San Francisco - Alison Bing [10]
From 1910 to 1940, new arrivals from Asia were redirected to the Angel Island immigration station Click here, where they were detained and interrogated for months or even years, pending official verification of parentage by a US citizen and/or a bribe to an immigration official of at least $1000 (about $20,000 in today’s terms). Most of the 175,000 Asian immigrants detained at Angel Island were eventually deported, though a few escaped their bleak imprisonment by suicide. More than 100 poems of despair, regret and outrage were carved into the walls of the immigration station, such as this one summarizing the Angel Island experience: ‘America has power, but not justice/In prison, we were victimized as if we were guilty/Given no opportunity to explain, it was really brutal.’
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KEEPING THE WEST WILD
As gold, silver and railroad money flowed into San Francisco, the city grew. It didn’t exactly blossom at first, though – public works were completely neglected, and heavily populated sections of the city were mired in muck. Eventually the debris-choked waterfront filled in, streets were graded and paved, and scores of fancy French restaurants opened to educate the palates of the nouveau riche. A financial district shot up along Montgomery and California Sts to manage all this new money, and the lawyers’ offices that cropped up alongside Jackson Sq saloons provided less deadly (if more costly) ways to resolve disputes. As soon as Andrew Hallidie made the formidable crag accessible by cable car in 1873, Nob Hill started sprouting mansions for millionaires, including the ‘Big Four’ railroad barons: Leland Stanford, Collis P Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. The Gold Rush was officially over; the land rush was on.
Wherever there was green in the city, real-estate speculators saw greenbacks. Developers cleverly repackaged the marshy cattle-grazing pastures of the Mission District and Cow Hollow, selling them as residential districts. San Francisco’s outlaw prospectors were lured into a state approaching respectability, settling into new neighborhoods far from the red-light districts and dutifully paying property taxes and police bribes. No wonder San Francisco’s cynic-in-chief Ambrose Bierce dryly defined the ‘out-of-doors’ c 1881 as follows: ‘That part of one’s environment upon which no government has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly useful to inspire poets.’
Some idealistic San Franciscans were determined to preserve the city’s natural splendors, even at the risk of attracting poets. The city’s first park was established in 1867, when squatters were paid to vacate the area now known as Buena Vista Park. The early urban environmentalist and Parks Superintendent John McLaren took charge of tree planting, and the hilltop park opened to sunset-seekers, fitness buffs and amorous advances by 1894.
Through local activism (see the boxed text), the natural wonders that surrounded San Francisco became more accessible to the public. Populist millionaire Adolph Sutro decided that every working stiff should be able to escape Downtown tenements for the sand dunes and sunsets of Ocean Beach, made possible for a nickel on his public railway. Sutro’s idea proved wildly popular, and by way of thanks he was elected mayor in 1894. Naturalist John Muir came through San Francisco in 1868, but quickly left with a shudder for Yosemite. However, the early environmentalist organization he founded, the Sierra Club, would eventually find its major backers in San Francisco. The unspoiled wilderness Muir and his organization successfully lobbied to protect includes one