And was such a real estate proposition ever before offered to a people and turned down? For the sum of $12,000,000 the city would have acquired full title to approximately two hundred and twenty blocks, the present value of which would be hard to estimate exactly. But a rough valuation indicates that the property would be worth enough to pay the entire city debt, buy the Spring Valley Water Company’s plant, bring in the Hetch-Hetchy water supply and leave a balance large enough perhaps to settle all questions with the United Railroads and municipalize the entire street transportation system, not in the dim future, but now.
Immense revenues would have flowed into the municipal treasury from these utilities. Taxation would have become a joke. All these things are among the haggard, melancholy “might have beens.”
There were too many well-intentioned, but bigoted, reformers in the city then, just as there are now.
And the incident serves to indicate the superiority of hindsight over foresight, which has been illustrated unhappily and too often in the history of the State.
CHAPTER XX.
Burning of Harpending Block Provides Fine Spectacle, But Oversight of Owner Costs Him Dearly.
George Hearst Makes Stake on Comstock and Celebrates by Taking Joe Clark on a Trip to Europe.
I was busy with other things besides real estate investments, financing railroads, and politics, during the five years between 1865 and 1870. In 1869 I built the first fine business block on the south side of Market street, the Harpending Block, between First and Second streets. It was also in 1869–1870 that Ralston and myself built the Grand Hotel, partly on our own land, partly on land belonging to the Platt estate, which we held under 20 years’ lease.
The Harpending Block cost nearly $400,000. It was burned two years later, contributing the biggest fire in San Francisco since the ’50’s. Through an oversight of my agent, the insurance hardly represented a tenth of the loss. The Grand Hotel remained for several years the last word in the hotel business of the Pacific Coast. It was its phenomenal success from the outset that induced Ralston later to embark in the Palace Hotel project, which contributed in a large measure to his ruin. I owned a three-fourths interest in the Grand Hotel; Ralston owned the balance.