SAN FRANCISCO.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 2679, 7 September 1870, Page 3

SAN FRANCISCO.

(from our own correspondent.) " Salt Lake City, July 2nd.

MONTGOMERY STREET,

This is the great street of San Francisco, par excellence. Montgomery .street is to San Francisco what the Strand is to London, the Boulevards to Paris, Broadway to New York, Collins street to Melbourne, and Princes street to Dunedin. In its architecture, in its business transactions, in its big rents and aristocratic notions, it stands alone. The owner of a Montgomery street dry goods store entertains a somewhat similar feeling towards his brethren in other parts of the city, as would a leading draper in Dunedia. for a haberdasher in a golf! fields township, or a squatter for a small cockatoo settled down on his run. But Kearney and California streets resent this uppishness of their neighbour, and not without reason either. By-and-bye they will probably catch it up ; at present, however, Montgomery street stands alone in its glory. It is not a wide street by any means—not more than 22 yards wide, 1 should say, including pavements; but its houses are tall arid beautifully finished, the sr one for some of the buildiags, such as Wells, Fargo, and Co.'s, for instance, having been brought from China. Montgomery street is a street of stores, of hotels, of banks, and of money brokers. It is, for the most parr, level, feut towards the end it runs away up art angle of 45 deg., and terminates in a sandhill, [ts buildings are finished off something like the Banks of Otago, of New South Wales, and of New Zealand, in Dunedin, but to hold their own with the second and I third class houses of this street, your banks should have two storeys more added to their height. Thousands of pounds a foot would not buy frontage in Montgomery street, and the stores and offices are, consequently, jammed close together. But though of little width, the depth of these stores and offices is something to look at, running back, as they do, hundreds of feet. The occupants of these offices, stowed away in upper storeys, are innumerable, and if you want to find > heir whereabouts, you look for their /tames on the steps of the stairs. It is a busy, pushing, restless thoroughfare this Montgomery street. From early morning till dusk, eager, hurrying crowds pass hither and thither along is pavements, stand at its corner, or throng around its bsnka in groups and crowds. Keen, sharp-looking men they are, carrying-on their monster speculations, and figuring up heavy losses and big gains at the day's end. It they know y^u well they put . out their right hand, perhaps—probably their left—as you pass them by, and then forget your existence altogether. Their minds are intently occupied in the things tioing on around them, and they have no time to think of the ameniies of life just now ; but by-and-bye, when business is over for the time, you may meet them a* ( lunch in the Merchants' Exchange., or in some of the other thousand and one large

saloons of the city, and they will converse with you quietly and courteously. la these moments of leisure you will find them well read, higaly cultured, and anxious to give and receive information.

Starting from Market street and leaving behind you the Grand Hotel, you will find many things to attract your attention in your walk down Montgomery street. To take this walk with any degree of comfort you should select the left hand side of the street, because the brokers, bankers, and surging crowds of passers-by, though plentiful enough, are not so plentiful as over the way on the opposite side. You would spend some of your time in glancing over that display of jewellery in Tucker's window—a display outshining Aladdin's cave inits gorgeousness. Close to Tucker's andon the same side of the street you are on,; you pass the Lick House, and over the .way you see auother great city hotel,* the Occidental, with its 450 rooms. You see not only the hotel itself, but also theisoles of its customers' boots, stuck up on the backs of chairs, oi' resting against the pillars at the entrance. Then you comeito the Kuss House, the best of the second-class hotels of San Francisco, where rural citizens most do congregate. California street shortly after crosses Montgomery street at right angles, and as you approach the corner you are almost deafened; with the yelling crowd of brokers and speculators who here carry on their operations., "Gould 1 and Curry, 560—5601;'? " The Amador ■ down £ "The ;Eureka at par,", Such j are some of the cries, which - catch your; ear. Escaping as quickly as possible from j this gesticulating crowd of apparent1 lunatics, you catch a glimpse of therWhat. Cheer House, with its motley crowd, around the door j a crowd of miners,, storekeepers, patent medicine men, - sharpers, street preachers, and other suspiciousl characters1/ You next come to Clay street, "where newspaper men- and printers hang" ouft;\-»nd ■ one block more brings you to Washington street, the terminus of/ thik fashionable promenade of the city. But before Washington street has been reached, and you have turned round to retrace your steps, groups of knowing-looking men, given to much gesticulating and to- conversing in under tones, will have attracted your attention. They are the politicians of the city—not the tip-top sawyers, but professionals—who are discussing their plans for the coming elections,' and concocting wily pld*s wherewith to gull the people. In this walk through Montgomery street you will meet the representatives of every business, profession, trade, and calling. You will see here better than anywhere else this great go-a---head people of San Francisco and of California. The ladies you meet with, you will find as graceful, as tasteful, and as dressy as they well can be. > But it was not the buildings nor the people that first attracted my attention in Montgomery street, No, it was THE HORSES. Like all old colonists, a good horse is to me an object of attraction, and I fancy I have seen some good ones in one place and another too ; but I never saw better ones than those I met in San Francisco. Those you see are mostly under traps, very few with saddles oa; but they are all well bred, well matched, and well groomed. Not only the private horses, mark you, but those which you see standing before hotel doors, and driving through the streets ready for hire; beautiful pairs of bays, greys, or chestnuts, good-actioned, fast trotters," without a single screw or broken kneed horse among the lot. But there was another thing I observed about these horses not undeserving of a word or two. No man or boy have I ever seen standing at their heads or close by them:' There they wait, all day long, by the sides of the streets, uncared for, unthought of. If you feel disposed to hire one of the well-kept, satinlined, closed-in hackney-coaches—an expensive luxury, by-the-bye, for which you have to pay at the rate of 63 or 83 a mile—after considerable'trouble you will find the driver in some cigar shop or drinking saloon in the neighbourhood, perhaps.a hundred, or it may be even two hundred, yards off. If, however, cab horses only were left so unprovided and so uncared for, the thing would deserve, perhaps, nothing more than a mere passing remark ; but it is just the same with private horses too. I have seen a "span" of thorough-breds—-nay, indeed, on, one occasion, a team of four high spirited horses, their necks curved, their mouths open, their chests flecked with foam, pulling hard at the reins, as they .vere driven up before some shopfront. The of the trap, a lady and gentleman, got out, the latter secured the reins loosely to the splash-board, and *then left those four horses there to themselves, perhaps for an b. our —very likely for several hours. I know I watched them myself for some time out of curiosity, to see what they would do ; but they did nothing. They stood there quietly—almost meekly— giving but little signs of that spirit I had observed a short time before. And I may here observe that during my stay in this country! have never read of nor saw a runaway horse in the streets of San Francisco.. If you walk along Montgomery street/ along California street, along; any of the other principal streets where busy men do congregate, you may count the horses and traps atanding by themselves by the hundreds. Once or twice, perhaps, you come across a horse tied to a small leaden weight lying loosely on the pavement, but horses so tied are few and far between. The secret of this, as I understand it, is that the horses have been all broken in by the lasso, and this standing by themselves has been made a part of their early training.

LOOKING OUT PROM MY WINDOW the sights which catch ray eye are these: Right in frout, across the street, stands a large, red, brick-built schoolhpuse, with stained glass windows. Between it and the road is a space now occupied with, sand, bags of coal, and drays. The pathway is blocked up with, piles of wood, with drays without horses and horses without drays. Adjoining is a redpainted open wooden building, and a huge sigi is attached to its gable end. Below this sign you can read the words; "Coal. West Hartley—• Sydney—Chili—Bellinghara Bay—Goose —Hard Eggs." A street branches off close by—a main thoroughfare this—and in the very middle of it a horse is moving round and round, busy at work all day lon-/. He is harnessed to a long shaft, in the turning of which he occupies the entire width of the street. The traps and the waggons cannot get by in consequence ; a? least they have to wait there some time before they can manage to do so, watching until the horse is at the opposite side of the street, and then making a dash at the opening. The street cars, too, are visible from my window passing and repassing it every five minutes. They are painted with a large streak of yellow at the bottom; then comes a large red one ; next a row of windows ; another streak of red a'^ove the windows, with the -vorda, "City Front," " Potrero," "Lone Mountain," painted upon it. The conductor has rung his bell, the driver

pulled up hia horses, a lady gets in, the bell rings again, and on goes the ponderous sfeeet car. Two Chinamen and China-women are now passing by ; and now a gentleman on a white Arab horse and high-peaked Mexican saddle canters past. Away up above me, some way off, lie the smooth rounded sand mounds, and'the Jewish synagogue with its burnished cupolas rears its head hundreds of feet abov every other object in sight. There is no tree; no shade of any kind; no protection of any kind from the glaring sun, which, from a blue cloudless sky, pours down his rays upon those brown painted houses which lie thickly around, square built, porticoed, and jalousied. Up yonder, a short way off, a large threestoried house is moving along the street. A strange sight it ia. HOTELS AND HOTEL LIFE. In describing San Francisco one might briefly, and not inappropriately, speak of it as a city of sandhills, or you might say it was a speculative city that lived in an atmosphere of gambling. One man would sell you it was a gay pleasant city, very like Paris in its ways and inner life ; in the dress, thoughts, and general characteristics of its men and women, but principally of its women. Another man "would say:it ; was an immoral city^ with little of the saint about it, but a great deal of the DeVil and': the Devil's ways/ Now for myself, when I think of San Francisco, its magnificent": hotels occupy the larger share6f mythbughts. More than any .othercity I know of in the world, San rFrancisco is a city of hotels. Paris provides for its visitors in as pleasant, comfortable, and luxurious a manner as any other city in the world, and the consequence is that 200,000 spend a portion of the; year there,, leaving, behind them aßout twenty millions of pounds ster ■ ling. 20,000 visitors go annually to New York, and leave it well satisfied with the accommodation of its hotels; but, I doubt if any of them can, in;its way, beat San Francisco. The fie best hotels of this city—the Grand, the Occidental, the Cosmopolitan, Lick House, andßuss 'House—have some 2000 persons staying; in othenij and the other lesser houses of * -entertainment accommodate at least an; equal number. These five hotels have; been erected at a cost of LI, 500,000, and! between them can figure up say 1700; rooms: If you wanted to live with the^ big "swells" of the land, you would; probably ■'', take up your quarters at the Grand Hotel, with v& Axmin- . ster carpets, innumerable passages, and 700 rooms. If you preferred meeting the substantial men, the upper and middle classes, the Occidental would be your choice. If you were a married man, and sought quietness, you would go perhaps to the Lick House or Cosmopolitan. But in good truth it 'matters little to which you go : you will be satisfied, and more than satisfied, with either of them. You pay 12s a day at each of them, and for this you have every comfort, every luxury, you can require or desire. Take 1 the following Bill of Fare of the Occidental dinner as a sample of what you may expect:— soups: Mock Turtle. Vermicelli. fish : Boiled Salmon, a la Boiled Trout, sherry N'ormaiide. sauce. cold : Roast Beef. Pressed Corned Beef. Mutton. Ham. Lamb. Tongue. Lobster Salad. Boned Turkey, aux Truffles, a la' Gelde. boiled : Leg of Mutton, Caper Sauce. Corned Beef *nd Cabbage. Beef Tongue. Bacon, with Green. Kale. Chicken, Parsley Sauce. roast : Ham, Champagne Sauce. Beef. Turkey. Loin of Veal. Stuffed Pig. Spring Lamb, with Sauce. Pork and Beans. entrees: Fillet of Beef. Crais6, aux Pommes a, la Parisienne. Small Patties ala Reine. Kidney Saute. Champagne Sauce. French Pancakes q, la Gelestine. . Macaroni, with Cheese, ala Lazarone. Breast of Lamb, Sauce Sdubise. Calf's Liver and Bacon. S'uffed Shoulder. Assorted Pickles. Cranberry Sauce. Currant Jelly. Horse Radish. Olives. Lsttuce. Apple Sauce. Celery. Cashmere. Chutney. VEGETABLES : Mashed Potatoes. Boiled New Potatoes. Baked Potatoes. Rice. Cauliflowers '. Stewed Tomatoes. Parsnips. Lima Baans. Hulled Corn. Asparagus. Spinach. Green.Peas. PASTRY : Indian Pudding, Rum Sauce. Lady Cake. Congress Tarts. ' Posco Slices. Vanilla Bretzels. Rhubarb Pie. Plum Pie. Apple Pie. Malt Candy. Pine Apple. Ice Cream. Sherry Wine Jelly. ! • DESSERT: ■ Prunes. Almonds. Raisins. California Walnuts. Apples. Pea-Nuts. Oranges. Strawberries and Cream. \ Yes, the Americans know how to liye well, and rnn their hotels properly. But the running of these hotels in San Francisco and in the cities of the Eastern States is a big thing—an onerous undertaking. The Lick House, which, perhaps, as far as size is concerned, is the smallest of the four first-class hotels in the city, fetches a rental of LIO,OOO a-year. Besides this, the present lessee, Mr Lawlor, has expended L 40,000 in furniture. But your hotel-keeper out here is great in the way of levying black mail —the greatest prcficient I know of at this, the newspaper man excepted perhaps. The ; eighteen or twenty hackney coaches, . for instance, standing; out-in front of the Lick Hoase pay Mr Lawlor L2OOO for this privilege. The barber pays him at the rate of L 750 a year for a small room off the bar ; and the billiard marker rentb the billiard-room for something like LIBOQ a year., A sharp, keen business man:is your genuine hotelkeeper, suave ia manner, polite; gentlemanly, but very eager to pocket your dollars. When you fully understand what he has to do, the amount of. business he has daily to get through, you car* appreciate the common remark of the counry applied to a man sharp, but sharp in an ordinary degree only, " I guess he's a darned smart man. I do ; but he can't run an hotel." Speaking ;of the Lick House reminds me of its magnificent dining room, the most magnificent in the States, it is said, as, indeed, it might well be, seeing that the inlaying of the floor and walls cost; about L36>000.

But, outwardly, the-Grand Hotel is the hotel of San Francisco.. From every part of the city you can* see its lofty cupola and large red flag. The building itself is of white cut stone ; a huge mass; of masonry to look, at, too ornate, perhaps, in its style to suit the tastes of many persons. Its turrets are high peakedj its gable ends sharp pointed, and its windows oriental looking. li's a big building, though. When you have walked around it you can realise fully its siz9. If you try it you will find it will take you. six hundred good steps to get round the triangular space itoccupies jandyou will find too, that, as in the case of all American hotels, the ground floor is occupied by stores and beautiful shops. The piece of ground occupied by that block of buildings in Dunedin bounded by Princes street, High street, and Ma»se street, is very

similar in shape, and About thd same size a3 this on which the $rand Hotel is built.

But passing on from the hotels themselves, it may not be uninteresting to examine the life within their walls. Hundreds and thousands of the men and women of Satn Francisco know no other life than this. The Mammoth Hotels, the smaller houses, the fashionable boarding^houses, the innumerable restaurants, are their residences, their homes. In these places they spend all their day a, growing up from childhood into manhood and womanhood, marry and die. The Americans are fond of ease, of idleness, of laxury, when these things do not clash'with their business, and all these are to h& had at the hotels. Then there is no bother with servants, with the details of hotrae-keep-ing; heavy rents are avoided, gas bills, coal accounts, water rates, are unknown ; and butchers, bakers, grocers, are not included in the daily miseries of your life. Everything runs easily and smoothly. Then, again, this life, besides being a life of ease, of luxury, of enjoyment, is also an economical life. One hundred pounds a year for each of its grownup members will secure a family a suife of rooms ' proportionate to the Fnumber, beautifully furnished, and well-dressed, civil servants. Then, too; the arrangement has a freedom about it that is sometimes very convenient^ The wife is independent of the husband's late return from his office. The husband'need'not rush through his business, for he has no fear of a cold dinner, and of angry looks awaiting him" at' home. But, though ' the life may be a pleasant one, and an economical one, it is undomestic and unhealthy—unhealthy alike to the body and t!ie mind, but particularly to the latter. Thereis a 1 coolness, a self-possession, a brazenness in the way the ladies walk into the public dining room and stare you all over from top to toe, that is anything but pleasant to behold. Vanity and frivolity too, spring out of this indolent hotel-life,: causing much of the unhappiness and of the immorality which prevail so largely throughout the city. I intended to have said a word; or two about other matters, about the hospitality of the people, their morality, the cost of living in San Francisco, its public buildings and places of amusement, the peculiarities of its inhabitants as they strike a Btranger; but T am starting for the Golden City to-morrow, and must leave myself room for such items of news as I may pick up there, on my return, to send you. The particulars, therefore, which I have just enumerated, must await some more convenient opportunity for the telling.