Latin Quarter: Telegraph Hill and North Beach
“The city is full of hold hills, rising steeply from the deep water. The air is keen and dry and bright like the air of Greece and the waters not less blue…recalling the cities of the Mediterranean…”
—JAMES, VISCOUNT BRYCE
BETWEEN the two steep hills that loom abruptly from the Peninsula's northeastern bulge—on the east, Telegraph Hill; on the west, Russian Hill—ringed with their tiers of buildings, a narrow Valley runs northwestward from the fringes of the financial district to the water front of North Beach. Along its bottom cuts the diagonal of Columbus Avenue, which begins among the clustering shops, cafes, and night clubs at the southern base of Telegraph Hill and ends among the gasworks, warehouses, and smokestacks at the northern base of Russian Hill. Up from this traffic-crowded artery, where stucco-fronted commercial buildings with their awnings and signboards string in long rows, climb endless blocks of weathered frame flats, staggered—step-like—one above another. Here and there a round-bellied window, a red-tiled roof, a patch of green garden breaks the monotony of their ranks. In the salt-fresh, sun-baked air of a clear day, each building Stands out sharply, tarnished with a mellow patina of sun, fog, and soot. Seen in such weather, under a hot blue sky, the district is reminiscent of some Mediterranean seaside village spilling to the water from steep heights. And seen when the billowing mists of a smoky twilight stream down the slopes, it has the look of a sprawling hillside town of northern Italy.
Whether imagined or actual, such resemblances could not have failed to suggest themselves to San Franciscans who know that this is San Francisco's “Little Italy.” It could only have been an imagined resemblance that prompted Ernest Peixotto's often-quoted remark: “If you want to behold a bit of the Bay of Naples, go some misty morning to Fisherman's Wharf.” To Robert Louis Stevenson the district was “Little Italy…a favorite haunt of mine…” In his time, too, it was called “Little Mexico” (a part of it still is Mexican). And it might once have been named “Little Ireland,” for as Wallace Irwin wrote of “Telygraft Hill” :
“The Irish they live on the top av it,
And th’ Dagoes they live on th’ base av it,
And th’ goats and th’ chicks and th’ brickbats and shticks
Is joombled all over th’ face av it…
Through the years, the face of hill and beach have changed almost beyond recognition, but since the town's beginnings the steep slopes of these northeastern limits have been peopled with a many-tongued foreign colony. And like Latin Quarters everywhere, the district carne in the end to be the traditional haunt of bohemia.
The visitor who boards a streetcar for North Beach will no more find an ocean beach at the end of the line than will the pedestrian who toils up Telegraph Hill find a telegraph station at the end of his climb. The beach along which bathhouses clustered—in the days when the famous wharf built by “Honest Harry” Meiggs in 1853 still extended into the Bay from the foot of Powell Street—was buried more than half a Century ago when tons of earth were dumped into the water, out as far as the sea wall extending along the present water front, finished in 1881. And long since vanished is that telegraph station on the summit of the hill which was a city landmark for decades after it was connected by wire in 1853 with a lookout station at Point Lobos. The station replaced the still older semaphore of which Bret Harte wrote in “The Man at the Semaphore”: “…on the extremest point of the sandy peninsula, where the bay of San Francisco debouches into the Pacific, there stood a semaphore telegraph…it signified to another semaphore farther inland the ‘rigs’ of incoming vessels, by certain un-couth signs, which were passed on to Telegraph Hill, San Fraincisco, where they reappeared on a third semaphore…and on certain days of the month every eye was turned to welcome those gaunt arms widely extended at right angles which meant ‘side-wheel steamer’ (the only steamer which carried the mails) and ‘letters from home.’”
The road to the Presidio, which wound over Telegraph Hill's western Shoulders and past North Beach, was a track through unsettled wilds until the later 185o's. For years the only house between Yerba Buena and the Presidio was the hospitable adobe which Juana Briones built in 1836 near the hill's western base, at what is now the intersection of Powell and Filbert Streets. In the shelter of that Lorna Alta (high hill) of the Spanish discoverers, the buxom dark-featured widow of Apolinario Miranda supplied milk and green vegetables to visiting ship's crews, administered to the sick, and sheltered an occasional refugee from the wretchedness of life before the mast. The travelers of the 185o's found the “old Presidio road…neither safe nor pleasant,” recalled pioneers T. A. Barry and B. A. Patten. “The hard adobe soil in summer was like stone, and in the rainy season gummy, sticky and disagreeable. The steep, shelving, uneven way [made] the carriage perpetually seem as if it were just toppling over.… Like all primitive roads, it wound up over the highest, most toilsome way, past cattle-pens, corrals, brick-yards and butcher's shambles, the ground all the way looking as baked and hard as slag or adamant, with no sign of Vegetation…”
Around Telegraph Hill's southern slopes—no more than a stone's throw from the town's first landing place at Clarke's Point—congregated in 1849 exiles from Australia's penal colonies in a district of grog shops, brothels, and gambling dives known as “Sydney Town.” Along the hill's western base spread the shacks and tents of “Little Chile,” settled by Chilenos and Peruvians. At weekly intervals, usually on Sundays, the organized hoodlums who called themselves “Hounds”—many of their number recruited from Sydney Town—used to raid the Chileno quarter, pillaging the houses, robbing and beating the inhabitants, attacking the women. The depredations were only halted by the Vigilance Committee of 1851.
For decades the North Point Docks under the brow of Telegraph Hill, built in 1853 from the foot of Sansome Street, were the landing place for immigrants from France and Italy. From the beginning they settled around the slopes of the hill. The section became a polyglot community, where Irish, Germans, French, Italians, and Latin Americans mingled easily. Although the first Italians had arrived as early as the 1830’s, they began to overwhelm the other nationalities with their numbers only toward the end of the nineteenth Century. By the thou-sands they carne—laborers, artisans, mechanics, farmers, shopkeepers. As soon as they were well established, they lent passage money to countrymen in the homeland. The majority settled in the North Beach-Telegraph Hill section because it reminded them of their native land, because rents and land were cheap there, and because it was near the Bay where many of them earned their living by fishing. The Irish, the Germans, and the French moved to other parts of the city. When the fire of 1906 began to creep up the slopes of the hill, it was the Italians who saved it. From their cellars they rolled out barrels of red wine and, forming a bucket brigade, protected their houses against the flames with blankets soaked in the wine. The district has been theirs ever since, shared for the most part only by the Latin American colony at its southwestern fringes, near the base of Russian Hill, and by the bohemian colony (succeeded lately by sympathizers of more affluent means) on the crest of Telegraph Hill.
“Little Italy” is no longer so little, for the Italians, 60,000 strong, are San Francisco's largest and most powerful national minority. And North Beach is home not only for the Italians who live there but also for those who have moved to other parts of the city or the Bay region. On Sundays and feast days they come back to North Beach to visit relatives and revive old friendships. They fill the bay-windowed flats, lounge in the doorways, and gather in groups for sidewalk discussion. They crowd the lawns and benches beneath the weeping willows in Washington Square. In their eyes is little regret for the vanishing past; in their rich laughter only a hearty appreciation for the present. What if the old stores are beginning to disappear—the dingy shelves and counters stacked with dried mushrooms, anchovies, and the Italian cheeses : Parmesan, Roma, Gorgonzola—the dusty rafters festooned with yards of rich moldy sausages and bunches of aromatic dried herbs: rosemary, thyme, sage and sweet marjoram—the boxes of creamy smooth chocolates from Turin and Perugia? Are not the great new markets, dazzling with refrigerated show cases and white tile, filled with the same good things to eat?
In the spring the markets, both old and modern, proclaim the virtues of capretti, fresh suckling kid. The young goats’ heads, replete with tiny horns, are displayed in the windows. Brown and white candy lambs, with little brass bells hung about their necks and Italian flags thrust in their backs, appear in all the confectionaries. Beside them lie huge Easter eggs with Buona Pasqua written on them in sparkling sugar. The pre-Lenten season is also the occasion for elaborate displays in shops devoted to imported gravure prints of a religious nature and Carrara marble images of the Virgin.
Formerly this season was marked by the rivalry between the Garibaldi and Bercigliari Guards. Sponsored by competing undertaking establishments, these two drill companies contested at Easter parades and pre-Lenten carnival balls for the choice of a queen and for trophies. Today the Italian Family Club and other social organizations hold pre-Lenten balls, but the maskers are missing, being confined to Italian celebrations of such Anglo-Saxon festivities as Halloween and New Year's Eve.
Keen rivalry still exists, however, among the colony's residents in the choice of a queen for the annual fete on Columbus Day. Elected usually by votes secured through purchases at various North Beach stores, she reigns briefly each October 12. A special mass at the Church of Saints Peter and Paul honors the great discoverer, as does a parade to the Municipal Pier at the foot of Van Ness Avenue. At the pier a pageant in fifteenth Century costumes re-enacts Columbus’ momentous landing on the shores of San Salvador.
In the fall, when truckloads of ripened grapes have been piled in cellars, North Beach waxes heady with the smell of fermenting wine. The owners of portable winepresses move from one cool basement to another, crushing grapes for the red vino. Besides beverages of domestic manufacture, North Beach merchants offer wines and liquors imported from Italy; and vov of Padua has converted many not of Latin blood to the colony's gastronomy and its casual way of life.
To industry, finance, sports, and politics the city's Italians have made distinguished contributions. The names of Amadeo Giannini, founder of the Bank of America, Armando Pedrini, and James A. Bacigalupi are known to the world's stock markets. (Until the 1929 stock market crash scarcely a North Beach Italian, from cook's helper to crab fisherman, did not own shares in Giannini's corporation.) Mayor Angelo J. Rossi is of Italian descent. Of National reputation in the world of sports are the Di Maggio brothers; Fred Apostoli, the boxer; Charlie Ferrara, golf champion; Vic Bottari and Angelo “Hank” Luisetti, football and basketball heroes. (With great pride North Beach residents point out the playground at Lombard and Mason Streets where they say Joe Di Maggio learned to play baseball.)
Mostly immigrants from Italy's northern provinces, the robust inhabitants of North Beach maintain their attachment for the soil in spite of their urban mode of living. The Peninsula truck gardens owned by their compatriots supply the city's wholesale vegetable and flower markets. The colony's other roots, particularly for its Neapolitan and Sicilian elements, are in the fishing industry; and herein is revealed a communal strain that is in marked contrast to the individualism apparent in other Italian enterprises. Members of the Crab Fishermen's Protective Association own their boats and gear in common and share among themselves the profits of the catch they bring in to Fisherman's Wharf.
Ever since Juana Briones established her home here, Spanish-speaking people have lived in North Beach. Although most of them now live farther west near the base of Russian Hill, many still cling to their older habitat on the slopes of Telegraph Hill. Here an ill-concealed and profound antagonism exists between them and their Italian neighbors. They patronize small butcher shops and grocery stores owned by their own countrymen. At the base of the hill a barber shop finds it expedient to hire barbers of each nationality, with separate chairs, for its factional clientele. That the sins of the fathers may not be visited upon the coming generations, however, a third chair is provided, with a hobbyhorse mounted on its seat, which is shared by children of both nationalities.
The small colony of Spanish-speaking people in the vicinity of Powell Street and Broadway likewise share with some misgivings the larger domain of their Italian neighbors, who own most of their property, and even their weekly newspaper, El Imparcial. The Mexicans and other Latin Americans maintain a separate life and a separate culture that clings to customs of their homelands. Although a common religion is their strongest bond with their immediate neighbors, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe differs in aspect from the Italian church which overlooks Washington Square. Along the base of Russian Hill they have also their restaurants and social clubs, their abarrotes which offer Mexican candies, pastry, huaraches, and pottery. Spanish phonograph records are sold in a store which displays Spanish books, South American and Mexican periodicals, and American “pulp” magazines reprinted in Spanish.
Despite its Spanish origins, San Francisco has today only about 8,700 Mexicans, of whom approximately 7,000 are native born. Other scattered Spanish-speaking groups bring the total Latin American minority to about 14,000. Many old families live in North Beach. The majority of the Mexicans are laborers; the Peruvians and others have clerical Jobs in the export and import trade. They have no native theater, but a North Beach movie shows a Spanish motion picture once each week. The Basque sheep-ranchers who come occasionally to North Beach are still to be found about the Español and Du Midi hotels. Mexican folk dances such as the jarabe tapetillo are seen only in cafes like La Fiesta. A little curio shop on Pacific Street sells baskets woven of maguey fibre, the vivid handicraft of Yaqui Indians, and various native wares imported from below the Rio Grande.
As North Beach clings to its traditions in spite of physical and social change, so does Telegraph Hill; and the hill has a tradition all its own which is not altogether incidental to the history of the Latin elements that have claimed all but its summit and its eastern side. The “Telygraft Hill” of the Irish who believed themselves descendants of Gaelic kings and littered the hill with their shanties, their washing, and their goats exists today only in the reminiscences of old-timers, but their influence is still there—with a few of the Irish themselves to keep it alive. The French, who shared the hill with them, have also moved elsewhere, and their old locations have been claimed by the Italians.
Gone, too, is that fervent assemblage of bohemians to whom Telegraph Hill was an oasis of Art in the wasteland of the 1920’s. Scattered now to fame, hack work, or cheaper quarters are all those blasé girls and sad young men who talked interminably in Freudian overtones of Picasso and T. S. Eliot, Stravinsky and Isadora Duncan, and read with bated breath in transition and the Dial the expatriate communiques from Rapallo and Trieste, and Paris editions of Joyce's Ulysses smuggled in from Mexico. That they painted little and wrote less was beside the point: they represented for Telegraph Hill the cultural frustration of an epoch, Gertrude Stein's “lost generation” before it found itself in the rebirth of National bohemianism somewhat more affluent, less real.
The passing of the days when the summit of “the Hill was not inhabited save by flocks of goats”—as Charles Warren Stoddard, who once lived there, wrote—was bitterly resisted by the little group of professional bohemians who had labored to create a Greenwich Village of the West. When one of the first of the hill's more pretentious homes began to rise from concrete foundations perched uncertainly on the steep slope, it was threatened by intermittent barrages of rocks, tin cans, and dead cats until, during the last weeks of construction, the owner was obliged to camp out in the unfinished building to protect it from vandalism. As improvements encroached, rents rose. When Montgomery Street was paved through to Julius’ Castle and towering concrete bulkheads were erected to dam up the treacherous clay hillsides, three- and four-story stucco apartment buildings with rents running into fancy figures began to appear. As rents soared, property owners began to rebuild and remodel the weatherbeaten shanties clinging to the eastern slopes or to demolish them and erect ultramodern studio apartments in their places. The artists retreated to lands of cheaper living. To take their places on the crest of the hill carne brokers, minor executives, and other part-time bohemians.
Filbert Street's long flight of weather-blackened stairs, climbing over the hill's grassy-edged Shoulders and up its scarred brown rocky face, gouged out long ago to fill in the water-front tidelands below, still affords glimpses of the hill as it was. Mounting the grassy slopes, where torrents of rainwater still gush down the ruts in spring, it passes tiny cottages hanging against cliff sides, narrow alleys laid with planks, steep little gardens behind picket fences. Remotely sound the rattle of winches along the docks, the puffs and snorts of the Belt Line Railroad locomotives, the sirens, whistles, and bells of the water front below, from which float upward whiffs of the odors of roasting coffee, of cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg from spice and coffee houses. Through the haze over the Bay, where gulls wheel, shimmer Yerba Buena Island with its pillared causeway below the wooded crest; the radiant white walls and towers of Treasure Island; and the bluish slopes—with their tumbled white buildings—of the East Bay shore. Over the weatherbeaten board walks and fences tumble matted hedges of geraniums; around green-shuttered windows, over the railings of balconies on stilts, up weather-stained shingled walls clamber creeping vines. And from the summit of the hill, banked in greenery, soars the gleaming white fluted shaft of Coit Tower.
The crest of the hill is another land. Around the park's patch of green, hemmed in by concrete walls, soaring modem apartment houses rear their blank stuccoed facades. Ragged eucalyptus trees shed their leaves on jumbled, varicolored roofs. From facades painted pink, green, blue, or yellow, expansive windows look out across the Bay. Behind heavy wooden doors, narrow brick-flagged passageways lead into court-yards sheltered from the cold blustering breezes off the ocean, where caged canaries sing in the sun. The building fronts are adorned with gaily painted doors and brass knockers, with windows revealing Indian pottery and blankets, with window boxes colored sea green, aquamarine, and lemon yellow. And only a half-block down the western slope, where gloomy flats border narrow Genoa Place, begins Little Italy, with its sour smell of bread dough fermenting; its pillows, mattresses and bedding hung out to air from open windows; its screaming children tobogganing down the steep pavements on the broken-out sides of fruit boxes.
Along the Latin Quarter's southern boundary, Broadway, where it turns its face toward the rest of San Francisco, denizens of hill and beach—Italians and bohemians—meet and mingle with the rest of San Francisco. Gaily bedizened with glaring electric signs after dark, Broadway and its cross streets in the four blocks between Kearny and Powell Streets are bordered continuously with restaurants and night clubs whose food, wine, and entertainment draw nightly throngs: Vanessi's, Finocchio's, the Fior d'Italia, and New Joe's—where crowds wait for seats at three in the morning; the Xochimilco and the Sinaloa; the Jai-Alai and the Español. At the opposite end of North Beach, near the water front with its wharves and warehouses, the bright lights of the Club Lido, the Bai Tabarin, Lucca's and the Fiesta Club dispel the gloom. And to the water front at Fisherman's Wharf, where the crabs brought in by the fishermen are cooked on the sidewalk in steaming caldrons, comes all of San Francisco for sea food at Joe di Maggio's, Fishermen's Grotto, or one of a dozen open-fronted cafes.
To those who love it best North Beach will remain the Latin Quarter: bohemia between the hills and neighbor to the sea, hospitable with the musical linguistics and the gracious folkways brought hither by paisanos from the hot countries. And the hill will still stand, with its crown of wind-swept eucalyptus, through the fog and the rain and the sun. And people will still come there at sunset to watch the long shadows creep upward from the trees of Washington Square and to feel in the stir of the gathering darkness the touch of George Sterling's “cool grey city of love.”
POINTS OF INTEREST
120. Probably the best-known and best-loved bar in a city of countless streamlined cocktail lounges is ISADORE GOMEZ’ CAFE, 848 Pacific St. A small lantern before an inconspicuous door marks the entrance to a narrow flight of dirty wooden stairs. Upstairs is a long, smoke-filled room—a room (describes the Almanac for Thirty-Niners) “…dilapidated as in speak-easy days, retaining the broken plaster of the ceiling, the insecure chairs, the cracked oilcloth on the tables, the long pine bar… Idle behind the bar, leaning across it with leisurely amusement, is Izzy Gomez in a black fedora…a coffee-colored fat man…elaborately feted on his birthday by San Francisco's Press Club…an illiterate fat man painted, photographed, written and sung about…” Here 63-year-old Isadore greets his closest friends, or anyone who may wander in, and tells tall, witty tales of life in his native Portugal—or dances Portuguese folk-dances with incredible grace despite his massive bulk. On occasion he expounds—punctuating with a ponderous forefinger—the three principles of his philosophy: “When you don't know what to say, say nothing”; “Life is a long road; take it easy”; “When you come to a pool of water on that long road, don't make it muddy; maybe you'll pass there again, and you'll be thirsty.”
Since 1900 Izzy has been running his bar, since 1930 in its present location. Famed in a city noted for good things to eat are his thick, juicy steaks and great platters of French-fried potatoes. And drinks are not measured here, but poured with casual generosity from the bottle. Repeal has not changed the house of El Gomez; red chalk marks left by a spotter during Prohibition days are still preserved, and a peep-hole still overlooks the stairs. The same famous mural back of the bar records the faces of Izzy, of Joe and “Dad” (who have served Izzy's customers for many years, casually polite, vastly unhurried), and of the more colorful characters who once gathered here. The initials of hundreds of them appear, cut into woodwork and tables.
N. from Pacific St. on Powell St. to Broadway; E. on Broadway.
121. Only church in San Francisco whose Services are conducted in the Spanish language is NUESTRA SENORA DE GUADALUPE, 908 Broadway, which derives its name from the shrine erected near Guadalupe, Mexico, in commemoration of the appearance before the peon, Juan Diego, of the Virgin Mary. One of its two stained-glass windows, softly lighting the rich interior, portrays Juan Diego kneeling before Bishop Sumaraga. The chastely simple Romanesque church building, its twin domes topped by gold crosses, was built in 1912. The first church in the United States to be constructed of reinforced concrete replaced the old frame structure (dating from 1875) destroyed by the 1906 fire. In April, 1939 Father Antonio M. Santandreu had rounded out his fiftieth year as the church's pastor. Oldest living priest on the Pacific Coast, totally blind and partially deaf, he now (1940) is assisted by three younger men, all trained in Mexico or Spain.
In sharp contrast to the austere facade is the ornate interior, approached from stone steps which lead to a sheltered patio bordered with flowers. On the arched ceiling of the nave, supported by twelve pillars, is portrayed in fresco the Holy Sacrament and the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin. Behind the flood-lit white marble altar, standing at the end of the exquisitely tiled main aisle, is a mural depicting the Last Supper and the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes. By day, light streams through stained-glass windows portraying the miracle at Guadalupe and the Sermon on the Mount; by night, from massive and ornate candelabra. Every year during the nine days before Christmas, when Mexican families are commemorating the birth of Christ with the ceremonies of Las Posadas (the lodgings) in their homes, the church holds a novena with special singing and prayers.
N. from Broadway on Mason St. to Vallejo St.; E. from Mason on Vallejo.
122. First Roman Catholic parish church in San Francisco, ST. FRANCIS’ CHURCH, 620 Vallejo St., owes its origin to the religious zeal of a group of the Gold Rush town's French residents, who persuaded a young officer of the United States Army to give them the use of a small room for Services. Father Langlois, on his way from Oregon to eastern Canada by way of Cape Horn, was persuaded to remain as their pastor. In a new adobe chapel on the church's present site, on July 19, 1849, Father Langlois said Mass for the first time in the new building and administered the town's first Roman Catholic baptism. The French soon were joined by worshippers of so many other nationalities that in 1856 they withdrew to found a church of their own, Notre Dame des Victoires.
In the adobe chapel's schoolroom, on December 7, 1850, a reception was given for young Bishop Sadoc Alemany, just arrived to take charge of a diocese extending from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Since St. Francis’ congregation was still smarting from the indignity of having been embezzled by an impostor of funds, Father Langlois is said to have insisted on the Bishop's credentials. When it appeared that San Francisco, rather than Monterey, would be the chief city of the diocese, he returned as Archbishop Alemany, his formal translation to the Metropolitan See of San Francisco occurring July 23, 1853. Here he took up residence in a wooden shanty adjoining the church, which served as his cathedral until dedication of St. Mary's on Christmas, 1854.
Construction of a new St. Francis Church was begun five years later. Dedicated March 17, 1859, the fourteenth-century Gothic structure of cement-faced brick survived the 1906 fire with little enough damage to permit restoration. The interior is an aisled nave of seven bays with a shallow apse. In the apsidal arches above the ornate altar and reredos are a series of frescoes depicting events in the life of St. Francis. Two larger frescoes over the side altars portray the death of St. Francis and the showing of the Stigmata.
NW. from Vallejo St. on Columbus Ave.
123. In the heart of the teeming Italian section, WASHINGTON SQUARE, Columbus Ave., Union, Stockton, and Filbert Sts., a quadrangular oasis of lawn, cypresses, and weeping willows, is an out-of-doors refuge from the close-set flats of the locality. In the center of the square is a bronze STATUE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, bequeathed by Henry D. Cogswell, wealthy philanthropist and eccentric, to: “Our boys and girls who will soon take our places and pass on.” A plaque in its base bears the curious inscription :
“P. O. Box With
Mementos
For The Historical Society
In 1979
From H. D. C.”
Inscriptions as curious—”Vichy,” “Congress Water,” and “California Seltzer”—proclaim the virtues of the ordinary drinking water (Cogswell was a determined temperance advocate) which spouts from the fountain. On the east side of the park a granite UNITED STATES COAST GEODETIC SURVEY MARKER carries the legend: “Astronomical and telegraph longitude, United States Coast and Geodetic Survey: Lat. 37.47′ .57″ N. Longitude 122.24′, 37″ W. Station Washington Square, 1869-1880.” Facing Columbus Avenue is the VOLUNTEER FIREMEN'S MONUMENT (Haig Patigian, sculptor), a bronze group of three volunteer firemen—one holding a supine woman in his arms—dedicated to the “Volunteer Fire Department of San Francisco, 1849-1866.” It was erected in 1933 through a bequest of Lillie Hitchcock Coit. Washington Square, which served as a campground for homeless Citizens after the 1906 holocaust, occupies land donated to the city January 3, 1850 by its first mayor, John W. Geary.
E. from Columbus Ave. on Filbert St.
124. The Roman Catholic CHURCH OF SS. PETER AND PAUL, 660 Filbert St., of concrete construction, lifts its two spires high above the Italian district it serves. Its cornerstone laid in 1922 by Archbishop Hanna, all but the exterior of the church was completed the following year. In 1939 and 1940 its facade again was shrouded in scaffolding. When finished the terra cotta exterior will be embellished on each side of the doorway by a mosaic of Dante at work on his Paradiso and another of Columbus landing in America. In the ornate interior seating 1,000, the Roman altar and many gilded images reflect the soft light filtering from the stained glass windows. Brought from Italy, the richly ornate altar, inlaid with mosaic and framed in white Carrara marble, bears a sculptured reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. The church's large statuary collection also includes a statue of patron saint John Bosco and a sixteenth-century carved wood figure of Jesus Christ.
Up Filbert St. steps to Telegraph Hill Blvd.; N. from Filbert on Telegraph Hill (by motor, N. from Filbert on Stockton St. to Lombard St.; E. from Stockton on Lombard to Telegraph Hill Blvd.; S. from Lombard on Telegraph Hill).
125. Crowning the brow of Telegraph Hill is PIONEER PARK, whose paved esplanade and parkway command a stirring panorama of the vast Bay and its shores and the city crowding to the edge of the Peninsula. Grown from loam-filled crevices on the bare rocky summit, its yellow broom, cypress trees, and stately eucalyptuses bank in greenery the base of COIT MEMORIAL TOWER (open Wed., Sat., Sun. 10-4 and 8-10; elevator 25¢), a slim, fluted concrete column (Arthur Brown, Jr., architect) whose glass-enclosed Observation gallery is 540 feet above the waters of the Bay. The tower is named for a life-long friend of San Francisco's firefighters, Lillie Hitchcock Coit, who in 1929 left funds to the city to be used for a memorial to the volunteer firemen of the 1850’s and 1860’s. As a girl of 15, she had been the mascot of the crack Knickerbocker Company No. 5. To the end of her life she wore the diamond-studded gold badge given her by the firemen, whether she attended a formal evening function or an early morning blaze. Where Coit Memorial Tower now rises stood, in the middle of the nineteenth Century, the telegraph station for which the hill is named—”A place of much resort” in the fifties, reminisced Barry and Patten. “…it was good exercise to walk up there, and the view repaid the trouble. There were…refreshing milk-punches to be had in the room beneath the lookout on the roof, where privileged visitors could ascend and use the telescope.”
A landmark in the history of government-subsidized art are the COIT TOWER MURALS, reflecting the contemporary scene in California city, factory and field in 1934, which were the result of the first work relief project for artists sponsored by the Federal government in the United States. Covering the walls of first and second floors and the stairway between them, they were executed by 20 members of San Francisco's art colony. On the main floor, above the entrance to the elevator room, a pair of Cyclopian eyes look down from Ray Boynton's mural symbolizing the mystic forces of nature, man in search of sustenance, and man in search of wealth. Other walls of the first floor graphically portray the characteristic activities of California life with their ten-foot figures by Malette Dean and Clifford Wight; industrial plants by Ralph Stackpole; a department store interior by Frede Vidar; a San Francisco Street by Victor Arnautoff; and rich agricultural fields by Maxine Albro. A library cross-section by Bernard Zakheim shows readers scanning the headlines in contemporary newspapers. A mural by John Langley Howard depicts unemployed “snipers” panning gold and grim-faced workers massed in front of a smelter plant. The murals in the elevator room, executed in oil, show views from Telegraph Hill and rolling California landscapes by Otis Oldfield, Rinaldo Cuneo, and Moya del Pino. A spectacular portrayal of the Powell Street hill by Lucien Labaudt decorates the stairway walls ascending to the second floor, where are found illustrations of California sports and outdoor life and Jane Berlandina's scenes of domestic life in egg tempera.
The MARCONI MEMORIAL, at the foot of the steps leading to Lombard Street, a modern, simply carved bench of Raymond California granite containing a bronze plaque (Raymond Puccinelli, sculptor) of Guglielmo Marconi, was erected to commemorate the inventor of the wireless in July, 1939. A Latin inscription reads: “Outstripping the lightning, the voice races through the empty sky.”
N. on Telegraph Hill Blvd. to Lombard St.; W. from Telegraph Hill on Lombard to Columbus Ave.; NW. from Lombard on Columbus to Taylor St.; W. from Columbus on Taylor.
126. Twentieth-century commercialism and Old-World tradition go hand in hand at FISHERMAN'S WHARF, foot of Taylor St., where are moored in serried ranks the tiny, bright-painted gasoline boats of the crab fishermen and the tall-masted 70-foot Diesel-engined trawlers of the sardine fleet. The high-sterned junks with square sails of the Chinese shrimp fishermen who supplied the forty-niners with seafood have long since disappeared. The colorful craft of the Italians who supplanted them—rigged with triangular lateen sails like the fishing boats of the Gulf of Genoa or the Bay of Naples—have disappeared too, supplanted in turn by trim vessels powered with combustion engines. And the fish markets to which San Francisco housewives once drove in buggies have become neon-lit shops offering “curb service” to motorists. But the gulls still fight over morsels thrown into the lagoon; small boys still impale sardine bait on the troll lines; the oldsters of the crab fleet still sit cross-legged, mending their nets by hand with long wooden needles.
Heedless of onlookers, the sun-browned fishermen go about their work, tossing their fish from the holds to the wharves, where they are trundled off in hand trucks, hanging up their nets to dry in great brown festoons, painting and repairing their vessels, haggling with fish buyers. Sicilian in origin, many of the barrel-chested crab fishermen sport the tam-o-shanter, the knit jersey, and the heavy sea boots of their Mediterranean homeland.
The boats of the crabfishing fleet, like their larger sisters of the sardine fleet, are brightly painted, with blue and white the predominating hues. During the fishing season (November through August) the crab fleet usually leaves the wharf with the tide—between two and three o'clock in the morning—bound for fishing grounds between three and six miles outside the gate, where each boat anchors within hailing distance of its neighbor. In mid-afternoon they return, laden with from one to four dozen crabs apiece, accompanied by screaming hordes of gulls. When not at sea, the crab boats are anchored at the inner harbor at Fisherman's Wharf, where the walks and planking are often plastered with nets drying in the sun.
Usually anchored outside the square lagoon of the crab fishermen are the sardine and bottom fish boats—large schooners and trawlers with deep after holds, their blue and yellow masts and booms towering above the smaller craft. In the sardine fleet, Norwegians and Slavonians predominate—excellent seamen, tanned by sun and wind, their faces wrinkled. Powered with 200- and 300-horsepower Diesel engines, the vessels venture northward as far as Alaskan waters and southward to Mexican shores. The dark of the moon between August and February is the best time for sardine fishing, because the sardine schools then are sighted most easily by the iridescent flash they create as they move through the water. The sardine fishermen use the net known as the purse seine, which is maneuvered in a circle by means of a skiff and then drawn together in much the same fashion as a tobacco pouch. The bottom fish vessels use the paranzella net, dragged between two boats, which revolutionized the industry when Pedro Costa introduced it in 1876. In these nets they trap sole, sand dab, rock cod, and flounder—which comprise 90 per cent of their catch—and occasionally starfish, octopi, and even sharks. The trawlers of the bottom fish fleet—which number about 20—rank in size with those of the sardine fleet. It was the bottom fish fleet which first used steam-powered boats, also introduced by Costa—for which reason sole were first known around San Francisco Bay as “steamerfish.” More than 2,000 men and 350 vessels are engaged in the fishing industry throughout the year; the annual catch totals nearly 300 million pounds. Ranking first in size of catch is the sardine; second, the crab. The shore community at the wharf includes blacksmiths, boatbuilders, tackle menders and net repairers, and the dock includes a marine service station where the tanks of the gasoline-powered crab boats are filled. Fishing fleet boats are available for hire at an average cost of $3.00 per person—which often includes cioppino (fish stew) with red wine.
Along the wharfside, the sidewalk is lined with huge iron cauldrons simmering over open fires of boxwood, where live crabs are boiled after the buyer has selected his choice from the dripping Stacks on display. Behind the kettles are squirming piles of lobsters, trays of shrimp and prawns, shelves decked with rainbow-hued abalone shells, and little turtles with brightly painted designs on their backs for sale as Souvenirs. Automobiles line the curb, their occupants eating seafood delicacies from trays. Other diners sit by restaurant windows looking out over the masts of the boats moored in the lagoon.