so much wealth.” The genteel residents of Menlo Park, predominantly conservative Southerners, called Linden Towers “the beautiful atrocity” and were filled with what one writer described as a “boundless lack of enthusiasm” for having a former bartender as their neighbor.
The summit of the 376-foot-high hill had only recently become the place to live in San Francisco. In the city’s early years, the Clay Street Hill, or Fern Hill, as it was variously called, was barely populated. (The etymology of the name Nob Hill is disputed; it probably derives from “nabob,” a wealthy person.) Dauntingly steep, especially on the southern and eastern sides that adjoined the growing city, and covered with sand dunes, it was an insurmountable barrier to the city’s expansion. Horse-drawn buses and streetcars could not climb it, and its slopes were considered too sheer to build houses on. A local newspaper called it “a Sahara of desolation,” a wind-swept expanse of sand and lupine, with a few live oaks tucked away here and there.
At some point during the early years, several large families erected a shantytown on the very summit of the hill, a ramshackle collection of huts cobbled together out of scrap material and surrounded by a barnyard through which cows, pigs, ducks, and chickens wandered. This strange Dogpatch looked down from its squalid heights to the bustling city below, like a fog-swept northern cousin of the dreamlike Technicolor Rio favela in Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus.
Nob Hill’s Wuthering Slums period ended at 5 A.M. on August 1, 1873, when a 37-year-old British immigrant named Andrew Hallidie, looking down Clay Street from the summit on Jones, called “All aboard,” released the grip, and started the world’s first cable car rolling downhill into a thick mist. Three hundred and seven vertical and 2,800 horizontal feet later, the door to Nob Hill had been opened. That same year, rancher and thoroughbred breeder James Ben Ali Haggin built the first mansion on the hill, a sixty-one-room house at Taylor and Washington Streets.
Haggins’s pile kicked off a mansion-building frenzy among San Francisco’s newly, and obscenely, rich. Chief among these were a quartet of capitalists even wealthier than the Silver Kings, the so-called Big Four—Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. Flush with the staggering profits they had made from their railroad monopoly, the Associates, as they were also known, vied with one another to build the most opulent palaces, which were lined up like enormous wooden peacocks on California Street. Stanford’s 1876 mansion, where the Stanford Court Hotel now stands on California between Powell and Mason, was typical in its almost ludicrous excess: A reception room boasted an onyx table cut from a faulty pillar taken from St. Peter’s in Rome, and its picture gallery featured artificial plants filled with mechanical birds that would burst into song at the touch of a button (whether their song kept a drowsy emperor awake is not recorded). Hopkins’s 40-room mansion above it, where the Mark Hopkins Hotel now stands, was topped by so many towers, steeples, and gables that it looked like a caricature of a medieval castle.
Naturally, Flood had to keep up. In 1882 he bought a block on California Street and began building a 42-room mansion. Fittingly, the foundation of Flood’s house was quarried by what in effect was slave labor. In a story on a visit made by various poobahs to Folsom Prison, the December 11, 1883, Alta blandly reported, “A large number of prisoners are now engaged in the quarries getting out massive blocks of granite for the foundation of the proposed residences of the bonanza millionaires on Nob Hill.” Not even the pharaohs who built the pyramids had a better labor arrangement.
The construction and completion of the house was big news. San Franciscans oohed over its opulent interiors, but what really fascinated the town was the bronze fence that surrounded the mansion. The elaborately wrought fence cost $30,000 (at least a million dollars in today’s money) and was looked after by an employee whose sole job was to polish it.
In those pre–high-rise days, the ostentatious palaces atop Nob Hill were visible all over town. Today there is only one place in San Francisco where a viewer can experience the same sensation: the northwest corner of Union Square, from where the massive Mark Hopkins Hotel seems to float like a castle in the air. To the workers toiling below, the mansions on the heights were infuriating, a constant, gloating reminder that their betters were literally lording it over them.
In 1886, the year Flood finished his mansion, the Alta (which had been acquired by his fellow Silver King James Fair) ran a piece headlined “A Socialistic Gathering. Citizens Urged to Raid the Mansions on Nob Hill.” The piece opened: “Nearly 300 people assembled in the open space at the foot of Clay Street yesterday forenoon, to listen to the mouthings of several socialists and anarchists who were speaking from the elevation of a heap of garbage. The tenor of the language used by them soon became of the most rabid and incendiary character, and in the course of an hour or so the scoundrels were inciting their auditors to make a raid on Nob Hill. They were to pillage and destroy every residence in that locality and divide the plunder equally.”
That raid never materialized. But by then, popular anger at the robber barons on the hill had been simmering for more than a decade.
The year 1877, the peak of the mansion-building craze on Nob Hill, witnessed the beginning of an unprecedented American political insurgency known as the Great Upheaval. Driven by a severe economic depression, the Great Upheaval started with a nationwide railroad strike, included the Haymarket Square bombing and the Pullman strikes, and took in the rise of numerous radical labor and farmers’ political parties. In San Francisco, the Great Upheaval manifested itself in the rise of an extremely strange figure named Denis Kearney, and the political party he started, the Working-men’s Party of California.
Kearney and his followers subscribed to a kind of inverted Tea Party ideology: They were anti-capitalist demagogues who played the race card. They accused greedy businessmen of using cheap Chinese labor to replace white workers and break their nascent attempts to organize. The charge was not unfounded, and when added to the anti-Chinese attitudes already held by many whites, it led to a poisonous resentment that soon turned violent.
The Chinese, who had begun arriving in 1849, were initially accepted by San Franciscans. But whites began turning against them when railroad magnate Crocker began importing workers from Canton to blast his Central Pacific line through the Sierra Nevada, paying them far less than what he paid white workers. When the economy slumped after the Civil War, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad did not bring the expected boom to San Francisco, the slogan “The Chinese Must Go!” began to be heard. And when manufacturers began replacing white workers with Chinese and using Chinese workers to break strikes, resentment turned into hatred. In 1869, Chinese workers were used to break a strike by boot and shoe workers; four years later, at least half the boots and shoes manufactured in California were made by Chinese. Chinese also dominated garment manufacturing and cigar making. In 1873 the city had 115 cigar-making plants employing 3,480 workers, almost all Chinese.
Enraged by what they saw as an unholy alliance between capitalists and their Chinese “slaves,” San Francisco’s rapidly growing population of workers demanded a solution to the “Chinese evil.” The political clout of the workers forced politicians to adopt anti-Chinese platforms, and both San Francisco and the state passed a series of Chinese exclusion acts. In 1875, San Francisco prohibited Chinese laundries from operating in non-fireproof buildings and imposed other restrictive laws. In 1876, state Democrats tried to bolster their reelection prospects by announcing a Senate committee to investigate the “Chinese issue”; the results were printed in pamphlets and distributed widely throughout the city. The committee’s “findings” can be summed up by the testimony given by Judge David Louderback of the San Francisco Police Court: “I think they are a very immoral, mean, mendacious, dishonest, thieving people, as a general thing.”
In 1877, the Comstock mines were in terminal decline, unemployment was soaring, and a major drought had caused the grain crop to fail. Large numbers of unemployed workers began gathering at a sandlot at McAllister a
nd Market Street, listening to orators inveigh against the “coolies” and the crooked businessmen who employed them. On July 24, 1877, a speaker named James D’Arcy whipped the crowd into such a frenzy that it set off en masse to destroy Chinatown. The workers burned a laundry at the corner of Turk and Leavenworth to the ground, pulled Chinese prostitutes from their houses and raped them, and beat every Chinese man they found on the street. These were the worst riots San Francisco had ever seen.
The next day, 5,000 men gathered at Fifth and Mission. After more incendiary speeches, the mob headed into the streets, vandalizing six Chinese businesses and trying to burn the Mission Bay docks of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which transported Chinese to the West Coast. When firemen and police arrived, the rioters cut the fire hoses and climbed a bluff near First and Brannan to hurl rocks at their adversaries below. One hundred members of a just-formed citizen’s militia called the Committee of Safety, led by an old vigilante chief named William Coleman, charged up the steep hillside, swinging pick handles. After a pitched battle in which a committee man was shot and mortally wounded, the “Pick Handle Brigade” finally drove the mob off.
Kearney had been a member of the Committee of Safety, but now he switched sides and began haranguing the crowds at the sandlots, denouncing the “moon-eyed lepers” and their businessmen masters, whom he called “miserable felonious bank-smashers.” In October he formed the Working-men’s Party of California, whose platform poured contempt upon “thieves, peculators, land grabbers, bloated bondholders, railroad magnates, and shoddy aristocrats,” and vowed “to vote the moon-eyed nuisance [Chinese] out of the country.”
A weird amalgam of socialism and racism, the Workingmen’s Party intrigued no less a figure than Karl Marx. In 1880 Marx wrote, “California is very important to me, because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist concentration taken place with such speed.”