Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam
By Hubert Howe Bancroft

Some Cities and San Francisco 

There had been some discussion as to improving and beautifying the city
of San Francisco prior to the catastrophe of April 18th. Landscape
architects had been consulted, proposals considered, and preliminary
plans drawn. Therefore when on that day the city was swept by fire,
obviously it was the opportune moment for the requisite changes in the
rebuilding. For a brief period enthusiasm waxed warm. It helped to
mitigate the blow, this fencing with fate. Let the earth shake, and
fires burn, we will have here our city, better and more beautiful than
ever-and more valuable-an imperial city of steel it shall be, and thus
will we get even with the misfortunes of this day.

Reform in the rebuilding was needed, whatever should be the scale of
beauty or utility decided upon. Fifty years ago the elevating influences
of tasteful environment were not so highly appreciated as now, and all
large cities are fifty years old or more. All large cities, as a rule,
had their beginning with narrow, crooked streets and mean houses. In
Europe and Asia there are aggregations of humanity whose domiciles have
remained unchanged, one might almost say uncleansed, for hundreds or
thousands of years, or ever since their mythical beginning, save only
for the covering of the debris of dead centuries.

These ancient towns, mostly offspring of feudalism, begun under castle
walls and continued after walls and castle had crumbled, as their area
enlarged, with some improvement, perhaps, in the suburban parts, still
retained this patch of mediaevalism, until obliterated by war, or fire,
or later by modern progress. Look at Edinburgh, for example. With all
its Scotch thrift and neatness, there yet remains the ill-conditioned
and once filthy quarter, beside which rise the old-time ten-story
houses built into the hillside, while in the modern part of the city in
sharp contrast are broad streets and open squares and fine buildings.

In America the birth of towns is quite different. Here are no plantings
of trembling poverty under lordly walls, but bold pioneering,
forecasting agriculture and commerce; no Babel building, with "Go to,
let us build here a Cleveland or a Cincinnati," but rather, "Here for
the present we will abide." If, however, serfdom and mediaevalism were
absent in New World town-planting, so also were aestheticism or any
appreciation of the beautiful apart from the useful. Old cities require
reconstruction to make them what modern taste and intelligence demand;
settlements in their incipiency are dominated by their sturdy founders,
who usually have other things to think about than beauty and adornment.

In this day of great wealth and wonderful inventions we realize more and
more the value of the city to mankind, and the quality of the city as a
means of culture. Cities are not merely marts of commerce; they stand
for civility; they are civilization itself. No untried naked Adam in
Eden might ever pass for a civilized man. The city street is the school
of philosophy, of art, of letters; city society is the home of
refinement. When the rustic visits the city he puts on his best clothes
and his best manners. In their reciprocal relations the city is as men
make it, while from the citizen one may determine the quality of the
city. The atmosphere of the city is an eternal force. Therefore as we
value the refinement of the human mind, the enlargement of the human
heart, we shall value the city, and strive so to build, and adorn, and
purify, that it may achieve its ultimate endeavor.

Civic betterment has long been in progress among the more civilized
communities through the influence of cultured people capable of
appreciating the commercial as well as the aesthetical value of art.
Vast sums have been spent and great results accomplished, but they are
nothing as compared with the work yet to be done-work which will
continue through the ages and be finished only with the end of time.

And not only will larger wealth be yet more freely poured out on
artistic adornment, but such use of money will be regarded as the best
to which it can be applied. For though gold is not beautiful it can make
beauty, even that beauty which elevates and ennobles, which purifies the
mind and inspires the soul. Progress is rapid in this direction as in
many others. A breach of good taste in public works will ere long be
adjudged a crime. For already mediaeval mud has ceased to be
fashionable, and the picturesque in urban ugliness is picturesque no
longer. All the capitals of Europe have had to be made over,
Haussmannized, once or several times. Our own national capital we should
scarcely be satisfied with as its illustrious founder left it.

It is a hopeful sign amidst some discouraging ones that wealth as a
social factor and measure of merit is losing something of its prestige;
that it is no longer regarded by the average citizen as the supreme
good, or the pursuit of it the supreme aim in life; there are so many
things worth more than money, so many human aspirations and acquirements
worthy of higher considerations than the inordinate cravings of graft
and greed. Hoarded wealth especially is not so worshipful to-day as it
was yesterday, while the beautiful still grows in grace-the beautiful
and the useful, compelling improvement, always engendered by improved
environment.

Some cities are born in the purple-rare exceptions to the rule. San
Francisco is not one of these. St. Petersburg, the city of palaces, of
broad avenues and granite-faced quays, whose greatest afflictions are
the occasional overflow of the Neva and the dynamite habit, was spoken
into being by a monarch. Necessity stands sponsor for Venice, the
beautiful, with her streets of water-ways and airs of heavenly harmony;
while nature herself may claim motherhood of Swedish Stockholm,
brilliant with intermingling lakes islands and canals, rocks hills and
forests, rendering escape from the picturesque impossible.

Penn planted his Quakers about 1682, long before many of the present
large cities in America were begun, yet Philadelphia was one of the few
sketched in such generous proportions that little change was afterwards
necessary to make it one of the most spacious of urban commonwealths.
With this example before him came in 1791, more than a century later,
the father of his country, who permitted his surveyors so injudiciously
to cover the spot on the Potomac which he had chosen for the capital
city of the republic as to require much expensive remodeling later. Yet
what American can drive about Washington now and say it is not worth the
cost? Further, as an example, the repeated reconstruction and adornment
of the national capital by Congress are priceless to the whole United
States, the government therein bearing witness to the value of the
beautiful. And if of value on the Potomac, is it not equally so at the
portal of the Pacific?

A few other cities there have been which have arisen at the command of
man, potentate or pirate, besides those of the quaker Penn and the tzar
Peter-Alexandria, the old and the new, with Constantinople between; the
first by order of the poor world conqueror, at the hand of the architect
Dinocrates, two or three centuries before Caesar, Cleopatra, and Antony,
but made fit for them and their chariots by streets a hundred feet wide.

The Danube is the mother of many cities, directing the destiny of
nations, from the Iron Gate to the Golden Horn. Vienna has been made
brilliantly modern since 1858. Beside the sufferings of Constantinople
our little calamity seems tame. Seven times during the last half century
the city has been swept by fire, not to mention earthquakes, or
pestilence, which on one occasion took with it three hundred thousand
lives. Yet all the while it grows in magnificence faster than the
invisible enemies of Mohammed can destroy it. But for these purifying
fires the city would still be one of narrow, filthy streets and vile
smells, reeking with malaria. The Golden Horn of the Bosporus possesses
no greater natural advantages than the Golden Gate of San Francisco, nor
even so great. The industrial potentialities of the former are not to be
compared with those of the latter, while for healthful airs and charming
environment we have all that earth can give, and therewith should be
content.

Cities have been made as the marquis of Bute made Cardiff, by
constructing a dock, and ship canal, and converting the ancient castle
into a modern palace. Many towns have been started as railway stations,
but few of them attained importance. Steamboat landings have been more
fortunate. Some cities owe their origin to war, some to commerce, and
not a few to manufactures. Fanaticism has played a part, as in India and
parts of Africa, where are nestings of half-savage humanity with a touch
of the heavenly in the air. Less disciplined are these than zion-towns,
but nearer the happiness of insensibility-the white-marbled and jeweled
Taj Mahal, Agra on the Jumna, and Delhi, making immortal Jehan the
builder, with his pearl mosque and palace housing the thirty-million-dollar
peacock throne; Benares, on the Ganges, a series of terraces and long stone 
steps extending upward from the holy water, while rising yet higher in the 
background are temples, towers, mosques, and palaces, all in oriental 
splendor. Algiers, likewise, an amphitheatre in form, might give San 
Francisco lessons in terrace construction, having hillsides covered with 
them, the scene made yet more striking by the dazzling white of the houses. 
After the place became French, the streets were widened and arcades 
established in the lower part.

In fact, the French believe in the utility of beauty, and in Paris at
least they make it pay. The entire expenses of the municipal government,
including police and public works, are met by the spendings of visitors.
To their dissolute monarchs were due such creations as the Tuileries,
the Louvre, and Versailles. Have we not dissolute millionaires enough to
give us at least one fine city?

London and Paris stand out in bold contrast, the one for utility, the
other for beauty. Both are adepts in their respective arts. The city
proper of London has better buildings and cleaner streets than when St.
Paul was erected; otherwise it is much the same. Elsewhere in London,
however, are spacious parks and imposing palaces, with now and then a
fine bit of something to look out upon, as the bridges of the murky
Thames, the Parliament houses, the Abbey, Somerset house, and
Piccadilly, perhaps. Children may play at the Zoo, while grown-ups sit
in hired chairs under the trees.

Three times London was destroyed by the plague, and five times by fire,
that of 1666 lasting four days, and covering thrice the area of the San
Francisco conflagration; yet it was rebuilt better than before in three
and a half years. Always the city is improved in the rebuilding; how
much, depends upon the intelligence and enterprise of the people.

Paris is brilliant with everything that takes the eye-palaces, arches,
Bon Marche shops, arcades, colonnades, great open spaces adorned with
statues, forest parks, elysian driveways, and broad boulevards cut
through mediaeval quarters in every direction, as well for air as for
protection from the canaille blockaded in the narrow streets. San
Francisco may have some canaille of her own to boast of one of these
days; canaille engendered from the scum of Europe and Asia, and educated
at our expense for our destruction. Over and over, these two cities,
each a world metropolis, have been renovated and reconstructed, the work
in fact going on continuously.

For some of the most effective of our urban elaborations we must go back
to the first of city builders of whom we have knowledge. The Assyrians
made terraces, nature teaching them. On the level plain building ground
was raised forty feet for effect. Like all artists of precivilization,
the Assyrians placed adornment before convenience, as appeared in
Nineveh on the Tigris and Babylon on the Euphrates. At Thebes and
Palmyra it was the same, their palaces of alabaster, if one chooses to
believe what is said, covering, some of them, a hundred acres. The