Two sketches of San Francisco fauna by British naturalist William Smyth, during an 1825-1827 expedition to California. Courtesy of the Online Archive of California. In 1863, proto-psychedelic writer and hashish eater Fitz-Hugh Ludlow took an overland stagecoach to San Francisco with the painter Albert Bierstadt. There he met Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and the rest of the young bohemians that enlivened the city’s literary scene. Ludlow wrote articles about the trip for The Atlantic Monthly, later collected in a travelogue called The Heart of the Continent: It is as hard to leave San Francisco as to get there. To a traveller paying his first visit it has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. There is no snow there. There are no summer showers. The tailor recognizes no aphelion or perihelion in his custom: the thin woolen suit which his patron had made in April is comfortably worn until April again. The only change of stockings there is from wet to dry, or from soiled to clean. Save that in so-called winter frequent rainfalls alternate with spotless intervals of amber weather, and that soi-disant summer is one entire amber mass, its unbroken divine days concrete in it, there is no inequality on which to forbid the bans between May and December. In San Francisco there is no work for the scene-shifter of Nature: the wealth of that great dramatist, the year, resulting in the same manner as the poverty of dabblers in private theatricals—a single flat doing service for the entire play. Thus, save for the purpose of notes of hand, the almanac of San Francisco might replace its mutable months and seasons with one great kindly, constant, sumptuous All the Year Round.

Two sketches of San Francisco fauna by British naturalist William Smyth, during an 1825-1827 expedition to California. Courtesy of the Online Archive of California.

In 1863, proto-psychedelic writer and hashish eater Fitz-Hugh Ludlow took an overland stagecoach to San Francisco with the painter Albert Bierstadt. There he met Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and the rest of the young bohemians that enlivened the city’s literary scene. Ludlow wrote articles about the trip for The Atlantic Monthly, later collected in a travelogue called The Heart of the Continent:

It is as hard to leave San Francisco as to get there. To a traveller paying his first visit it has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. There is no snow there. There are no summer showers. The tailor recognizes no aphelion or perihelion in his custom: the thin woolen suit which his patron had made in April is comfortably worn until April again. The only change of stockings there is from wet to dry, or from soiled to clean. Save that in so-called winter frequent rainfalls alternate with spotless intervals of amber weather, and that soi-disant summer is one entire amber mass, its unbroken divine days concrete in it, there is no inequality on which to forbid the bans between May and December. In San Francisco there is no work for the scene-shifter of Nature: the wealth of that great dramatist, the year, resulting in the same manner as the poverty of dabblers in private theatricals—a single flat doing service for the entire play. Thus, save for the purpose of notes of hand, the almanac of San Francisco might replace its mutable months and seasons with one great kindly, constant, sumptuous All the Year Round.
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  1. oggblogg reblogged this from tarnoff and added:
    I heart my city.
  2. tarnoff posted this