THE WICKEDEST AND GAYEST.
The Bohemian is gone, but the spirit that founded and made it still exists, and we may look to see it rise, like the phoenix, from its ashes.
San Francisco was often called the wickedest city in America. It was hardly that, it was simply the gayest. It was not the home of purity; neither is any other city. What other cities do behind closed doors San Francisco did not hesitate to do in the open.
In Eastern cities the police have driven vice into tenements, lodging houses and apartments. San Francisco did not do that. She had certain quarters where, according to unwritten law, vice was allowed to abide, and she did not try to hide the fact that it could be found there. She was not secretly immoral; she was frankly unmoral.
She did not believe in driving her vice from the open where it could be recognized and controlled—prevented from doing any more harm than it was possible to stop—into districts of the city where good people dwell and purity would feel its contaminating influence. There were regions in which the respectable never set foot, haunts of acknowledged vice which for virtue to enter would be to lose caste.
As for its gayety, San Francisco was proud of the reputation of being the Paris of America. Its women were beautiful, and they knew it. They liked to adorn their beauty with fine clothes and peacock along the streets on matinee days. If you asked a San Francisco girl why she wore such expensive clothes, she would say, frankly, “Because I like to have the men admire me,” and she would see no harm in saying it. There was very little sham about the San Francisco women. Their men understood them and worshiped them. They bore themselves with the freedom that was theirs by right of their heritage of open-air living, the Bohemian atmosphere they breathed, the unconventional character of their surroundings. Their figures were strong and well moulded, their faces bloomed with health like the roses in their gardens. They drew the wine of laughter from their balmy California air. Sorrow and trouble sat lightly on their shoulders.
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.
AN ALL-NIGHT TOWN.
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.