San Francisco - Alison Bing [12]
In 1865 the citizens of San Francisco submitted a petition to the Board of Supervisors for an ambitious park project. In 1869, 1017 acres of dune stretching west of the city were set aside for a park, and Frederick Law Olmstead was commissioned to design the project. But it would take a tenacious young civil engineer, William Hammond Hall, decades to Golden Gate Park through to fruition, fending off speculators, gamblers and corrupt politicians at every turn.
He briefly quit his job in disgust in 1886, after the ‘Big Four’ railroad barons – Leland Stanford, Collis P Huntingdon, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker – lobbied City Hall to convert the park into a racetrack lined with tract homes. The park hosted a casino and carnival attractions for the 1893 Midwinter’s Fair, and Hammond Hall had to fight to get the park returned to its intended purpose. Luckily City Hall was too busy lining its own pockets to fund the ambitious racetrack plan, and the park had already proved too popular with the public to be sequestered for private use.
On a single sunny day in 1886, almost a fifth of the city’s entire population made the trip to the park. Though a San Francisco newspaper of the day cautioned that its scenic benches led to ‘excess hugging,’ the people loved their park, and effectively defended it from private development.
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THE SHOW MUST GO ON
San Francisco had learned one thing from its experience with catastrophe: how to stage a comeback. The city was rebuilt at an astounding rate of 15 buildings a day. A city plan was concocted to relocate Chinatown to less desirable real estate in Hunter’s Point, but the Chinese consulate refused to relocate, as did the temples of Waverly Place and several gun-toting merchants. No longer would Chinatown serve as a convenient den of iniquity for the slumming socialites of Nob Hill: Look Tin Eli and a consortium of Chinatown community leaders ousted opium dens and brothels, and hired notable architects to rebuild the district as a crowd-pleasing tourist destination with a signature Chinatown deco look.
The rest of Downtown was brought back to its feet not by City Hall, but by die-hard entertainers. All but one of San Francisco’s 20 historic theaters had been completely destroyed by the earthquake and subsequent fire, but theater tents were soon set up amid the rubble. The smoke wafting across makeshift stages wasn’t a special effect when the surviving entertainers began marathon performances to keep the city’s spirits up – but it wasn’t hard to bring down the house when buildings were still collapsing all around them.
In a show of popular priorities, San Francisco’s theaters were rebuilt long before City Hall’s grandiose Civic Center was completed. Most of the Barbary Coast had gone up in flames (with the notable, highly flammable exception of Hotaling’s whiskey warehouse; Click here) and was destined to be rebuilt as a major port, so the theater scene and most of its red-light entourage decamped to the Tenderloin. Built in 1907, soon after the earthquake, the Great American Music Hall still shows the determined flamboyance of post-earthquake San Francisco, with carved gilt decor recalling golden days of yore and scantily clad frescoed figures hinting at other possible backstage entertainments.
San Francisco’s more highbrow entertainments of opera and classical music began a glorious second act, despite the fact that the world’s most famous tenor, Enrico Caruso, vowed never to return to the city after the quake had jolted him out of bed at the Palace Hotel. Soprano Luisa Tetrazzini ducked out of a 1911 squabble over her talents between Oscar Hammerstein and New York’s Metropolitan Opera to return to San Francisco, and gave a free performance at Lotta’s Fountain for an audience of 250,000 – virtually every last man, woman and child in San Francisco.
San Francisco’s greatest comeback performance was the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, in celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal. Resourceful San Franciscans used earthquake