San Francisco’s Lost Rendezvous

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 21, 1906

San Francisco’s Lost Rendezvous

A HINT of the manner of life in a great city is given by a writer in a recent issue of the San Francisco Chronicle. In the course of his description of the high-class restaurants of that ruined metropolis, where wealth and beauty congregated, and epicures feasted upon costly viands and clinked their glasses, this writer says:—

There were, too, those places known to every theater-goer, Zinkand’s, the Louvre, Techau Tavern, all famous for the cheer they spread at midnight, when the homeward-bound stopped in for a chat, a salad, a rarebit, and a friendly glass. Here, in a way, was the center of San Francisco’s social life. Here the wealthy of the avenues and the respectable, with fun-loving hearts, and the gayer folk who frolicked amid the wine glasses, met together and listened to the music of the orchestra and saw the day pass into the morrow. Happy rendezvous of all classes now fallen.

They are all gone. There are no automobiles in front of the Poodle Dog. The lights are out in Marchand’s, and the discreet waiters have vanished. Zinkand’s is gone, too, with the Louvre and the Tavern, and the theater crowds that thronged them. The steps into the Café Fiesta are dusty, and its fountains no longer play. Matias, in the other end of town, no longer serves tamales and thick wine, graced with Latin proverbs. The crowd in Coppa’s is dispersed, and those late revelers who discoursed over their wine in the Buon Gusto until the first morning car rounded Telegraph Hill are somewhere in a dryer land, saladless and wineless.

This sounds like a description of social life in old Rome in the days of the decline. But all this whirl of gaiety was brought to a sudden stop by twenty-eight seconds of shaking and its attendant results. The haunts of pleasure are now in ruins, and the frequenters of these places have been driven by waves of flame to other shores. Life in San Francisco is typical of life in other cities. The warning to keep out of the cities has come none too soon. Like the cities of the plain in the olden time, our modern cities are doomed.