Tag Archives: California

My Visit to 1920s–and 2020s–San Francisco

6 Replies

The podcast on children’s books that I’ve been cohosting since May has been taking up all of my social media energy, but I’ve finally gotten sufficiently on top of it to return to the world of 100 years ago and revisit San Francisco, where I spent a few days in July.

Like everyone else, I’d heard the horror stories about what’s happened to the city, which I had last visited in 2004. Since my trip, I’ve seen some articles along the lines of “it’s not really as awful as they say,” or at least “it’s more complicated,” but at the time my expectations were along the lines of “urban hellscape.”*

So, as I strolled with my husband around neighborhoods like Nob Hill, North Beach, and Chinatown, I was pleasantly surprised to see a totally normal city. Not a utopia, but the same mix of commerce, bustle, and urban problems that I’m used to in Washington, D.C. If tourists were staying away in droves, no one had told the throngs of people at Fisherman’s Wharf or on the twisty-turny street.

After a week in Sacramento, with its downtown full of empty storefronts and sidewalks empty of people aside from the homeless, San Francisco seemed positively vibrant.**

On the bus from Sacramento to San Francisco, I had prepared for my visit by doing some reading from 100-year-old magazines. In an article in the January 1922 issue of Illustrated World called “San Francisco Fifteen Years After the Fire,” Charles Geiger recounted the city’s impressive recovery following the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires that destroyed much of the city. “When one gazes about and observes the new and beautiful city of San Francisco, which fifteen years ago was a barren desolate waste following the catastrophe which befell it,” Geiger wrote, “he is filled with admiration for the bravery and the daring of the people of this great western city who at a cost of half a million dollars have made a remarkable record of achievement.”

Illustrated World, January 1922

The most notable of these achievements, Geiger says, is the reconstruction of the Civic Center, which includes the City Hall, the city’s “chief architectural adornment,” the Exposition Auditorium, and the Public Library.

Illustrated World, January 1922

I couldn’t wait to check out this marvel of civic rebirth. My husband agreed to come along. I would have felt more comfortable with a Lonely Planet guidebook, with maps orienting you by neighborhood and text warning you of dangers. Bookstores in San Francisco turned out to be surprisingly few and far between, though. I did go to the legendary City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, but when I asked the young man at the checkout if they had guidebooks he looked at me like I’d asked for the Colleen Hoover fanfiction section. Guidebooks for where, he asked.

“San Francisco,” I confessed, unmasked as a tourist.***

“There might be some over there,” he said, pointing to a nearby shelf. And there were a few, but they were all along the lines of A Guide to San Francisco’s Ghosts. I didn’t want a visitation from the dead! I just wanted to go to City Hall!

So, on a Saturday morning, I put City Hall into Google Maps and got a route that went through Union Square and along Market Street. That sounded okay. Market Street was famous, right? Plus, I’d read on a blog post that one of the best bookstores in San Francisco was in the area.

Union Square was buzzing. Tourists and locals were enjoying the beautiful weather and pouring in and out of stores and restaurants. We continued along Market Street.

It didn’t take more than a block or two for us to see that something was very, very wrong. Since it was a weekend, I wouldn’t have expected a lot of foot traffic in this downtown area, but it didn’t seem like anyone came here, ever, other than the people standing around on the sidewalks, seemingly on drugs. We didn’t feel threatened, exactly. We just felt uneasy, like we had entered some postapocalyptic landscape. I don’t have any pictures. It wasn’t a place where you wanted to stand around messing with your phone, and, in any case, how do you photograph nothing? Suffice it to say that the wasteland of empty glass buildings didn’t at all resemble this photo of the area in Illustrated World.

Illustrated World, January 1922

Fortunately, it didn’t take long to get to the Civic Center area, which, while not exactly bustling, at least showed signs of life. Kids played at a playground in the square, and I wasn’t the only tourist snapping photos of City Hall.

The buildings Geiger had marveled over resembled their 1922 selves, although the new public library he wrote about is now the Asian Art Museum.

The current library, which opened in 1996, is nearby, and we paid a visit. It was a pleasant space, though fairly empty on this sunny Saturday.

The bookstore, disappointingly, turned out to be a corner of the library where used books were for sale. No Lonely Planets here. I was ready to get out of Civic Center. Let’s go to Haigh-Ashbury, I said to my husband, and put the address of a highly recommended bookstore in that neighborhood into the Uber app.

When we got to the address, though, there was no bookstore to be found. I was starting to take this personally. Luckily, it turned out that the store—The Booksmith—had recently moved a block or so down Haight Street. I spent a happy hour browsing, and added The Booksmith to my list of favorites. And I finally got my Lonely Planet, which belatedly warned me that the Civic Center area is “best avoided without a mapped route to a specific destination.”

The rest of the trip was more reminiscent of 1960s than 1920s San Francisco. We chatted with tie-dye-dressed servers at a Haight-Ashbury creperie, who told us about the throngs the previous week, when the Dead had been in town, watched drummers drumming on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park,

and visited Berkeley, a first for me.

I took in some sensational views, praise that we Cape Town residents do not dish out lightly.****

Outside the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, there’s a statue of Tony Bennett, who first sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” there in 1961. He had died a few days before we arrived, and I stopped by twice to look at the floral tributes. Both times I saw a young hotel employee—maybe the same one, but I’m not sure—sadly paying his respects.

A few days after we left, I learned that, on August 2, 1923, a hundred years minus a week before our visit, Warren Harding had died at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel. The hotel, built in 1909 after the 1875 original burned in the fire, is still there. It’s on Market Street, in a less desolate area than where we walked. If I’d been more up on my history, I could have paid a visit.

Palace Hotel ballroom, 1920, promotional material (via Wikipedia Commons)

Oh, well. If I was going to memorialize someone, I’d pick Tony Bennett over Warren Harding any day.

As for San Francisco’s future, it would be tempting to loop back to Geiger’s glowing account of the city’s rebirth and say, “If they could rebuild then, they can rebuild now.” A closer look at the reconstruction, though, reveals that, while impressively rapid, it was marred by corruption, violence against alleged looters, and an attempt by city leaders to move residents of Chinatown, which had been destroyed by the fire, to mud flats on the outskirts of the city.

I did find one source of inspiration: the Chinese community, along with Chinese government representatives, successfully fought the relocation plan. Chinatown was rebuilt, with the new buildings featuring architectural flourishes like pagodas and dragons that still define the neighborhood today. It was a local businessman named Look Tin Eli who had the idea for the design of the new buildings, but some critics have called them a fantasy of China by western architects aimed at turning the neighborhood into a tourist attraction. Still, the community activism, business acumen, and resilience that led to Chinatown’s rebirth is a story I’m glad to have learned about.

Dupont Street, now Grant Avenue, San Francisco, ca. 1910 (Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)
squiggle

*Heads up that these articles are from the New York Times and New Yorker, respectively. Both publications have a monthly quota of free articles for non-subscribers. I’m a Times subscriber, but it always irritates me when I unknowingly click on a link to a New Yorker article and belatedly realize that I’ve used up one of my six articles.

**Of course, Sacramento might have been more vibrant if the state legislature had been in session and/or temperatures hadn’t been hovering around 100. Also, a shout-out to the wonderful downtown bookstore Capital Books.

***Except who really cares? I’ve never understood why you’re supposed to be embarrassed about being a tourist, assuming you’re acting like a normal person and not an ugly-American stereotype, in which case you probably wouldn’t be embarrassed anyway. Is everyone just supposed to stay in the place they come from all the time to avoid this shameful label?

****If you’re new to this blog and thinking, “But you just said you live in Washington, D.C.,” I spend part of the year in each city.

squiggle

New on the podcast, Rereading Our Childhood:

Rereading The Owl Service by Alan Garner

Rereading The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald

Rereading A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Reading Little Witch and The Little Leftover Witch

Rereading Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers

The Uncrowned King of Bohemia: The fascinating story of a not-so-great poet

15 Replies

Illustration by Adelaide Hanscom Leeson, “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” 1905, with George Sterling as model

There I was, thinking I was all done with bad mother poems, when I discovered the worst one of all, by George Sterling–in the same issue of The Bookman, as it happens, as I found hitherto bad-mother-poem champion Anna Hempstead Branch.

Until a few months before, The Bookman had been running a series called “The Masque of Poets.” I came in in the middle, couldn’t make much sense of it, and filed it away under Incomprehensible 1918 Things. But the “Masque’s” editor, Best American Short Stories founder Edward O’Brien*, had published a book based on it, and there was a review by Bookman poetry critic Jessie Rittenhouse.**

The gimmick in “The Masque of the Poets”: each month, The Bookman ran a few poems by famous writers, published anonymously. This wasn’t much of a gimmick, as Rittenhouse pointed out—it would have been more fun, she said, to have a contest where people guessed the poets’ identities. On the whole, she was lukewarm about “The Masque,” reckoning that the poets hadn’t submitted their best work. There were some pleasant surprises, though. Like George Sterling’s poem “The First Food,” which she called “poignant and intimate.”

Portrait photograph of George Sterling by Arnold Genthe, 1904

I was skeptical. The 49-year-old Miss Rittenhouse was a big deal on the poetry scene—secretary of the Poetry Society of America and former poetry editor of the New York Times Book Review—but, poetry-wise, she was stuck in 1865.

Here’s “The First Food.” Judge for yourself.

Mother, in some sad evening long ago,
From thy young breast my groping lips were taken,
Their hunger stilled, so soon again to waken,
But nevermore that holy food to know.

Ah! nevermore! for all the child might crave!
Ah! nevermore! through years unkind and dreary!
Often of other fare my lips are weary,
Unwearied once of what thy bosom gave.

(Poor wordless mouth that could not speak thy name!
At what unhappy revels has it eaten
The viands that no memory can sweeten, —
The banquet found eternally the same!)

Then fell a shadow first on thee and me,
And tendrils broke that held us two how dearly!
Once infinitely thine, then hourly, yearly,
Less thine, as less the worthy thine to be.

(O mouth that yet should kiss the mouth of Sin!
Were lies so sweet, now bitter to remember?
Slow sinks the flame unfaithful to an ember;
New beauty fades and passion’s wine is thin.)

How poor an end of that solicitude
And all the love I had not from another!
Peace to thine unforgetting heart, O Mother,
Who gavest the dear and unremembered food!

I know—creepy, right?

I was all set to file this away for use as Worst Poem of the Month when I decided to look into Sterling’s life to see whether by any chance he killed his father and married his mother. He didn’t, but his actual story is almost as weird.

Mary Austin, Jack London, George Sterling, and Jimmie Hooper (Arnold Genthe, ca. 1902-07)

Sterling was born in 1869 in Sag Harbor, Long Island, the first of nine children of a doctor who tried to get him to become a priest—which, as we will see, would have been a very bad fit. He followed his uncle to California, worked in real estate for a while, made a name for himself locally with a book of poetry published in 1903, and moved to the sleepy town of Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1905. Sterling quickly put Carmel on the map as a center of literary, artistic, and Bohemian life, earning himself the sobriquet “The Uncrowned King of Bohemia.” An exodus from San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake increased the town’s popularity.

Sterling was no exception to the rule that all the people we’ve ever heard of from back then were friends with each other. He was the protégé of The Devil’s Dictionary author Ambrose Bierce, who followed him to Carmel, and his best friend was Jack London***. Writers Upton Sinclair, Gelett Burgess, Sinclair Lewis, Robinson Jeffers, and Mary Austin and photographer Arnold Genthe were among those who came to Carmel for temporary or permanent stays. (Okay, I’d never heard of the last two.)

Cosmopolitan, September 1907

Cosmopolitan published Sterling’s poem “A Wine of Wizardry” in 1907, and Bierce proclaimed him the heir to Keats, Coleridge, and Rossetti. Many others begged to differ. There was apparently a low bar for controversy in 1907, because this one was huge. Meanwhile, things were getting pretty wild in Carmel. There were, or so rumor had it, nude beach parties, free love (gay and straight), wife-swapping, and opium dens.

Nora May French (Arnold Genthe, ca. 1907)

Then the tragedies began. In November 1907, Nora May French, a glamorous young poet who was staying with Sterling and his wife, committed suicide by drinking cyanide that she had obtained on the pretext that she needed to polish some silver. News accounts varied as to whether French had been sleeping in the same room as Sterling’s wife. (Sterling was away.) This, and tales of French’s “nymphomaniac” ways, increased Sterling‘s notoriety. Others in the circle also met sad ends. London died following a morphine overdose in 1916 (accidental, apparently, but there were rumors of suicide), and Bierce disappeared in Mexico in 1914.

Caroline “Carrie” Rand Sterling, George Sterling’s wife, date unknown****

Sterling began drinking heavily. His wife filed for divorce in 1913, citing non-support, idleness, and dissipation. In August 1918, she too committed suicide by taking cyanide. Sterling began carrying around a vial of cyanide himself, saying, “A prison becomes a home if you have the key.” He finally took a lethal dose in November 1926, while H.L. Mencken was visiting him in San Francisco. (Yes, the Uncrowned King of Bohemia was friends with the Sage of Baltimore too. A volume of their correspondence was published in 2001.)

But let’s not leave Sterling on this sad note. He and his crowd had a lot of good times. Like when they were pounding abalone to tenderize it. This was the only time that it was permissible to sing the Abalone Song, which was composed mostly by Sterling, with contributions by London, Lewis, Bierce, Burgess, and others. There were many versions. This one is from Carl Sandburg’s 1927 folk song anthology The American Songbag:

From “The American Songbag” by Carl Sandburg, 1927

*Edward O’Brien had recently started a new feature in The Bookman called “War Echoes.” It generated a lot of mail, and the nearest post office in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts, was two miles away, so he asked the postal service to open a new post office closer to his house. And they did!

**The Bookman was incestuous like that. Rittenhouse’s first book of poetry had been reviewed in the previous issue—lukewarmly, which must have stung.

***Sterling was portrayed in two London novels that I never heard of, Martin Eden and Valley of the Moon.

****UPDATE 8/31/2024: A college professor who published a book about Sterling and his circle says that she is certain that this photograph is not of Sterling. See the discussion in the comments section.