PICTURES OF OLD CHINATOWN
FOREWORD
My Dear Dr. Genthe:
Long before I knew who you were, I used to mark you in the shadows and recesses of Chinatown, your little camera half-hidden under your coat, your considering eye and crafty hand of the artist alert to take your shy and superstitious models unawares. Later, it was my privilege to follow you sometimes—to watch you playing your Germanic patience against their Chinese patience, to marvel at you, in dark room and studio, working with those mysterious processes by which you —more than any other man alive—have made art out of the play-time snap-shot. Now, after the great disaster, all that remains for your work of a decade is this same picture record of old Chinatown at which you worked so lovingly for eight years.
In the summer of steel and steam drills and heroic enthusiasm—the summer of rebuilding—you and I passed through the new, clean Chinatown. It was a clear, sea-scented night, I remember, and very late. We stopped beneath the ruins of Old St. Mary's. The new-rising city, like the old one in dim, suggestive contour—as an adult face is like its childish counterpart—stretched out at our feet. Where the vivid carouse and romance of Dupont and Kearny Streets had been, a black hollow, mysterious, awful, as though the Pit had taken Hell's Half Acre back to itself; beyond, a wall of steel skeletons and gaunt, windowless towers. The scattered lights, placed where never lights would be in finished and inhabited structures, gave a dreadful air of strangeness and desolation to this city vista. I stood as one who sees spirits. And you spoke:
"Rubber boots and copper kettles in the shop windows—and we have still to call it Chinatown!" You had been looking backward, I perceived, as I had been looking forward. So, with the ruined tins of St. Mary's creaking above us in the night wind, we talked about that little city of our love, Chinatown. "No, it's gone," said I, "And beauty, or at least such beauty as they know, cannot live in Class A buildings." You, like a true partizan, fell to defending as soon as you found me agreeing with your criticisms. "They won't remain Class A for long," you said. "The Chinese will make them over somehow. They can no more live in inappropriate ugliness than we in dirt." Yet we both sighed for the Chinatown which we knew, and which is not any more except in the shadowing of your little films.
You, the only man who ever had the patience to photograph the Chinese, you, who found art in the snap-shot—you were making yourself unconsciously, all that time, the sole recorder of old Chinatown. I but write as a frame for your pictures; I am illustrating you. If, in these writings, I use the past tense, I do not mean to imply that our Californian Chinese have changed their natures or their manners. Much of what I describe here has survived, and much more will prevail. It is just that your lenses and plates record only the past; and, I, embroidering your work, have tried to keep in tone.
Will Irwin.
***
An excerpt from the beginning:
FROM the moment when you crossed the golden, dimpling bay, whose moods ran the gamut of beauty, from the moment when you sailed between those brown-and-green headlands which guarded the Gate to San Francisco, you heard always of Chinatown. It was the first thing which the tourist asked to see, the first thing which the guides offered to show. Whenever, in any channel of the Seven Seas, two world-wanderers met and talked about the City of Many Adventures, Chinatown ran like a thread through their reminiscences. Raised on a hillside, it glimpsed at you from every corner of that older, more picturesque San Francisco which fell to dust and cinders in the great disaster of 1906. From the cliffs which crowned the city, one could mark it off as a sombre spot, shot with contrasting patches of green and gold, in the panorama below. Its inhabitants, overflowing into the American quarters, made bright and quaint the city streets. Its examplars of art in common things, always before the unillumined American, worked to make San Francisco the city of artists that she was. For him who came but to look and to enjoy, this was the real heart of San Francisco, this bit of the mystic, suggestive East, so modified by the West that it was neither Oriental nor yet Occidental—but just Chinatown.
It is gone now—gone with the sea-gray city which encircled it. The worse order changeth, giving place to better; but there is always so much in the worse order which our hearts would have kept! In a newer and stronger San Francisco rises a newer, cleaner, more healthful Chinatown. Better for the city—O yes—and better for the Chinese, who must come to modern ways of life and health if they are to survive among us. But where is St. Louis Alley, that tangle of sheds, doorways...
1112998429
My Dear Dr. Genthe:
Long before I knew who you were, I used to mark you in the shadows and recesses of Chinatown, your little camera half-hidden under your coat, your considering eye and crafty hand of the artist alert to take your shy and superstitious models unawares. Later, it was my privilege to follow you sometimes—to watch you playing your Germanic patience against their Chinese patience, to marvel at you, in dark room and studio, working with those mysterious processes by which you —more than any other man alive—have made art out of the play-time snap-shot. Now, after the great disaster, all that remains for your work of a decade is this same picture record of old Chinatown at which you worked so lovingly for eight years.
In the summer of steel and steam drills and heroic enthusiasm—the summer of rebuilding—you and I passed through the new, clean Chinatown. It was a clear, sea-scented night, I remember, and very late. We stopped beneath the ruins of Old St. Mary's. The new-rising city, like the old one in dim, suggestive contour—as an adult face is like its childish counterpart—stretched out at our feet. Where the vivid carouse and romance of Dupont and Kearny Streets had been, a black hollow, mysterious, awful, as though the Pit had taken Hell's Half Acre back to itself; beyond, a wall of steel skeletons and gaunt, windowless towers. The scattered lights, placed where never lights would be in finished and inhabited structures, gave a dreadful air of strangeness and desolation to this city vista. I stood as one who sees spirits. And you spoke:
"Rubber boots and copper kettles in the shop windows—and we have still to call it Chinatown!" You had been looking backward, I perceived, as I had been looking forward. So, with the ruined tins of St. Mary's creaking above us in the night wind, we talked about that little city of our love, Chinatown. "No, it's gone," said I, "And beauty, or at least such beauty as they know, cannot live in Class A buildings." You, like a true partizan, fell to defending as soon as you found me agreeing with your criticisms. "They won't remain Class A for long," you said. "The Chinese will make them over somehow. They can no more live in inappropriate ugliness than we in dirt." Yet we both sighed for the Chinatown which we knew, and which is not any more except in the shadowing of your little films.
You, the only man who ever had the patience to photograph the Chinese, you, who found art in the snap-shot—you were making yourself unconsciously, all that time, the sole recorder of old Chinatown. I but write as a frame for your pictures; I am illustrating you. If, in these writings, I use the past tense, I do not mean to imply that our Californian Chinese have changed their natures or their manners. Much of what I describe here has survived, and much more will prevail. It is just that your lenses and plates record only the past; and, I, embroidering your work, have tried to keep in tone.
Will Irwin.
***
An excerpt from the beginning:
FROM the moment when you crossed the golden, dimpling bay, whose moods ran the gamut of beauty, from the moment when you sailed between those brown-and-green headlands which guarded the Gate to San Francisco, you heard always of Chinatown. It was the first thing which the tourist asked to see, the first thing which the guides offered to show. Whenever, in any channel of the Seven Seas, two world-wanderers met and talked about the City of Many Adventures, Chinatown ran like a thread through their reminiscences. Raised on a hillside, it glimpsed at you from every corner of that older, more picturesque San Francisco which fell to dust and cinders in the great disaster of 1906. From the cliffs which crowned the city, one could mark it off as a sombre spot, shot with contrasting patches of green and gold, in the panorama below. Its inhabitants, overflowing into the American quarters, made bright and quaint the city streets. Its examplars of art in common things, always before the unillumined American, worked to make San Francisco the city of artists that she was. For him who came but to look and to enjoy, this was the real heart of San Francisco, this bit of the mystic, suggestive East, so modified by the West that it was neither Oriental nor yet Occidental—but just Chinatown.
It is gone now—gone with the sea-gray city which encircled it. The worse order changeth, giving place to better; but there is always so much in the worse order which our hearts would have kept! In a newer and stronger San Francisco rises a newer, cleaner, more healthful Chinatown. Better for the city—O yes—and better for the Chinese, who must come to modern ways of life and health if they are to survive among us. But where is St. Louis Alley, that tangle of sheds, doorways...
PICTURES OF OLD CHINATOWN
FOREWORD
My Dear Dr. Genthe:
Long before I knew who you were, I used to mark you in the shadows and recesses of Chinatown, your little camera half-hidden under your coat, your considering eye and crafty hand of the artist alert to take your shy and superstitious models unawares. Later, it was my privilege to follow you sometimes—to watch you playing your Germanic patience against their Chinese patience, to marvel at you, in dark room and studio, working with those mysterious processes by which you —more than any other man alive—have made art out of the play-time snap-shot. Now, after the great disaster, all that remains for your work of a decade is this same picture record of old Chinatown at which you worked so lovingly for eight years.
In the summer of steel and steam drills and heroic enthusiasm—the summer of rebuilding—you and I passed through the new, clean Chinatown. It was a clear, sea-scented night, I remember, and very late. We stopped beneath the ruins of Old St. Mary's. The new-rising city, like the old one in dim, suggestive contour—as an adult face is like its childish counterpart—stretched out at our feet. Where the vivid carouse and romance of Dupont and Kearny Streets had been, a black hollow, mysterious, awful, as though the Pit had taken Hell's Half Acre back to itself; beyond, a wall of steel skeletons and gaunt, windowless towers. The scattered lights, placed where never lights would be in finished and inhabited structures, gave a dreadful air of strangeness and desolation to this city vista. I stood as one who sees spirits. And you spoke:
"Rubber boots and copper kettles in the shop windows—and we have still to call it Chinatown!" You had been looking backward, I perceived, as I had been looking forward. So, with the ruined tins of St. Mary's creaking above us in the night wind, we talked about that little city of our love, Chinatown. "No, it's gone," said I, "And beauty, or at least such beauty as they know, cannot live in Class A buildings." You, like a true partizan, fell to defending as soon as you found me agreeing with your criticisms. "They won't remain Class A for long," you said. "The Chinese will make them over somehow. They can no more live in inappropriate ugliness than we in dirt." Yet we both sighed for the Chinatown which we knew, and which is not any more except in the shadowing of your little films.
You, the only man who ever had the patience to photograph the Chinese, you, who found art in the snap-shot—you were making yourself unconsciously, all that time, the sole recorder of old Chinatown. I but write as a frame for your pictures; I am illustrating you. If, in these writings, I use the past tense, I do not mean to imply that our Californian Chinese have changed their natures or their manners. Much of what I describe here has survived, and much more will prevail. It is just that your lenses and plates record only the past; and, I, embroidering your work, have tried to keep in tone.
Will Irwin.
***
An excerpt from the beginning:
FROM the moment when you crossed the golden, dimpling bay, whose moods ran the gamut of beauty, from the moment when you sailed between those brown-and-green headlands which guarded the Gate to San Francisco, you heard always of Chinatown. It was the first thing which the tourist asked to see, the first thing which the guides offered to show. Whenever, in any channel of the Seven Seas, two world-wanderers met and talked about the City of Many Adventures, Chinatown ran like a thread through their reminiscences. Raised on a hillside, it glimpsed at you from every corner of that older, more picturesque San Francisco which fell to dust and cinders in the great disaster of 1906. From the cliffs which crowned the city, one could mark it off as a sombre spot, shot with contrasting patches of green and gold, in the panorama below. Its inhabitants, overflowing into the American quarters, made bright and quaint the city streets. Its examplars of art in common things, always before the unillumined American, worked to make San Francisco the city of artists that she was. For him who came but to look and to enjoy, this was the real heart of San Francisco, this bit of the mystic, suggestive East, so modified by the West that it was neither Oriental nor yet Occidental—but just Chinatown.
It is gone now—gone with the sea-gray city which encircled it. The worse order changeth, giving place to better; but there is always so much in the worse order which our hearts would have kept! In a newer and stronger San Francisco rises a newer, cleaner, more healthful Chinatown. Better for the city—O yes—and better for the Chinese, who must come to modern ways of life and health if they are to survive among us. But where is St. Louis Alley, that tangle of sheds, doorways...
My Dear Dr. Genthe:
Long before I knew who you were, I used to mark you in the shadows and recesses of Chinatown, your little camera half-hidden under your coat, your considering eye and crafty hand of the artist alert to take your shy and superstitious models unawares. Later, it was my privilege to follow you sometimes—to watch you playing your Germanic patience against their Chinese patience, to marvel at you, in dark room and studio, working with those mysterious processes by which you —more than any other man alive—have made art out of the play-time snap-shot. Now, after the great disaster, all that remains for your work of a decade is this same picture record of old Chinatown at which you worked so lovingly for eight years.
In the summer of steel and steam drills and heroic enthusiasm—the summer of rebuilding—you and I passed through the new, clean Chinatown. It was a clear, sea-scented night, I remember, and very late. We stopped beneath the ruins of Old St. Mary's. The new-rising city, like the old one in dim, suggestive contour—as an adult face is like its childish counterpart—stretched out at our feet. Where the vivid carouse and romance of Dupont and Kearny Streets had been, a black hollow, mysterious, awful, as though the Pit had taken Hell's Half Acre back to itself; beyond, a wall of steel skeletons and gaunt, windowless towers. The scattered lights, placed where never lights would be in finished and inhabited structures, gave a dreadful air of strangeness and desolation to this city vista. I stood as one who sees spirits. And you spoke:
"Rubber boots and copper kettles in the shop windows—and we have still to call it Chinatown!" You had been looking backward, I perceived, as I had been looking forward. So, with the ruined tins of St. Mary's creaking above us in the night wind, we talked about that little city of our love, Chinatown. "No, it's gone," said I, "And beauty, or at least such beauty as they know, cannot live in Class A buildings." You, like a true partizan, fell to defending as soon as you found me agreeing with your criticisms. "They won't remain Class A for long," you said. "The Chinese will make them over somehow. They can no more live in inappropriate ugliness than we in dirt." Yet we both sighed for the Chinatown which we knew, and which is not any more except in the shadowing of your little films.
You, the only man who ever had the patience to photograph the Chinese, you, who found art in the snap-shot—you were making yourself unconsciously, all that time, the sole recorder of old Chinatown. I but write as a frame for your pictures; I am illustrating you. If, in these writings, I use the past tense, I do not mean to imply that our Californian Chinese have changed their natures or their manners. Much of what I describe here has survived, and much more will prevail. It is just that your lenses and plates record only the past; and, I, embroidering your work, have tried to keep in tone.
Will Irwin.
***
An excerpt from the beginning:
FROM the moment when you crossed the golden, dimpling bay, whose moods ran the gamut of beauty, from the moment when you sailed between those brown-and-green headlands which guarded the Gate to San Francisco, you heard always of Chinatown. It was the first thing which the tourist asked to see, the first thing which the guides offered to show. Whenever, in any channel of the Seven Seas, two world-wanderers met and talked about the City of Many Adventures, Chinatown ran like a thread through their reminiscences. Raised on a hillside, it glimpsed at you from every corner of that older, more picturesque San Francisco which fell to dust and cinders in the great disaster of 1906. From the cliffs which crowned the city, one could mark it off as a sombre spot, shot with contrasting patches of green and gold, in the panorama below. Its inhabitants, overflowing into the American quarters, made bright and quaint the city streets. Its examplars of art in common things, always before the unillumined American, worked to make San Francisco the city of artists that she was. For him who came but to look and to enjoy, this was the real heart of San Francisco, this bit of the mystic, suggestive East, so modified by the West that it was neither Oriental nor yet Occidental—but just Chinatown.
It is gone now—gone with the sea-gray city which encircled it. The worse order changeth, giving place to better; but there is always so much in the worse order which our hearts would have kept! In a newer and stronger San Francisco rises a newer, cleaner, more healthful Chinatown. Better for the city—O yes—and better for the Chinese, who must come to modern ways of life and health if they are to survive among us. But where is St. Louis Alley, that tangle of sheds, doorways...
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Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940015641110 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | OGB |
| Publication date: | 09/22/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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