Rediscovering San Francisco -- South Park Was "Pomander Walk" of Bygone Era -- February 28, 2025

San Francisco Examiner, 25-November-1924

"Rediscovering San Francisco" was a series of articles about the old days in San Francisco. Idwal Jones was the writer. I worked at Third and Howard for many years, so I frequently took lunchtime walks to South Park. William Kip was the first Episcopal bishop in California. I don't believe the dimension of the park were based on Brunel's Great Eastern. The ship was longer and a bit wider. "Pomander Walk" is a ritzy area in Manhattan's Upper West Side. 

SOUTH PARK WAS "POMANDER WALK"

OF BYGONE ERA

This is the fifth of a series of articles on San Francisco. Others will follow.

If you have a mind to celebrate a quite inconsequential anniversary, you might stroll about in South Park, which this month will be seventy years old. Though its charms and trees are gone and nothing of its former grandeur remains, its history is of splendorous interest.

You will find it between Second and Third streets, just belong Bryant. The obvious jest of calling it an "oval square" was one that made George Gordon's life unhappy. Gordon was the builder who was inspired in the fifties to create a residential quarter that should be utterly ultra.

Born in Scotland, he had lived in London for years. When he came to San Francisco he perceived the dire need of a chic fauborg, a swell suburb, something like St. James Square, at home. with a dash of the Kew Gardens.

He began to develop the tract, and set up a brickyard in the middle of the project. He planned two rows, face to face, of august three-story buildings, made of brick and granite. The more you think of Gordon, the more his significance dawns upon you. The man was actually the first realtor in California -- the first to conceive of estate development on a grandiose scale.

The homes were built, and gentry of the first rank move in Senator Gwin, the Friedlanders, Peter Donahue, the Millers, the Dunphys, the Yales among them. The brickyard mess cleared up, Gordon's brains wa seized with a patriotic whimsey.

On the Thames, where Gordon's heart still lingered with fondness, Brunel, the engineer, was building the Great Eastern, the Leviathon of its day. Gordon secured plans of the ship, or at least a diagram, and pored over it. Then he pegged out the park to the exact dimensions of the upper deck of the great boat. Hence the elliptical shape of this three-quarter-acre tract, 628 feet long by about 80 at its widest part.

The idea captivated the fancy of the dwellers-by. The retired captains, can under arm, like a telescope, trod the sward with the noble port of admirals and sniffed the salt breeze from not afar off.

Gordon put up a gate at prow and stern and at either side and fenced the park about with a grill bulwark fourteen feet high. Trees, hollyhocks and clumps of boxwood flourished. To this sacred enclosure only the property owners had the keys. Hoi polloi were kept out. It was doubtful if they would have dared the impertinence of entering.

Master Reginald and Miss Cecilia frolicked on the grass and plucked primroses under the eyes of French bonnes. Doddering old gentlemen with ivory sticks and snuff boxes dozed in the sun. Linnets uttered their tuneful notes; in fact, the birds all sang with more exquisite elegance than elsewhere.

Facing the north side was the Berton house, later the Hanlons', at which balls were attended by as many as 200 couples. And just across was the Zeitska Academy for Young Females -- like the one in which Becky Sharp made her start. In Thackeray's "Vanity Fair." Here were taught deportment and drawing and music to two score adorable young ladies, tight-wasted and prone to smelling salts. Twice daily they took a stroll in the park, a rite witnessed by the young bloods.

French was taught by Miss Montaigne, a prim spinster who fed on secret griefs. She was a martinet for propriety. It was whispered she had gone over the books in the library and assigned male authors to one side of the wide room and female authors to the other.

Footmen opened the doors of the carriages, and visitors stepped into the gardens before each house, shielded from the vulgar gaze by a privet hedge. Bishop Kip made the rounds in state, and imported cooks vied with each other in preparing toasted muffins for him.

In the middle seventies the prestige of South Park waned. Rincon Hill became the fashionable quarter. Linking the two was an agreeable promenade, and Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard and R.L. Stevenson were fond of the stroll.

James Dunphy, the scion of the Monterey cattle barons, and Charles Yale, the geographer, who now whiles his time in the Bohemian Club library, were brought up in the park as little lads. In the eighties the park suffered total eclipse. Grocers and tradesmen set up shop withing the precincts. Delivery wagons, instead of going round back, stopped in front of the door.

Eight years ago, the Japanese began to settle here, and now the prevailing tongue is Nipponese. They run notion and grocery shops and hotels and young Japan frolics on the elliptical sward.

Though the city still looks after the grass, the property owners, as Gordon saw to it seventy years ago, still hold the park in the free simple of their deeds.

Rediscovering San Francisco -- Polk Street Still Clings to Its Traditions -- January 30, 2025

San Francisco Examiner, 24-November-1924

"Rediscovering San Francisco" was a series of articles about the old days in San Francisco. Idwal Jones was the writer. I haven't found the third item in the series. Dennis Kearney drew great crowds with anti-Chinese oratory. Frank Norris was a San Francisco novelist. McTeague was a naturalistic story that mostly took place along Polk Street before the Earthquake and Fire.

POLK STREET STILL CLINGS TO ITS

TRADITIONS

This is the fourth of a series of articles on San Francisco. Others will follow.

Polk street came into sudden blooming in the crinoline epoch. Little girls in pantalettes trundled hoops along the settled stretch, from the bay to Green, when this thoroughfare was known as Sparks street.

A desolate sand waste, cut by trails and wagon roads, lay from this point to Market street and the sand lots, where Dennis Kearney later held forth. In the middle sixties native Californians in easy circumstances used to hold open house at their ranches on the sand tract about where Jackson street enters.

The rise of Polk was synchronous with the development of Van Ness avenue, but when the nabobs built along the avenue, the glory of Polk street was dimmed. Thenceforth it devoted itself to trade and in the '90's its claim of having the best vegetable shops in the city was unchallenged.

Easy-going, expansive and bourgeois, and not above shuffling out in slippers on the quest of beer, the inhabitants led a pleasant life unhampered by overmuch convention.It is Frank Norris, of course, who has immortalized Polk street, and the truest pictures of its folk and ways are yet to be found in the pages of "McTeague."

Hugh Walpole, the English novelist, spent hours tramping along Polk street in seach of traces of Norris, five years ago. He wound up discouraged at the cigar stand of the late Joseph Hoffman at the corner of California. Hoffman had lived over 35 years on the street.

"You never heard of a chap named McTeague, a dentist, did you?" asked Walpoles. "Used to live on Polk street."

"McTeague? Why no, he never lived here."

"Well, he didn't exactly. A chap named Norris made him up."

"Oh, you mean young Frank? Sure, he used to hang around here a bit. He told me that he was writing a book out of his own head, and would give me a copy. But he ain't showed up since. What's become of him? I thought he was kinda bright."

Been dead about 17 years," commented Walpole. And at this anecdote of the suchness of fame, the late Joseph Conrad used to laugh so heartily that he forgot his twinges of rheumatism."

After the fire, which razed Polk street, Bohemianism began to seep in. Just above the California street corner a two-story building had been put up. Each of the rooms, being illuminated by a skylight, was ideal as a studio. Painters, artists and literary souls took possession. Hardly a famous artist in the West but stayed a while under its hospitable roof.

Theo. Wores painted landscapes here. Cadenasso, the Corot of the eucalyptus; Frank Van Slound, a notable figure painter and former director of the California School of Fine Arts, were others who early gave lustre to the edifice.

Damiano Vuletich, now in Monterey; Antonio Petrina, Arthur Mathews and Arthur Putman. Henry von Sabern, portrait sculptor and Beaux Arts man, occupied for a while two connecting rooms. Portanova, who will make the Dante statue for the local Italian colony, wrought like a Trojan, sharing the studio of Jean Jacques Pfister.

Pfister, tall and distinguished, had been the incumbent of a financial post in the Swiss legislature when he became infatuated with painting. Like Gauguin he went to other ends of the earth, painted incessantly and slowly became known. He specialized in poppy-fields and Mt. Tamalpais, and a canvas typical of his style hangs in the Hotel Somerton lobby.

After Pfister's departure, Studio 7 became the cenacle of the literary spirits in San Francisco, who foregatheredd once a week. Some of those whose names were written on the wall were George Sterling, E. F. O'Day, George Douglas, Theodore Dreiser, Walpole, Blasco Ibanez, Clem K. Shorter, H. L. Mencken, E. V. Lucas and Robert Cortes Holliday.

It was here that Sadakichi Hartman read his autobiography. Half Japanese, half Prussion, erudite and anarchistic; the first to popularize Japanese art; an intimate of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Maupassant and Walt Whitman, the narrative of his adventures was absorbing.

Nor was the lyric muse unworthily represented. Maestro Serantoni, who put on the operas at the Washington theater, George Kruger, the pianist, and others, made the old shell resound with melodies.

Two years ago the edifice was condemned as a fire-trap and pulled down to make way for an apartment house, and la vie artistique bit the dust along Polk street.

Rediscovering San Francisco -- When the Plaza Was the City's Heart -- December 29, 2024

San Francisco Examiner, 22-November-1924

"Rediscovering San Francisco" was a series of articles about the old days in San Francisco. Idwal Jones was the writer. John White Geary was San Francisco's last alcalde and first mayor. Cleopatra's Needle is an ancient Egyptian obelisk that has stood in New York's Central Park since 1881.

When the Plaza Was the City's Heart

This is the 2nd of a series of articles devoted to rediscovering San Francisco. Others will follow.

The roads that led to Rome never brought together stranger crowds than were wont to fill Portsmouth Square in the early '50s. San Francisco had already eclipsed Monterey as a port of call and trade, and the strangers that milled in the Plaza to stare at the sights and each other put one in mind of the woodcuts in the old geographies.

The town in 1852 had 7,000 Chinese. Grandiose mandarings strutted in the Square, agitating their fans and giving their caged birds an airing. Tattooed Maoris, all giants, strode along, wrapped in feathered cloaks. Russians in sables, coal-black and bearded Abyssinians; negroes in gay-colored jackets; Turks, Malays, Japanese and Kanakas were there in profusion. Dons from Castile, very pompous, tendered themselves hither.

Americans, largely from New England and Missouri, lean, lantern-jawed fellows who shunned the use of the razor as an effeminancy, made the Square their meeting place. Here it was that events of public importance came off.

Overlooking it, at the corner of Clay and Grant avenue, Jacob P. Leese, a trader, opened his home with great eclat on the Fourth of July, 1836. It was the first house built in this city, then called Yerba Buena.

A United States sloop-of-war, the Portsmouth, dropped anchor at the beach, July 8, 1846. Captain Montgomery ran up the American flag on a pole in the Square and the sloop boomed a salute. The road facing the beach was then named Montgomery street.

Another great day was in February, 1847, when the inhabitants made holiday over the rechristening of San Francisco, hitherto yclept Yerba Buena. There was sorrow and dismay over where Benicia now stands, for that thriving settlement had to change its name, as a consequence, from Francisca. Benicia hated to knuckle down to San Francisco, whose citizens felt Benicia would be a great rival in the future. In retrospect their fears seem unfounded.

Now called Portsmouth Square, after the first historic sloop, the plaza became more and more the center of life. At the southwest corner the first schoolhouse was built in 1847. Thomas Douglas, a Yankee, was the first teacher. Young San Francisco was rebellious, and he had to maintain discipline with the aid of a rawhide thong. Bearded men stuck their heads through the windows to absorb scraps of learning.

Every third building facing the Square was a gambling hell. On the Kearny street side near where the Hall of Justice now stands, was the Parker House. In 1849 gamblers rented the whole second floor for $60,000 a year.

Adjoining the Garret House, at the upper side, was the post office. When the mail came, rows of men, half a mile long, stood in line to get letters. Some expected no letters at all, but stood in line, nevertheless, and when near the window sold their places to the impatient at very nice sums. Not a few made a living this way. It was no worse than modern theater-ticket speculation.

Vaqueros, with bells, spurs and serapes, used to show off in the crowd by cavorting on their horses. Carts went through at a gallop. In the center of the Square were sweetmeat and foodstuff booths, tethering posts and parked wagons and horses. Ladies of an ancient profession rode through, smartly dressed in the height of London style, to the applause of the multitude.

The people of Portland, Oregon, made us the gift in 1850 of a flagpole, 110 feet long, and this was set up with rejoicing, Col. J. W. Geary, the mayor, made an eloquent speech of acceptance. This flagpole was so fine a sight, with the banner atop, that folk rode all the way from Monterey to see it. So straight and flawless a pole had never been seen. It was two feet taller than Cleopatra's Needle, and justly the object of civic pride and affection.

The China Boys got public presents on August 28, 1850, in the Square. Tracts, flags, books and cards of a religious nature, printed in Chinese characters, were bestowed upon them by the mayor's committee. Some of these, cherished as mementoes of their ancestors, are still treasured by inhabitants of modern-day Chinatown.

Rediscovering San Francisco -- Jerry the Oyster-Opener -- November 26, 2024

San Francisco Examiner, 21-November-1924

"Rediscovering San Francisco" was a series of articles about the old days in San Francisco. Idwal Jones was the writer. George Canning published the ironic poem "The Friend of Humanity and the Knife Grinder" in 1797. Dennis Kearney drew great crowds with anti-Chinese oratory. Blind Chris Buckley, was a powerful Democratic party political boss.

JERRY THE OYSTER-OPENER

This is the first of a series of articles devoted to rediscovering San Francisco. Others will follow.

NOT any more than the knife-grinder in Canning's poem had old Jerry "a tale to tell, sir."

For seventy years he had lived in the thick of history as it was unrolled along Kearny, Montgomery and Clay streets. He saw it all from the shop window where he sat opening oysters.

Jerry's one delusion was that he was Irish.

He was born at sea, and the captain had forgotten to put down the latitude and date.

Anyway, his father, Joe Mallorca, a Portuguese got a job as newsboy at Noisy Carrier's, 14 Long Wharf. This jetty stuck out into the bay from Montgomery street and is now all built over.

As Jerry Mullarkey, he became a newsboy at the tender age of six. He peddled the "Alta California" at the docks. This paper was nearly as big as a door and had daily and weekly editions. He had to stand on a soap box and yell at the top of his voice to make sales.

This conspicuous position brought him in three dollars a day, but the gains were offset by too many black eyes and trouncings from his rivals.

Then he got a job helping in the kitchen of the Rassette House, at the corner of Bush and Sansome. For years he developed a muscular wrist opening tin cans and paving the way for his career.

The most important date in Jerry's history was 1872. John Moraghan, who ran a fish and game house, conceived the idea of planting oysters.

Hitherto the delicacy had been imported from Massachusetts in cans. True, the enormously wealthy used to have the bivalves shipped them from 'round the Horn and blanched not at paying two dollars apiece for them.

Moraghan drove with a champagne basket full of oysters, to Millbrae, and planted them in the bay. They sprouted, fattened and multiplied. In a few years the yield was 82,000 oysters a week. San Francisco went oyster-mad.

In 1883 the yield was 2,000,000 a week.

Jerry went to work for the great Moraghan in the middle seventies. His pay was eight dollars per diem. When he first began at the Rassette House he got recompensed in doubloons, rupees, English crowns, pesos -- whatever the boss cook had at hand.

Thenceforth he achieved fame as the fastest oyster-opener in San Francisco.

Everybody used to come to Maraghan's. Jerry used to swear he once opened five bushels of oysters in eight hours. Doubtless this is pure braggadocio.

In the late sixties he bought a stool, a high one with brass legs -- a throne, no less -- and he did his work by the open window, to the admiration of the populace.

Doane's, at the old California Market, where the present market stands, was another great oyster emporium, but Jerry refused an offer to go there because the windows were at the back.

After that nothing much happened. In 1877 he saw Dennis Kearney, the sand-lot orator, march with his army up Clay street to terrorize Chinatown. That year Kearney made a great demonstration against the millionaires on Nob Hill. Oysters rose in price steadily into the middle eighties, then slowly declined.

In 1884 Jerry opened a shop of his own on Montgomery street at the corner of Sacramento. Here he saw more figures through the window. There was Boss Buckley, who drove by every morning in a barouche. In 1894 the Midwinter Fair was held in Golden Gate Park, and he took two hours off to see it. The next holiday was in 1896, when the Ferry building was opened with great ceremony. In 1899 and 1900 there was plenty of trouble in the Philippines, according to the newsboys, but it didn't interest him at all. But in 1901, moved by a vague, patriotic impulse, he went to the Union Iron Works Dock to see McKinley launch the Ohio -- quite a fine boat.

In 1906 the fire chased him out of the shop. He encamped in Portsmouth Square for two weeks.

His especial griefs were that he had lost the oyster knife he had used for forty years, and also his dog, which he suspected two old Chinese refugees of having killed and eaten. that he had lost all didn't concern him very much.

After things were cleared up, ten years ago, he found his powers failing. He got his wages regularly, and for the last five years, despite a cataract in his eye, opened two bushels of oysters daily.

Then came prohibition, which somehow annoyed him more than wars and fire.

Oysters had fallen from their high estate. They used to be sent out to fine houses in hampers like game from Marin county and ducks and venison. Latterly they got toted about in bottles.

He brooded over the bottles. Latterly, airplanes had rumbled overhear. But even with two pairs of glasses on his nose, Jerry couldn't see them. Opening oysters was the main thing, and in 1923 he laid down his knife to die, not without much regret.