Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam
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Hubert Howe Bancroft >> Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam
All this leads us to the highest hopes for the future. What we need most
of all is a centralization of mechanical industries around the shores of
this bay. Let everything that is made be made here, and the requirements
of all the peoples facing this ocean here be met. The Panama canal will
be a blessing or a curse to California in proportion as she rises to the
occasion and makes opportunities. Manufactures and commerce tell the
whole story. Let us have the city beautiful by all means-it will pay;
Paris makes it pay; but we must have the useful in any event-this, and a
municipality with its several parts subordinated to a general scheme.
What we can do without is demagogism, with its attendant labor wrangles,
and all the fraud, lying, and hypocrisy incident to a too free
government. We want a city superior to any other in beauty, as well as
in utility, and it will pay these United States well to see that we have
it. If we build no better than before, we gain nothing by this fire
which has cost many a heartache.
The game of the gods is in our hands; shall we play it worthily? Two
decades of inaction at this juncture, like those which followed the
advent of the overland railway, would decide the fate of the city
adversely for the century, and the effect of it would last for ten
centuries. When the shores of the Pacific are occupied as the shores of
the Atlantic now are, when all around the vast arena formed by America,
Asia, and Australia are great nations of wealth and culture, with
hundreds of Bostons and Baltimores, of Londons and Liverpools, the great
American republic would scarcely be satisfied with only a porter's lodge
at her western gateway.
It is not much to say that the new city will be modern and up to date,
with some widened streets and winding boulevards, gardens banging to the
hillside, parks with lakes and cascades, reservoirs of sea water on
every hilltop; public work and public service, street cars telephones
and lighting being of the best. Plans for such changes were prepared
before the fire; they can be extended and carried out with greater
facility since the ground has been cleared from obstructions. All this
and more may easily be done if the government can be made to see where
the true interests of the people lie, to regard a west-coast metropolis
with an eye for something of beauty as well as of utility, an eye which
can see utility in beauty, and withal an eye of pride in possession. A
paltry two or three hundred millions judiciously expended here by the
government would make a city which would ever remain the pride of the
whole people and command the admiration and respect of all the nations
around this great ocean.
Of what avail are art and architecture if they may not be employed in a
cause like this? Here is an opportunity which the world has never before
witnessed. With limitless wealth, with genius of as high an order as any
that has gone before, with the stored experiences of all ages and
nations-what better use can be made of it all than to establish at the
nation's western gate a city which shall be the initial point of a new
order of development? Away back in the days of Palmyra and Thebes the
rulers of those cities seemed to understand it, if the people did
not-that is to say, the value of embellishment. And had we now but one
American Nebuchadnezzar we might have a Babylon at our Pacific seaport.
For a six-months' world's fair any considerable city can get from the
government five or ten millions. And why not? There's politics in it.
Can we not have some of "those politics" for a respectable west-coast
city? Would it not be economy to spend some millions on an industrial
metropolis which should be a permanent world's fair for the
enlightenment of the Pacific? The nation has made its capital beautiful,
and so established the doctrine that art, architecture, and beautiful
environment have a value above ugly utility. May we not hope for
something a little out of the common for the nation's chief seaport on
the Pacific, a little fresh gilding for our Golden Gate?
THE END