the city heart.
Beyond the heights where one catches glimpses of the ocean, the city
slopes to abrupt cliffs along the outer harbor, and here are mansions
whose windy gardens overhang the surf. Beyond Market street is the area
described in the phrase, "south of the slot". Superficially drab and
gray in aspect, it has been celebrated again and again in song and
story. From this region have come the majority of San Francisco's
champion athletes. Near here beats the red heart of the labor world.
And not far off still stands that exquisite gem of Spanish
catholicism--Mission Dolores.

Here and there--and it is a little like meeting a ghost in a crowded
street--through all the beauty and freshness of the new city project the
bones of the old: the lofty ruins, ivy-hung, of a huge Nob Hill Palace
here; the mere foundation, bush-encircled, of a big old family mansion
there; elaborate rusty fences of Mid-Victorian iron which enclose
nothing; wide low steps of Mid-Victorian marble which lead nowhere. The
San Franciscan speaks always with a tender, regretful affection of
that dead city, but, as is natural, he speaks of it less and less. For
myself, I am glad now that I never saw the city that was; for I can love
the city that is with no arriere pensee.

They serve, however--those bones of a dead past--to remind the stranger
of a marvelous rebuilding feat, to accent the virility and vitality, the
courage and enterprise of a people who, before a half decade had passed,
had eliminated almost every trace of the greatest disaster of modern
time.

Perhaps, after the beauty of its situation, the stranger is most
struck with the picturesqueness given to the city by its cosmopolitan
atmosphere. For San Francisco, serving as one of the two main great
gateways to an enormous country, a front entrance to America from the
Orient, a back entrance from Europe and a side entrance from South
America, standing halfway between tropics and polar regions, a great
port of the greatest ocean in the world, becomes naturally one of the
world's main caravanseries, a meeting place of nations.

Chinatown is not far off from the heart of the city. And Chinatown
pervades San Francisco. It is as though it distilled some faint oriental
perfume with which constantly it suffuses the air. You meet the Chinese
everywhere. The men differ in no wise from the men with whom the smaller
Chinatowns of the East have acquainted us. The women make the streets
exotic. L