Turns about Town

by Robert Cortes Holliday

But on the shore side of the San Francisco water front, my fancy was much taken by the salt sea savor of the signs of the houses of entertainment—signs reminiscent of the jovial days of briny romance, echoed in the chantey in "Treasure Island," which has as its refrain:

Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum.

I passed, among others, the Marine Café, the Navy Café, the Admiral Café, the Harbor Bar, and the Ferry Café.

I did not turn up Market Street, but went on around the nose of the peninsula, which is the foundation of San Francisco. I passed a three-masted ship, the Lizzie Vance, lying by her wharf, with men aloft in her rigging. Then I clambered up endless relays of rickety wooden stairs mounting Telegraph Hill. On either side of the ladder-like steps, ramshackle cabins bedecked with lines of fluttering "wash." Like the celebrated editor of Puck, H. C. Bunner, I might say that in my travels I've missed many a cathedral but I never missed a slum.

I went along through the Latin Quarter, slid down the steep slope of Kearny Street, and found myself wandering into that quaint little park, Portsmouth Square, where R. L. S. in his most stressful days lounged in the sun and listened to the tales of the vagabonds of the Seven Seas. Somewhat bigger than tiny Gramercy Park, hardly as large as little Madison Square, this park. In the center of the bit of rolling lawn, before a towering screen of rustling trees, the graceful little stone ship, buoyant on its curling stone wave, rides atop its tall stone pedestal graved "To Remember Robert Louis Stevenson," and on the face of which is cut that most fragrant of creeds, which (as everyone knows) begins: "To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence" ...

Behind the bench on which I rested was the establishment, so proclaimed the legend printed on its front, of Wing Sun, Funeral Director. For, as you know, Portsmouth Square is embraced on one side by prosperous Chinatown, and on the other by the Italian quarter of San Francisco. And the races, Latin and Oriental, mingle in the little park to take the air.

What here is still more colorful and picturesque, frequently there is a striking and amusing mixture of races in the costume of an individual figure. A Manchu lady, it may be, of waxen, enigmatic features, draped in flowing black silken trousers, hobbles along on high-heeled, pearl-colored American shoes. And there a slim reed of an Oriental maiden, with a complexion like a California orange, whisks by in the smartest of tailored suits—without a hat, her gleaming black hair done in Chinese fashion, long ornamented rods thrust through it, a vivid pendant of bright blossoms at one side of the head.

Sitting there, I thought of the nature of public parks and what pleasant places they are.

Splendid thing, elaborate park "systems," whereby you may go for miles through a grimy city, and move among groves and meadows and bosky dells, with inspiriting glimpses of mirror-like ponds and flashing streams all the way. And of course I enjoy the great parks of a great city.

But more appealing to me than the gorgeous spectacle of Hyde Park, or Van Cortlandt, or Fairmont, or Jackson, or Forest Park are the little places tucked here and there in the seething caldron of the town. These are a lovely department of the streets—they are the little parlors of the streets. Here calls are made, and infants sun themselves—they have, these parklets, their social and their domestic life, under the democratic heavens.