There was no end of enjoyments. After the theatre
they would go to Zinkaud’s, Tate’s, the
Palace or some other of the many places of resort,
for a snack to eat and a spell under the music, which
was to be heard everywhere.
Another part of the gay life of the city was for a
private dance to keep going all night in a fashionable
residence, and at daylight, instead of everybody going
to bed, to jump into automobiles or carriages or take
the trolley cars and whizz off to the beach for a dip
in the cold salt water pool at Sutro’s baths,
and then, with ravenous appetites, sit down on the
Cliff House balcony to an open-air breakfast while
watching the ships sail in and out at the Golden Gate
and hearing the seals barking on the rocks. After
that home and to rest.
The city never went to sleep altogether. It was
“an all-night” town. Few of the restaurants
ever closed, none of the saloons did. Always during
the whole twenty-four hours of the day there was “something
doing” in the Tenderloin. No hour of the
night was ever free of revelry. It was marvelous
how they kept it up. The average San Franciscan
could stay awake all night at a card game, take a
cold wash and a good breakfast in the morning, and
go straight downtown to business and feel none the
worse for it.
It was a gay town, a captivating, piquant, audacious,
but not especially wicked city. A Frenchy, a
risque city it might justly have been called, but
it was not wicked in the sense that sordid vice, vulgar
crime and wretched squalor constitute wickedness.
It was a lovable place that everybody longed to get
back to, once having been there. A woman, leaving
it for years, watched it from the ferryboat, and,
weeping, said, “San Francisco, oh, my San Francisco,
I am leaving thee.”
Will those who left it after the fire ever get back
to their old city again? We have already expressed
our doubt of this. The old San Francisco is probably
gone, never to return. The new San Francisco will
be a cleaner, saner and safer city, destitute of its
rookeries, its tenements and its Chinatown. It
will be a greater and more sightly city than that
of the past, but to those who knew and loved the old
San Francisco—San Francisco the captivating,
the maddest, gayest, liveliest and most rollicking
in the country—there must be something impressibly
sad to its old inhabitants in the reflection that the
new city of the Golden Gate can never be quite the
same as the haven of their early affections.
Plans to Rebuild San Francisco.
