Oakland—Same dock, next slip south. City Front Cars.
Saucelito—Meiggs' Wharf, foot of Powell street. North Beach cars.
San Quentin—Davis street, near Vallejo. City Front or Sutter street cars.
Vallejo—Corner of Front and Vallejo. City Front or Sutter street cars.
HOW TO SEE SAN FRANCISCO AND ITS SURROUNDINGS.
Brief trips, or short excursions, requiring but a few hours each. Short skeleton tours in and about the suburbs, suggesting the most interesting points, with the walks, rides, drives or sails by which one may reach them—the time required and the best hours of the day, the amount of walking necessary, with the conveniences and cost.
IN AND ABOUT THE CITY.
I. Walk up Montgomery street to Telegraph Hill. If you don't feel like climbing clear to the top, follow the foot-path which winds around about two thirds up its east and northeast slopes. If you go to the top you can go down into—or if you take the lower path you will come round into, Lombard street. Walk down that to Powell; turn to your right and follow Powell north to the water and Meiggs' wharf, down the wharf if you want the bay breeze, and the bay sights from a lower level; come back—take the South Park cars; ride up Powell by Washington Square, up Stockton, down Washington—get out at the upper corner of the Plaza, walk diagonally across, notice the old City Hall on your left, stroll up Kearny to California or Bush, down which you descend one block to Montgomery.
II. Chinese Quarters.—Sacramento street, from Kearny to Dupont, along Dupont to Pacific, down Pacific to Stockton, to Jackson, down Jackson to Kearny; cast your eyes down the little alleyways and courts which cut up the blocks along these streets. Look at these signs! "Hop Yik, Wo Ki, Tin Yuk, Hop Wo, Chung Sun, Cheung Kuong, Hang Ki, Yang Kee, Shang Tong, Shun Wo," that last wouldn't be a bad one to go over the door of "civilized" rum-hole. "Wing On Tsiang, Wung Wo Shang, Kwong On Cheang," and scores of others. Most are personal names, some are business mottoes. They are generally phonographic, that is, you pronounce them according to their spelling. Here and there one suggests fun. For instance, "Man Li." Well, why not a Chinaman as well as a white man? Has the superior race the monopoly of lying? That sign is certainly creditable to the Chinese female; it says Man Li; not woman lie. Not far thence a very appropriate successor finishes the logical sequence, "Hung Hi." Certainly, why not? That's what ought to be done to any merchant who will lie. Any Man Li, should be "Hung Hi." These celestials certainly have no bad idea of the eternal fitness of things. What would happen to our Melican merchants if that rule were rigidly applied? It would'nt be much trouble to take the next census. This is the out-door glance by daylight. If you want a more thorough exploration by day or by night, call on special officer Duffield, (George W.) at 1,107 Montgomery street, who knows their haunts and ways, and can show you all you'll care to see. His long experience among them has also acquainted them with him to such a degree, that they allow him to enter and pass through their houses and rooms whence another might be shut out. In fact, he is their special officer, paid by the Chinese merchants to guard their property, and is emphatically the man to have for an escort. He can take you into their gambling saloons, into their pigeon-hole lodging houses where rag-pickers, beggars and thieves fill the air with opium smoke, then shove themselves, feet foremost, into a square box of a pigeon-hole, more like a coffin than a couch. He can guide you into crooked, narrow, labyrinthine passages through which you can just squeeze, and which you could never find nor enter without guidance; into inner courts, around which, and in the midst of which, stand old rickety, tumble-down, vermin-haunted hives of wooden tenements which rise through three or four stories, all alive with the swarming lazzaroni, packed into the smallest and dirtiest of rooms, and huddled into every dark and filthy corner.
These are the lowest and worst of their race; the infernal celestials, among whom the officer will not take a woman at all, and where it would not be safe for any man to attempt entrance alone. The approaches are so ingeniously constructed and so artfully disguised, and the passages wind among each other so intricately, and intersect each other so perplexingly, that not one in a thousand could ever find the beginning, and hardly one in ten thousand could discover the end.