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Our Hills
The Clay Street Railroad solved the problem. We spent fifteen years and as many
millions of money trying to cut down our hills and spoil them. It was a sad
waste of energy and good money, not unnatural perhaps, but a desperate blunder.
Now we see that the one thing paramount is not to cut down hills; let them
remain as high as nature built them; the higher the better and the steeper the
better; for thus will the views be the best, and each succeeding terrace of
houses more freely overlook the next lower terrace. On every summit plant the
stationary engine, and let us mount by our wire-rope railways even as we are
wafted to the sky stories of our giant taverns by the soaring elevator. Our
wire-rope railways are so many elevators on a magnified scale; the function is
identical; their effect will be akin. The house elevator as rendered the topmost
stories of our hotels the most attractive and desirable floors; and in like wise
the wire railway renders the topmost hights of our hillsides their finest
building sites. We have been a little slow to learn the lesson that the Clay
street railroad had to teach; nor have the stupid among us fully appreciated
even yet all its implications. But Stanford, and the choice spirits who are with
him in the Bush street enterprise, are not of the fat-witted sort; and we are
safe in assuming that the truth they have discovered will not remain long hidden
from others who are in the like boat with them. Next Pacific street demands a
wire road, and later the acclivities that rise from the old North Beach. These
completed, Russian Hill will be adequately served, and some hundreds of the
finest and most eligible sites within the limits of San Francisco duly utilized.
We need one elevator to mount to the new public square on the summit of
Telegraph Hill. Thus only can that spirited public gift be redeemed from the
limbo of delusion and mockery. With the fullness of time will all these things
come, and with their coming we shall witness a revival of values on those hights
which is no more easy to realize now than it would have been three years ago to
realize the speculation now taking place in Dupont street property, based on the
prospective widening of that thoroughfare and our experience of the effect of
widening Kearny street.
San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser
May 27, 1876
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