Next, a brigadier general arrived to set up a proper military establishment. A harbormaster was appointed—a figure of increasing importance because of the armada of ships that was piling up, quite literally, in the roads immediately offshore. More than 200 sailing vessels were lying off the quayside in July 1849, almost all of them abandoned by the crews who had sailed with them, their sailors gone a-digging up in the placer streams. By the end of that same year the number had risen to 600, with most of the ships moored or abandoned. Grainy pictures of the time show behind the town’s buildings a huge forest of masts reaching as far as it is possible to see.
Moves were then made to elect a proper state government, and the city thought about hiring police to keep some kind of control on the free-spending, ill-mannered miners who returned from the mountains with gold dust in their bags and mischief on their minds. Gambling houses opened, saloons proliferated in vast numbers, and, inevitably, whorehouses—a scattering at first—started up in business. These, which would eventually number in the hundreds, were staffed by professional women from all over the Americas, who answered the call to come to California every bit as eagerly as did the men.
San Francisco had its beginnings as a city “raised from the ground as if by magic,” with its buildings “hatched like chickens by artificial heat.” As many as a hundred new buildings a month went up in 1849, and the demand for them was so great that a small shop might rent for $3,000 a month and a modest tent in a good location might go for $40,000 a year. A more substantial building on what was formerly the plaza but which in honor of the first visiting U.S. Navy vessel had been renamed Portsmouth Square,* was rented in 1850 for $75,000; its owner might have considered himself fortunate to get $200 in annual rent just one year before.
Most of the arrivals stayed in flimsy canvas tents, forests of which went up on the slopes of those hills deemed too steep for the wooden frame buildings being built on the shore. At night they presented an extraordinary sight, lit from within by oil lanterns—a sailor moored in the harbor reported that the hillsides looked like “an amphitheater of fire.” A New York manufacturer named Sydam came to town offering canvas houses that weighed 125 pounds and could comfortably—his word—sleep twenty, with twelve in hammocks and eight on the floor. But the rains, the cold Pacific winds, and the gritty miasma of breeze-borne sand (for sand dunes lay everywhere to the west of the little settlement, stretching six miles to the sea) made tent life far less of an idyll than Sydam advertised. Moreover, he can hardly have anticipated the effect on his invention of the feral donkeys that wandered down from the hills and did their bit to add to the universal misery—by chewing at the tent canvas, biting down guy ropes, and in one case breaking into a tent that was occupied by a snoring drunk and munching away half of the man’s hair.
The town was filthy in those early days, and known primarily for rats, fleas, and piles of empty liquor bottles. Cholera outbreaks were dismayingly frequent, and in the early years it was common for the bodies of the dead to be abandoned by the shore, in the hope that the tide might carry them off into the open sea. There was little by way of indoor plumbing, and the water supply was halting, with what there was invariably polluted. Gaslights had been invented but not installed, and so the city at night was dark and dangerous, crowded and unhealthy—and yet regarded with tolerant fondness by all who looked back on those heady first Gold Rush years. Those who survived the very early San Francisco were armed with a pride that was quite unknown to the later immigrants.
Lateral thinking had more than a little effect on the housing shortage. It was of course perfectly reasonable to use some of the abandoned ships crowding the shoreline for housing or for prisons (one, the British China clipper Euphemia, was anchored off the main city wharf and used as a holding pen from 1850, especially for the state’s insane). But some bright spark decided that rather than keep the vessels anchored off in the roads—which meant that the patrons had to be rowed back and forth in lighters—it would make sense to sail them in fast, ram them head-on into the muddy shoreline, and berth them there permanently. All they then had to do was hammer together a frontage that would offer the illusion that the ships were in fact properly made buildings.
The best known of these ship buildings was the Niantic Hotel, a former North Pacific whaler that its skipper decided to employ hauling Gold Rush immigrants up to San Francisco from the west side of the Isthmus of Panama. He made only one journey: The ship was becalmed en route for weeks, scurvy broke out, and the moment they eventually arrived all the passengers and his crew jumped ship for the mines. The skipper promptly sold the hulk to a firm called Gildmeister, Fremsey and Co.—a name hinting at both the town’s growing prosperity and the geographical spread of the newcomers’ national origins—which used it as a warehouse, and then built shacks on deck to turn it into a hotel. It eventually burned, as such ships often did, after which its hulk was rammed up on shore and used as the foundation for the hotel that would remain in place until it was demolished in 1872. Pictures from the time show the Niantic standing foursquare among other businesses—the Boggs Liquor Store, the Tract Society, Colonel Tibbs the Dentist, the Eagle Saloon, and Bubb, Grub and Co.—each one of them ships, some still recognizably nautical, with bowsprits and masts and rigging, others storefronted, as if they had been standing for years on any main street anywhere in America.
Throughout the 1850s the ever-expanding city began to be plagued by fire—hardly surprising, with the highly flammable combination of flimsy buildings, stiff winds, abundant fuel oils, and strong drink. The first blaze to cause a good deal of damage came on Christmas Eve 1849, after which there were three outbreaks in 1850 and two more in 1851, all of which consumed tents and frame buildings, and even the newfangled iron-framed (but “Rustproof!” said the makers) prefabricated houses that were being shipped out from New York at a freight cost of only $18 apiece. Given that the houses cost as little as $100 to buy, it seemed likely that these might provide an affordable safe alternative to the fragile tinderboxes of before. But no: It turned out that in a fire the metal holding up these new structures “got red hot, then white hot, then fell together like card-houses,” and that their metal doors expanded in the heat and couldn’t be opened. People were often found trapped inside—and all of a sudden fire casualties started to become a significant feature in the city death rolls.
After a fire in May 1851 wrecked eighteen city blocks, did damage worth $12 million, and killed scores, the city decided it should have a properly organized fire department. Hundreds of young men responded, and by 1852 fourteen volunteer companies began competing to be the fastest to respond and the quickest to douse. But the hope that combining a passion for flammability with testosterone might solve the city’s fire problem turned out to be a vain one. A furious fight broke out among three of the companies that were competing to be first to one particular fire, and there were broken bones and one man hurt by gunfire. The event prompted the city to authorize a paid fire department instead. At the same time City Hall’s bureaucrats began to write building codes to protect structures against the ravages of flame, hot gas, and high temperatures. As we shall see, such reforms did little to help, but they at least imposed some kind of order on what for a few heady months was little more than a Wild West shambles.
And the fires also played a part in giving San Francisco a particularly appropriate official seal. In 1859, after presiding wearily over a ceaseless rash of destructive blazes, City Hall commissioned a designer to draw a stylized phoenix rising from flames, and to place it front and center of a shield that had the more obvious and expected motifs of gold mines, sailing ships, and patriotic flags. The seal also carried the motto Oro in Paz, Fierro in Guerra: “Gold in Peace, Iron in War.” But it is the phoenix that remains in the mind—a symbol that would be cited many more times, and not least, of course, in the spring of 1906.
For a while the new building codes helped to slow the pace of the city’s expansion just a little. Contractors became more
circumspect about how they built, structures had to be made with more caution, and the more prosperous citizens began to put up bigger and more ornate houses and offices. Generally the pace of the city’s growth assumed a sedate character—not least because the finds of gold started to wind down, though the great silver strike among the blue clays of the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859 perked matters up again, transforming scores of city beggars into fat and urbane rich men.
The steadier pace of growth did not, however, change the habits of those living there, which were as dissolute as ever, with San Francisco enjoying or suffering a reputation as the wildest city in the country, one that aspired to be the Paris of the outer West, but in fact looked and felt much more like the docksides of Marseilles. The local newspapers noted that in the first six years of the 1850s no fewer than 1,400 murders had taken place, and only three of the murderers had been hanged. Vigilance committees sprang up to try to apply rough street-corner justice to the worsening situation, and hanged a handful of supposed criminals after hasty trials at drumhead courts. During the 1850s San Francisco’s notoriety was fully and widely established; it was a den of iniquity, a lawless town where men in unrestricted mobs drank, gambled, and whored their way from street to street, unchecked by family, by conscience, or by law.
The area on the seaside of Portsmouth Square was without rival the most louche part of town; and because some visiting sailors thought its reputation for iniquity and chicanery bore more than a passing resemblance to the pirate-infested coast of North Africa, where the truest villains were the Berber cameleers, it quickly came to be known as the Barbary Coast. It was here that a uniquely San Francisco patois was born: The music halls, where male passersby were first lured by extravagantly painted women, were known as melodeons; if the customer could be persuaded—and strong drink helped—to abandon the singing for sex, he would be taken to a whore’s crib; if he preferred to keep drinking, running up his bar bill to a level where it was impossible for him to pay, his debt would be passed on to a crimp, a loan shark who would sell his indebtedness to a sea captain, who would in the end come looking for the unfortunate and take him off to work onboard ship, as the only known way to reduce the balance. And if debt was not persuasive enough, then the captains could rely on the violent mickey-and-blackjack administering thugs of San Francisco, the so-called shanghai men, who for a small fee would deliver a hog-tied and unconscious bundle to the deck: When the poor man awoke he would find himself somewhere out in the cold Pacific, heading west for China, and working on a ship whether he liked it or not.
The word hoodlum comes from the San Francisco of the time as well. Some say it was an anti-Chinese cry of “huddle ’em,” a signal for mobs of ne’er-do-wells to surround and harass an innocent “Celestial,” as they were widely called; other etymologists claim that the word comes from a seldom-seen German term for “ruffian.” Whatever the word’s origins, the fact that it was born in San Francisco says much of the temper of the times. There were indeed rough men down by the new town’s waterfront—hoodlums who would shanghai you, or who would guard a working girl’s crib, or tip off the crimp with a name like Blinky Tom or Whale-Whiskers Kelley in the melodeon—all the kinds of nuanced nastiness that for much of the closing quarter of the nineteenth century infected the unsavory streets of the Barbary Coast.
The Bonanza Kings, as the new Comstock silver millionaires were known, made certain that San Francisco also offered the nouveaux riches an array of glittering pleasure palaces that were attuned to their own peculiar needs. So fine restaurants and music halls and bars and high-class brothels sprang up, and the streets of the new plutocracy were fast being paved with cobbles; handsome signs were being put up with their names—Montgomery, Clay, Sacramento, Commerce, Battery, and California among the first—and the luxury of piped water brought in from small reservoirs was being offered to all residents fortunate enough to live in the gleaming center of the new city.
AS THESE TRAPPINGS of major metropolitan status continued to gather, the city’s wild reputation began to abate, and a kind of bohemian normality gradually settled on the place. By 1863 there were 115,000 people living within the city boundaries, and very slowly the proportion among them of women—which had been as low as one in seven just ten years before—was edging up to its customary level. Large hotels were thrown up—sixty in all by the time of the American centenary in 1876—some of them, like the Palace, with its courtyards and marble splendors, ranking with any in the world. There were something like 600 saloons, 40 bookshops, a dozen photography studios (in consequence there are today more black-and-white images of San Francisco* in archives around the world than of any other city of comparable size and standing). Omnibuses and hackney coaches took passengers around the town; some of the coaches were quite magnificent, their carriages silk lined, lacquered, and brightly painted, their horses enormous and covered with leathers tricked out with Comstock silver.
Fleets of huge smoke-belching ferryboats began regular services across the Bay to Oakland and Berkeley, stopping en route to discharge passengers at Yerba Buena Island. (This island, the only major relic of the city’s original name, is still preserved today.) Eventually, given the importance of the cross-bay ferries, an imposing terminal building would go up: The Ferry Building, with a 200-foot clock tower modeled on Seville Cathedral, remains today, having survived every earthquake and fire that has afflicted the city since.
In time the small rowboats that took passengers around the shoreline and down the soon-to-be-filled-in creeks (whose landfill would make them the most earthquake-vulnerable parts of town) were replaced by small railways that brought people in from the growing suburbs. In 1870 the mechanisms that would in due course allow the creation of one of the city’s most enduring icons, the cable car, were invented and duly patented (and very forcefully protected). The first of these cars began to run along Clay Street in 1873, using A. S. Hallidie’s patented grips, levers, sheaves, and pulleys; it successfully hauled carloads of passengers up and down the rather steep (though not particularly high) hills, making light of gradients where no horse could possibly tread. Before long the cars were everywhere, their clanging and the steely singing of their cables beneath the roadway part of the city’s magical soundscape to this day.
Soon there were an opera house, an art gallery, a synagogue, and various asylums for the troubled and afflicted, and in time there were public gardens galore. The open space where rallies were held, sympathetic to the Union cause in the Civil War, was left open after the passions of that conflict had subsided, and not unreasonably called Union Square. But it was not a pleasure garden, not one of the “lungs of the city” that planners elsewhere thought important.
The city had expressed a need for true public spaces as early as 1855, when one of the newspapers denounced the successor to the old Mexican plaza, Portsmouth Square, as a “barnyard for human and other cattle” that was “an eyesore and a disgrace.” There were envious glances back east, where Frederick Law Olmsted was just then starting work on Central Park in New York, and Boston was seeing the beginning of its public gardens. But at first it was left to entrepreneurs, rather than to the city, to provide green spaces, and so before long there was Russ’s Gardens, begun by a local jeweler; there was the Willows (next to the Willows Beer Hall) and the privately run City Gardens, which offered lawns lit by Chinese lanterns on the estate of a businessman named Shaw. All provided some relief for the swelling throngs on the city streets.
One of the best known and longest lived of these privately run gardens was Woodward’s, started by a man who made a small fortune out of a hotel he opened in 1852 down by the seafront on Sacramento Street, which he called the What Cheer House. Robert Woodward was from Rhode Island, had come to California in 1849 by sailing around the Horn, and had started What Cheer as a workingmen’s hotel that eventually had a thousand rooms, most of them going for as little as fifty cents a night, providing that the establishment’s strict rules of temperance were observed. r />
He made a fortune thereby, brought out his family from Providence, and built himself a large house on Mission Street—which had itself been built on the old plank route between Yerba Buena and the Mission Dolores. He stocked its gardens with exotic plants and a collection of even more exotic animals. He opened an art gallery—filling it with impeccable copies of old masters—and started a lending library near his hotel. Eventually, being at heart a philanthropist of the deepest dye, he opened up his own gardens to the public. Inside the walls there were a boating pond, a lake with sea lions, enclosures with panthers and kangaroos, camels, tigers, opossums, and monkeys—every imaginable plant and animal and item of astonishment and delight to please the thousands who poured in daily to see it all. People flocked to fire-eaters from India, acrobats from Japan, an eight-foot-tall Chinese man, and a dancing bear called Split-Nose Jim. For the next twenty years Woodward’s Gardens were San Francisco’s equivalent of Copenhagen’s Tivoli. It was only when the city created the even larger, more remarkable (and still surviving) expanse of meadows, gardens, and lakes known as Golden Gate Park that the citizenry permitted Woodward to close his creation in 1894, and to have the place leveled and turned over to the great commercial buildings that still occupy his tract of land today.
AND THEN THERE WAS Tangrenbu—Chinatown.
The Gold Rush had attracted men from everywhere. According to one of the drier accounts, there were “Indians, Spaniards of many provinces, Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Malays, Tartars and Russians.” There were people “from Chile and France and China, Vermont and Tennessee,” wrote another. Or, as the Annals of San Francisco put it, there were
the people of the many races of the Hindoo land; Russians with furs and sables; a stray, turbaned, stately Turk or two, and occasionally a half-naked shivering Indian; multitudes of the Spanish race from every country of the Americas, partly pure, partly crossed with red blood—Chileans, Peruvians and Mexicans, all with their different shades of the same swarthy complexion, black-eyed and well-featured, proud of their beards and moustaches, their grease, dirt and eternal gaudy serapes or darker cloaks.