The Lure of San Francisco: A Romance Amid Old Landmarks — John Shaqi
The Lure of San Francisco: A Romance Amid Old LandmarksPotter, Elizabeth Gray
General
The Lure of San Francisco: A Romance Amid Old Landmarks
Potter, Elizabeth Gray
San Francisco (Calif.)
"Well, you leave it to me," finished the man in the street.
"Sure, Mike, I will," responded the woman.
My companion halted in consternation.
"We make American citizens of them all," I asserted.
"Les petits enfants aussi," I added as a child ran past, shouting a
response in irreproachable English to the Parisian command of her
mother.
We turned through the rude stone wall into Pioneer Park and along the
unkept paths shaded by eucalyptus, cypress and acacia trees and came
upon the open height where the mountain-hemmed bay lay in broad expanse
before us, dotted with islands and with ferries streaking their way
across its blue-gray surface.
"Wonderful," he exclaimed under his breath.
'"O, Telegraft Hill, she sits proud as a Queen,
And th' docks lie below in th' glare,'"
I quoted from Wallace Irwin.
He lowered his gaze to the numerous wharves running out into the water,
with teams appearing and disappearing at the entrances of the covered
docks, like lines of busy ants.
"'And th' bay runs beyant her, all purple and green
Wid th' gingerbread island out there,'"
I continued the quotation.
"What are those terraced buildings?" he queried.
"It has been the military prison for years. It is Alcatraz Island."
He looked his inquiry.
"Spanish for Pelican," I answered, seating myself on a rock. "Ayala, the
captain of the 'San Carlos,' the first ship to enter the bay, named it
from the large number of the birds he found on it, and the big island to
the right that looks like a portion of the main land is Angel Island,
abbreviated from Ayala's Isla de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles."
"And Goat Island?" he questioned as he threw himself down on the grass.
"Yerba Buena," I corrected. "The other name was colloquially applied
when Nathan Spear, being given some goats and kids by a Yankee skipper,
put them over there. There were several thousand on the island in
forty-nine, but the Americans killed them all off by night in spite of
Spear's protests."
"Not all of them," he denied as he shied a stick at a white head
reaching from below for a grassy clump.
"'And th' goats and chicks and brickbats and sticks
Is joombled all over the face of it,
Av Telegraft Hill, Telegraft Hill,
Crazy owld, daisy owld Telegraft Hill,'"
I laughed.
"I suppose the Spaniards must have had a name for this sightly hill,"
said the Bostonian, his eye tracing the rugged skyline across the bay,
along the Tamalpais Range on the north, and the San Antonio Hills on the
east.
"Yes, Anza christened it in 1776 when he climbed up here for a view
after selecting the sites for the Presidio and the Mission. He called it
La Loma Alta, and the High Hill it remained until the Americans put it
to commercial use in forty-nine. The little town on the edge of the cove
in the hollow of the hills was unconscious of a ship entering the harbor
until she rounded Clark's Point, the southeast corner of this hill, and
dropped anchor in full view--"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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