Our Fair City, By Charles Raudebaugh

“The good Dr. Pangloss, in demonstration of his thesis that this is the best of all possible worlds, argued that since we had stockings, legs were made to fit them.  The beldam, San Francisco, sitting in her red plush box at the opera, agrees with a sly wink.  She pinches her snuff, scratches a fleabite, adjusts her whalebone neckband, folds her hands, and goes to sleep as the curtain rises.

Is it not so that since the days of the mud paths before gold was discovered the streets of San Francisco have always been poor and inadequate?  Housing insufficient?  No space for merchants?  Municipal government poor?  Is this not San Francisco?  From Telegraph Hill you can see hundreds of ships in the Bay; they are here because there has been a war.  Pouf!  There were as many ships in the Bay when the Gold Rush was on. 

Yes, it perhaps was a little indelicate of the old United Railroads to send its representative so openly to the City Hall with his cardboard suit box of cash to pay off the Board of Supervisors for a street railway franchise.  But that was nearly forty years ago, and wasn’t Abe Ruef sent to prison?  (Poor Abe, he was such a charming fellow!)  Things are better ordered now.  Payoffs aren’t made out of cardboard boxes.  Noting as crude as that.  So, let us listen to the opera.  San Francisco is a city of great culture, you know.  We had such a difficult time getting the people to approve the money for the Opera House.  It was only four million dollars and you’d think they did not want to build a memorial to their War Dead.  (Wonder what kind of memorial they want for the latest war?)  But they came along eventually.  Never mind the streets.  Let’s enjoy the music.”