Noel C. Cilker

If you live in San Francisco, you probably avoid it. If you're visiting from out of town, it's probably the second place on your list of must-see sites (after Fisherman's Wharf). It's crowded with people spacily walking about and lining up to overpay for a ride on the cheesily nostalgic cable car. It's Union Square, just off the Powell Bart station and filled with tourist destinations and Christmas shopping necessities: Macy's, Express, and the guilty pleasure (and surprisingly good, but don't tell anyone I said so) Cheesecake Factory. But, as Gary Kamiya writes in his excellent "Portals of the Past" column in the San Francisco Chronicle, "for decades, the center of San Francisco was not Union Square but Portsmouth Square, and the most important streets by far were not Powell or Stockton, but Montgomery and Kearny." Portsmouth Square was the center of town life, where everything important happened, and where Ah Toy, after quickly ascer...

Every now and then I see signs that I've been working on a topic too long. I saw one last week after I posted some cool images of San Francisco that I found in the Bancroft Library. One in particular caught the attention of a faithful follower, this drawing of a San Francisco street scene in 1849: I had seen this image a few times before so I didn't give it a second thought. The reader, however, noticed something kind of wacky about it. "I had no idea old ships were turned into storehouses and hotels!" she wrote, and if you take a really close peek, you can see that she's right. The "Storeship" and the "Niantic Hotel" are, indeed, ships. I didn't even think to point them out last week because, well, I have been immersed in San Francisco history for the past seven months and for me it was old news. I've become San Fran-jaded! So I figured it was time to put on a new set of glasses. The artist of this drawing was not crazy nor ma...

For the past who-knows-how-many months - I'll say seven - I've been nose deep in books. Some exciting, some boring, some valuable, and some that leave me wondering how they ever got published. My local library (quick plug for local libraries!) has been indispensable as a resource for information about San Francisco and the Gold Rush, as has Google (quick plug for local Googles!) with its vast collection of digitized old books from the 1850s. I literally click my mouse buttons and books appear on my screen. As a result I haven't had to move much and my butt has grown into my office chair. I'm now coming to the point where it's time to venture outside and see what lies beyond the computer screen. One of the reasons is that I'm starting to see facts repeat themselves in the books I'm looking through, and the other reason is that I'm feeling, frankly, a little ashamed. Why? Because I haven't been to the Bancroft yet. The Bancroft Library, for those o...

Writing about the Chinese is both a blessing and a curse. I will say, right off the bat, that the blessings far outweigh any difficulties I've come across, both in my research and as I begin my writing. The most obvious plus is that I'm learning more and more about the culture of my husband's family. None of their ancestors, to their or my knowledge, made the Pacific crossing in a boat to find gold in the 1800s, but in 1981 my in-laws did  embark from Hong Kong, as Ah Toy did, crossed the Pacific, as Ah Toy did, and, like our mistress hero, arrived in San Francisco to try their hands at a new and more profitable life in a foreign land. (I'm fairly certain that their similarities end there, especially occupationally.) Additionally, I've read some fascinating books about Chinese religion, superstitions, philosophy on food, yin and yang, feng shui, and numerous other facets of Chinese culture that have caused me, from time to time, to gleefully shout, "I sort of...

The New Year, wherever or whomever you are, naturally prompts us to look back and see how far we've come. Usually we only review the last 365 days, stop at the previous January 1st, then swing our eyes back around and head down the trail of our current nascent year. Gold Rush San Franciscans did the same. Though most were still not convinced that the city was going to be their permanent home (they had families to get back to to share their gold - or gambling - riches with), they still felt that a pausing-to-reflect was in order, if nothing else than to take a quick break from rebuilding their burnt out homes or mapping out which geographic region of the street was the least muddy to cross. These are people who worked on the Sabbath (!) mind you, so taking a hiatus to recall the past year was no small deal. The big newspaper at the time was the Daily Alta California.  On the morning of January 1st, 1851, the residents of San Francisco awoke, plunked a coin into the hand of a s...