Turns about Town

by Robert Cortes Holliday

Certainly I admit that roaming the streets (like everything else) can doubtless be overdone. Nevertheless, to most people, people of ordinary ways of life (like myself), I highly recommend the practice, as a most healthful exercise, as a pleasant course of profitable education, as a source of endless amusement, and as a Christian virtue. The trouble, I think, with most of us is not that we see too much of the streets but that we do not see as well as we might the streets we happen to be on. We do not read as we run.

So I would write an article In Praise of Streets.

As I was saying (when that minister switched me off), I was strolling along the Embarcadero. Among all the different sorts of streets there are none I think more beguiling than those which lie along the water front of a town or a city. The water-front streets of all seaport cities, of course, partake very much of the same character. Particularly in the picturesque aspect of the shop windows.

Here along the rim of San Francisco Bay you pass the sparkling pier buildings (now and then of Spanish mission architecture) of the Toyo Kisen Kaisha Oriental S. S. Co., of the American Hawaiian S. S. Co., the Kosmos Line, and the Pacific-Alaska Navigation Co., among others. While on New York's West Street you see the structures of the White Star Line, the Cunard Line, the Red Star Line, erected in masonry of a sort of mammoth and glorified garage architecture, funnels and masts peeping over the top; and further down the frame sheds of the Morgan Line, the Clyde Steam Ship Company, Savannah Line, Lackawanna Rail Road, Hoboken Ferry, and so on. But the tastes of the sailor man as a shopper appear to be very much the same whether he is along the London docks, on West Street, by Boston piers or here on the Embarcadero. In this the West and the East do meet.

The æsthetic taste of the water front inclines, very decidedly, to the ornate. As (presumably) a present to a lady and a decoration for the home the favorite object seems to be a heavy china plate. A romantic landscape, or a moonlight scene, or perhaps a still life study of portly roses is "hand painted" in very thick pigment on its face. Its rim is plaited in effect, like the edge of a fancy pie, and through numerous openings in this rim is run a heavy ribbon by which to hang it on the wall.

Next in prominence in the window displays of water-front bazaars is the set of bleary-colored glass ware (upper edges bound in gold) which I take to be designed for the purpose of serving punch, or perhaps lemonade—a large bowl of warty surface, with a number of cups to match hanging from hooks at its brim.

The water front obviously is strong for the amenities, the arts and the refinements of life. Bottles of perfume (with huge bows of ribbon at their necks) are in great abundance in its shop windows; as also are packets of boudoir soap (Dawn Lilac seems to be the favorite), toilet powders, silk initial handkerchiefs, opera glasses, ladies' garters of very fluffy design, feminine combs ornamented with birds in gilt, exceedingly high stand-up collars for gentlemen, banjos, guitars, mandolins, accordions (of a great variety of sizes), harmonicas, playing cards, dice and poker chips.

As for the rest of the display, it is a multifarious collection: rubber hip-boots, hair clippers, money belts, brogans, bandana handkerchiefs, binoculars, tobacco pouches, spools of thread, pitch-black plug tobacco, hand searchlights, heavy underwear, woolen sox, razor strops, tin watches, shaving brushes, elaborately carved pipes, trays of heavy rings, and here and there some quaint curiosity, such as a little model of a sailing ship in a bottle which it could not have entered through the mouth, or some such oddity as that.

One old friend of mine on West Street I missed on the Embarcadero. And that is (very battered and worn are the specimens of him which remain as the last of his noble race) the cigar-store wooden Indian.

And (I much regret) neither on the Embarcadero nor on any other water front in America do we have the rich costume ball effects that you find about the docks of London. There (as you remember) about the East India and the West India docks may be observed tall, dark visaged figures in loosely flowing robes and brilliant turbans solemnly pushing along high laden trucks and, high above on the decks of ships, hauling away at ropes.