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| 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.
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