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
a feeling in the air much like that of Indian summer in the East.
January is the month when the roses are at their brightest.
So much for the strange climate, which invites out of doors and which
has played its part in making the character of the people. The externals
of the city are - or were, for they are no more - just as curious. One
usually entered San Francisco by way of the Bay. Across its yellow
flood, covered with the fleets from the strange seas of the Pacific, San
Francisco presented itself in a hill panorama. Probably no other city of
the world, excepting perhaps Naples, could be so viewed at first sight.
It rose above the passenger, as he reached dockage, in a succession of
hill terraces. At one side was Telegraph Hill, the end of the peninsula,
a height so abrupt that it had a one hundred and fifty foot sheer cliff
on its seaward frontage. Further along lay Nob Hill, crowned with the
Mark Hopkins mansion, which had the effect of a citadel, and in later
years by the great, white Fairmount. Further along was Russian Hill, the
highest point. Below was the business district, whose low site caused
all the trouble.
Except for the modern buildings, the fruit of the last ten years, the
town presented at first sight a disreputable appearance. Most of the
buildings were low and of wood. In the middle period of the '70's, when,
a great part of San Francisco was building, the newly-rich perpetrated
some atrocious architecture. In that time, too every one put bow windows
on his house to catch all of the morning sunlight that was coming
through the fog; and those little houses, with bow windows and fancy
work all down their fronts, were characteristic of the middle class
residence districts.
Then the Italians, who tumbled over Telegraph Hill, had built as they
listed and with little regard for streets, and their houses hung crazily
on a side hill which was little less than a precipice. The Chinese,
although they occupied an abandoned business district, had remade their
dwellings Chinese fashion, and the Mexicans and Spaniards had added to
their houses those little balconies without which life is not life to a
Spaniard.
Yet the most characteristic thing after all was the coloring. The sea
fog had a trick of painting every exposed object a sea gray which had a
tinge of dull green in it. This, under the leaden sky of a San Francisco
morning, had a depressing effect on first sight and afterward became a
delight to the eye. For the color was soft, gentle and infinitely
attractive in mass.
The hills are steep beyond conception. Where Vallejo street ran up
Russian Hill it progressed for four blocks by regular steps like a
flight of stairs. It is unnecessary to say that no teams ever came up
this street or any other like it, and grass grew long among the paving
stones until the Italians who live thereabouts took advantage of this
herbage to pasture a cow or two. At the end of four blocks, the pavers
had given it up and the last stage to the summit was a winding path. On
the very top, a colony of artists lived in little villas of houses whose
windows got the whole panorama of the bay. Luckily for these people, a
cable car scaled the hill on the other side, so that it was not much of
a climb to home.
With these hills, with the strangeness of the architecture and with the
green-gray tinge over everything, the city fell always into vistas and
pictures, a setting for the romance which hung over everything, which
has always hung over life in San Francisco since the padres came and
gathered the Indians about Mission Dolores.
And it was a city of romance and a gateway to adventure. It opened out
on the mysterious Pacific, the untamed ocean; and through the Golden
Gate entered China, Japan, the South Sea Islands, Lower California, the
west coast of Central America, Australia. There was a sprinkling, too,
of Alaska and Siberia. From his windows on Russian Hill one saw always
something strange and suggestive creeping through the mists of the bay.
It would be a South Sea Island brig, bringing in copra, to take out
cottons and idols; a Chinese junk after sharks' livers; an old whaler,
which seemed to drip oil, home from a year of cruising in the Arctic.
Even the tramp windjammers were deep-chested craft, capable of rounding
the Horn or of circumnavigating the globe; and they came in streaked and
picturesque from their long voyaging.
In the orange colored dawn which always comes through the mists of that
bay, the fishing fleet would crawl in under triangular lateen sails; for
the fishermen of San Francisco Bay are all Neapolitans who have brought
their customs and sail with lateen rigs stained an orange brown and
shaped, when the wind fills them, like the ear of a horse.
