Talking of millionaires naturally suggests Nob Hill, the millionaire quarter of the Golden City. It is veritably a place of palaces. I have never seen so many splendid houses collected in such a small area. Their price in bricks and mortar alone runs anywhere from two to four millions, and yet it is a literal fact that the streets between them are grass-grown. If I had five dollars I should be inclined to bet them against five cents that this is a combination which no other city on earth can show.
The reason, of course, is that on the mountainous streets which the cable-cars climb traffic of any other sort is practically impossible. No good American walks more than a block or so on a quite level street, and you might as well ask him to walk up the side of a house as to climb Nob Hill.
Wherefore the cable-cars rush solitary up and down through a wilderness of stone-paved, grass-grown streets, flanked by palaces whose owners, I presume, have horses and carriages. How they get them down to the city and up again is one of the two or three unsolved problems which I brought away with me. Another of these is: Why did the practical American genius think it worth while to pave the precipices which they call streets round Nob Hill?
Talking about streets reminds me that they don’t say street much in San Francisco. There isn’t time. They just mention the name. This is the way my guide-booker speaks somewhat flippantly of the streets in Millionairetown:
“Upon taking the car you immediately pass through the banking and insurance district, climb up one of the steepest hills of the city to Nob Hill, passing on the left at the corner of Powell the late Senator Stanford’s residence, corner of Mason, the late Mark Hopkins’ residence.... Corner of Taylor, the residence of the late A. M. Towne.... Corner of Jones, Mr. Whittles’.... Corner of Taylor, the Huntington residence, while opposite is the residence of the late Charles Croker, adjoining, and on the corner of Jones is the residence of his son, W. H. Croker.”
“Powell” has a cable one and a quarter inches in diameter, twenty-six thousand feet long, and weighing sixty-six thousand six hundred and twenty-five pounds. Some San Franciscan cables last three months. This was expected to last about five weeks. You can understand how terrific the clutch and the wear and tear must be when you sit down on the front seat of a car carrying thirty or forty people, and see a hill half as steep again as the one from Richmond up to the Star and Garter rush down underneath you at about sixteen miles an hour. It was here that the newly landed Chinaman saw his first cable-car and made the historic remark:
“No pushee, no pullee; all same go like hellee,” which brings me, no very great distance, only a few blocks in fact, from Millionaireville to Chinatown.
Chinatown, San Francisco, is a city within a city. Go through it by night as I did with one who knows its inmost secrets, and you will find that it is also a cancer in the body corporate of a fair city (which is itself one of the most politely and delightfully wicked on earth), a foul blot on a fair land, a smudge of old-world filth across a page written by the most nervous hands and the keenest brains that modern civilisation has produced.
Geographically, as San Francisco is bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean, etc., Chinatown is bounded by “California” and “Pacific,” “Kearny” and “Stockton.” It has a population of ten thousand Mongolians, and an unknown number of Americans and Europeans, men and women, who have lost caste so hopelessly that they can no longer live among their own kind. The men certainly would not be considered fit society even for an American politician.
As for the women—well you see most of them painted and powdered and tricked out in scanty, tawdry finery, sitting in little rooms behind lattices open on to the street, and opposite these the wayfarer, western or eastern, European or American, Jap or Chinaman, may stand and peer in. There are whole streets of these latticed rooms, and the women are of all nationalities. The leaseholders pay enormous rents for the houses, and their owners are amongst the most respected citizens of San Francisco.