No matter how busy you may be at home, you are here for enjoyment. When evening comes you want a good lecture, concert or play. We have them all—the first occasionally, the last two regularly. The newest, largest and finest play house is the
California Theater, on the north side of Bush street between Kearny and Dupont: John McCullough, lessee and manager. If there's a good play in the city, we generally find it here; if there are comfortable chairs and luxurious boxes anywhere, they are certainly here; and if there's an artist of good taste and a successful manager combined in one man, his name is John McCullough. The theater is new and spacious, having comfortable seats for over three thousand, one of the largest stages in the United States, with complete mechanical appliances, and finely-painted scenery and drop-curtain.
Metropolitan Theater.—Montgomery street, north side, between Washington and Jackson. Occasionally occupied for transient engagements, often presenting excellent plays. Has fine acoustic properties; seats two thousand.
Alhambra, 325 Bush street. This is a snug and tasty combination of theater, minstrels and opera house, usually presenting some popular and spicy blending of wit, art and song.
Maguire's Opera House.—Washington street, north side, between Montgomery and Kearny; Thomas Maguire, proprietor. This is the famous old theater in which Forrest, Kean and Booth delighted the California audiences of earlier days.
Chinese Theater.—At No. 630 Jackson street the curious visitor may witness the most curious medley ever put upon a stage and called a play. An interminable and unintelligible jargon of ding-dong, clatter-clatter, tum-tum and rattle-rattle-rattle combined with falsetto screeches, wonderful gymnastics, graceful contortions, terrific sword combats, and strange old oriental masqueradings, is what you may see in the celestial play house. Half an hour of it will fully satisfy you; but every eastern visitor must needs endure at least so much.
Museums—Woodward's.—At Woodward's Gardens, Mission street, between Thirteenth and Fourteenth. This contains over ten thousand specimens of zoology, ornithology, Indian relics, alcoholic collections, natural curiosities, ancient coins, etc., besides a beautifully arranged and finely lighted art gallery, including several rare old pictures, and a sort of floral museum in the shape of a charming conservatory, wherein fragrance vies with beauty to delight and detain.
Melodeons, Dance Halls, Beer Cellars.—We hardly anticipate that the average tourist will care to be "guided" into places under this heading, but the philosophic student of human nature, as well as the curious observer of social customs, cannot consider his knowledge of any city complete until he has personally seen and actually known, not only the highest, but the lowest, amusements extensively patronized by its people. Like all other large cities, San Francisco has its share of low haunts in which really modest, and sometimes meritorious, performances blend with a much larger proportion of immodest, meretricious and disgraceful ones.
Halls.
Platt's Hall.—216 Montgomery, east side, just north of Bush street, is one of the most popular in the city. Popular concerts, literary lectures, religious anniversaries, educational celebrations, magical entertainments, military balls and social dances, succeed each other so rapidly that there are few nights, especially in the pleasure season, when Platt's Hall does not offer something worth going to see. Henry B. Platt, proprietor.