The City That Was

The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest hearted, most pleasure loving city of the western continent, and in many ways the most romantic, is a horde of refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate, have caught its flavor of the Arabian Nights, feel that it can never be the same. -from The City That Was A hundred years ago, San Francisco was devastated by earthquake and fire, and immediately after, reporter Will Irwin of the New York Sun, and formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote an elegy for that shattered city that is suddenly heartbreaking anew, as the United States as a nation comes to terms again with the loss of another fabled metropolis. Reprinted from the Sun, where it appeared on April 21, 1906, this unabashedly loving and tender essay celebrates the food, the fashion, the weather, the nightlife of the foggy city by the bay. But most poignantly, Irwin laments for the people for whom "hospitality was nearly a vice" and to whom the city itself "a gateway to adventure." In the wake of the destruction of New Orleans, this century-old essay is tragically fresh. American journalist WILL IRWIN (1873-1948) is also the author of The House of Mystery: An Episode in the Career of Rosalie Le Grange, Clairvoyant (1910).