Thursday, January 30, 2025

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.

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