The Balchutha and Coit Tower as seen from the Aquatic Park Pier

“With the memory of persons not yet old,  a mariner might have steered into these narrows—not yet the Golden Gates—opened out the surface of the bay—here girt with hills,  there lying broad to the horizon—and beheld a scene as empty of the presence,  as pure from the handiwork,  of man,  as in the days of our old sea-commander. . . .Now,  a generation later,  a great city covers the sand-hills of the west,  a growing town lies along the muddy shallows of the east;  steamboats pant continually between them from before sunrise till the small hours of the morning;  lines of great sea-going ships lie ranged at anchor;  colours fly upon the islands;  and from all around the hum of corporate life,  of beaten bells,  and steam,  and running carriages,  goes cheerily abroad in the sunshine.  Choose a place on one of the huge throbbing ferryboats,  and,  when you are midway between the city and the suburb;  look around.  The air is fresh and salt as if you were at sea.  On the one hand is Oakland,  gleaming white among its gardens.  On the other,  to seaward,  hill after hill is crowded and crowned with the palaces of San Francisco;  its long streets lie in regular bars of darkness,  east and west,  across the sparkling picture;  a forest of masts bristles like bulrushes about its feet;  nothing remains of the days of Drake but the fanciful trade-wind scattering the smoke,  the fogs that will begin to muster around sundown,  and the fine bulk of Tamalpais looking down on San Francisco like Arthur’s seat on Edinburgh.”     From SAN FRANCISCO by Robert Louis Stevenson [1883]  

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© Ron Henggeler 2007. All rights reserved
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