"San Francisco was a cesspool in its time. A century ago, little more, there was a stretch of it where every son of a bitch in all creation gathered.
"They came in off the ocean, or across the land, and they made that place a whore to rival Babylon..."
-Garth Ennis, The Boys, Volume Nine: The Big Ride (Runnemede, NJ, 2011), "Barbary Coast," Part One, p. 9, panel 4.
"But out here you leave all that behind.
"You look the past in the eye, and you feel clean."
-panel 5.
I don't know whether any of that is sound but it reads good.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And not everyone is fond of San Francisco in real life! Some compare the city to Sodom and Babylon. And legitimate criticisms can be made of the politicians who now govern it.
Ad astra! Sean
San Francisco was only a small village (Yerba Buena) before the Gold Rush, and then it was a mining boom town -- overwhelmingly composed of single men single-mindedly chasing money and whose ideas of recreation centered on gambling, drink and whores.
This took a long time to wear off and in some respects remained influential for good and all -- for example, San Francisco was always a great gourmet/restaurant town because so many of the original inhabitants were unmarried and ate out a lot, and because many of its inhabitants came from places like France and Italy with long restaurant traditions.
It was a violent and corrupt city for a long time; and the rest of California tended to regard it with holy horror because it was also a very cosmopolitan one, heavily Catholic when it wasn't irreligious, and full of immigrants from everywhere on earth from the beginning.
By way of contrast, from the time it ceased being a Mexican village in the 1850's through 1945, Los Angeles was much more homogenous -- it was a whitebread town, full of transplanted Midwesterners and fairly straight-laced Protestant when it wasn't going after weird cults. Los Angeles proper treated Hollywood (heavily Jewish) with disdain for a long time, though they liked their money.
In that period, Los Angeles considered San Francisco mongrelized and debauched, and San Francisco considered Los Angeles to be full of dim, thick hicks -- "Des Moines by the Sea" or "Wisconsin with palm trees".
There was also a strong political rivalry -- Southern California was Republican and individualistic, San Francisco was Democrat and a strong union town.
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