San Francisco and Chinatown Essay -- California Place History American

San Francisco and Chinatown Gilded age San Francisco stood as a beacon for travelers jump-start for the western coast of the United States. The most prominent city in the developing west during the latter parts of the nineteenth century and the enterprise of the twentieth, San Francisco encompassed a range of conflicting identities. This time period marked a transitory stage in the development of San Francisco, evolving from a booming border town to a civilized metropolis, the emerging San Franciscan identity kept up(p) qualities from both poles of this spectrum. Chinatown, existing as a city within the city, share this relationship of extremes with San Francisco. To travelers visiting San Francisco, Chinatown was a necessary stop. The writings in travelogues create during this period describe Chinatown by means of a mix of revulsion and curiosity, its inhabitants virgin and sub-human. In short, within the developing city of San Francisco, an expedition into China town remained a nonrational exploration of a foreign and exciting environment. Emily Faithful, an Englishwoman writing in 1884, traveled through America in order to explore the changing part of women during the nineteenth century.1 Faithful remarked, San Francisco is a city of strange contrasts. Perhaps on that point is not a faster place in the world, and yet there are few more conspicuous for works of true benevolence. on that point is more drinking, and more fanatical total abstinence than I eer encountered elsewhere2 Faithful focused mainly upon the moral decay sequent San Franciscos prosperity, however she closed her description of San Francisco by contrasting the retrogression of the so-called society set,3 to the equally large cultured... ...ities (Philadelphia Hubbard brothers, 1883), 455 and Alfred Falk, Trans-Pacific sketches a tour through the United States and Canada (Melbourne G. Robertson, 1877), 23.8 Glazier, Peculiarities of American Cities, 464.9 N icholas Everitt, Round the world in strange familiarity America, British Columbia and the west (London T. W. Laurie Ltd., 1915), 270.10 Green, Notes, 65.11 Glazier, Peculiarities of American Cities, 468.12 Glazier, 469.13 Catherine Bates, A Year in the Great Republic (London, Ward & Downey, 1887), 140.14 ibid.15 Bates, A Year in the Great Republic, 141.16 Ibid.17 ibid, 142.18 Glazier, Peculiarities of American Cities, 469.19 Green, Notes on New York, San Francisco, and Old Mexico, 71.20 Ibid.21 Green, Notes, 71.22 Glazier, Peculiarities, 470.23 Ibid, 471.