The Californiacs by Inez Haynes Gillmore
page 14 of 26 (53%)
page 14 of 26 (53%)
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electric signs second only in size, number, brilliancy and ingenuity to
those on Broadway. But whether you come by day or by night, the instant you emerge from the Ferry building, San Francisco gets you. Market street is one of the most entertaining main-traveled urban roads in the world. Newspaper offices in a cluster, store windows flooded with light, filled with advertising devices of the most amusing originality, cars, taxis, crowds, it has all the earmarks of the main street of any big American city, with the addition, at intervals, of the pretty "islands" so typical of the boulevards of Paris and with, last of all, a zip and a zest, a pep and a punch, a go and a ginger that is distinctively Californian. I repeat that California throws her first tentacle into your heart as you stand there wondering whether you'll go to your hotel or, plunging headforemost into the crowds, swim with the current. Imagine a city built not on seven but a hundred hills. I am sure there are no less than a hundred and probably there are more. Certainly I climbed a hundred. On three sides the sea laps the very hem of this city and on one side the forest reaches down to its very toes. That is, when all is said, the most marvelous thing about San Francisco - that the sea and forest come straight to its borders. And as, because of its peninsula situation they form the only roads out, sea and forest are integral parts of the city life. It accounts for the fact that you see no city pallor in the faces on the streets and perhaps for the fact that you see so little unhappiness on them. On Sundays and holidays, crowds pour across the bay all day long and then, loaded with flowers and greens, pour back all the evening long. As for flowers and greens, the hotels, shops, cafes, the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants are full of them. They are so cheap on the streets that everybody wears them. Everybody seems to play as much as possible out of doors. Everybody seems to sleep out of doors. Everybody has just come from a hike or is |
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