It is doubtless only a question of time when expanding San Francisco will absorb the cities an hour's ride across the Bay,—Oakland, Berkeley, and Alameda,—the homes now of many of San Francisco's business men.
The University of California at Berkeley draws its largest clientele from San Francisco. By the benefactions of the widow of Senator Hearst of San Francisco, this university has under way a housing perhaps the most spacious and symmetrical in the world. The structure, to cost nearly five million dollars, follows a plan chosen by experts from designs submitted after a world competition, and will crown a long hill slope, looking down on San Francisco City and Bay and out toward sleeping Asia. The allied professional colleges of the University are already in San Francisco. Its art department is in the fine old mansion of Hopkins, the railroad builder, on California Street, the home street of millionaires. A school of mechanic arts, endowed by the pioneer, James Lick, who gave the great astronomical observatory to the State University, is also under way in San Francisco.
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Another university drawing its student body largely from San Francisco is an hour or more down the peninsula from the city,—the Leland Stanford, Jr., founded by Jane and Leland Stanford and wife, of San Francisco. This university, by the way, is built, after the old mission plan of one-story buildings, about an inner court, with arcades and Roman towers and tiled roof.
LELAND STANFORD.
The city has three great working libraries, the Public, the Mercantile, and the Mechanics' Institute. Adolph Sutro, the late owner of about one tenth of the territory of San Francisco City and County, whose fine grounds out by the Cliff House have long been open to the public, left a unique collection of two hundred thousand pamphlets and volumes of rare worth, gathered for the public use. The Bancroft Library is phenomenal in that it has cornered all the original material for the history of the far West. Those myriads of manuscripts, pamphlets, and books have been indexed by experts and the library is a sort of Vatican for California.
The Bohemian Club of San Francisco, a comradery of litterateurs, artists, and lovers of the arts, is a unique expression of the æsthetic individuality of the city, and is one of its strong social forces.
THOMAS STARR KING.