The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1904-10-02


MIA is San Francisco. There is a le-
gend that the followers of st. Francis
objected that their saint had been
omitted in the names which the
Spanish explorers gave to various geo
graphical points, and were told that if
they would discover port or harbor it
would be named for him, and that
straightway they were guided to the
splendid harbor which Drake, in his
explorations, near as he had landed to
it, had somehow missed, and that thus
the name of their patron saint became
attached for all time to the chief city
of the State.
The first impression of the tourist in
entering San Francisco, whether he
comes, as we did, by train, or whether,
as more tourists come, across the har-
Dor by ferry, is one Of disappointment.
1t might have been made the most
beautiful city in America, if not in the
world. It is built on q series of hills
bordering a harbor which may be truly
designated as superb, and looking on
the one side upon the Pacific, on the
other upon the harbor and the noun
tains beyond. If it only could have
had time to grow! Then these hills
would have been terraced, the roads
would have wound back and forth up
their steep sides, the residences would
have overlooked one another, and
would have been empowered in the
trees which the fertile soil would so
easily have produced, and San Fran
cisco would have been the Naples of
the New World-the garden city of
America. But it had no time TO grow.
Hurriedly built by immigrants crowd
ing to the State, burning. with the
painful exhilaration of the gold fever.
a city at first of house-boxes and
tents, it has never recovered from the
misfortune of its early too great COM
mercial prosperity. 1t was laid out by
some architectural genius from the
fiat plains of the West, who knew no
way to lay out a town except in
straight streets at right angles to each
other. This necessitated climbing ac-
too steep for steam, electric,
or horse power, and rendered nces-
sary the invention of the cable-car,
and up these hills you are pulled, and
down them you are lowered, sometimes
at a pace which takes away your
breath, until you become accustomed
to the motion. Then it grows curious
ly exhilarating.
The center of San Francisco is we'll
ia r
pect, made by the enterprise of it's
It's business blocks are
dignified, and it has not as yet rear
ed those enormous narrow boxes, set
on end. which disfgure the streets of
New York and Chicago. Outside this
business center the buildings are most
ly wood. 1t is by all odds the most
wooden city 1 have ever been in, and
It's residences curiously follow one /
model. They are .ornamented with |
beads and scroll .work, in which the
designs are repeated with so little
variation that one might imagine that |
the great majority have been produced
by the same planning and saving mill,
and designed by the same carpenter.
Even many of the newer houses fol-
low this fashion, which must have
been set nearly half a century ago. I
should, perhaps, hesitate to offer this
on the domestic architecture
of San Francisco, had it not been
tersely expressed to me by a loyal San
Franciscan, who said that if the San
Franciscans would plane the orna-
ments off their houses, they would be
very good-looking structures. The
of this fashion in San
Francisco is little more curious be-
cause it is not followed in the suburbs.
Across the bay from the city are
Berkeley, Oakland, and Alameda, and
a little way down the peninsula on
which San Francisco stands are other
chief of them San Mateo.
These residential districts might be
to the Newtons at Boston.
Yonkers and Montclair at New York,
Germantown and Bryn Mayr at Phila-
delphia. The residences are modern
in their structure, individualistic in
their character, and, both in the lands
cape architecture and in the house ar
chitecture, make as attractive homes
and furnish as unmistakable evidences
Of taste and culture as are to be found
in the suburbs of any modern city.
Ones first impression is that a city /
so almost wholly constructed of wood
as San Francisco would be particular
w subject to devasting fires. Some
such fires it has known in its history,
but they have not compared in the