thepenguinpress: San Francisco in Mark Twain’s Time via The San Francisco Chronicle Mark
thepenguinpress: San Francisco in Mark Twain’s Time via The San Francisco Chronicle Market Street, as seen from Montgomery Street. “The city had been a refuge in the 1860s,” Tarnoff writes, but by the mid-1870s, “it looked more like a dumping ground. People from other parts of the country washed up on its shores looking for work, swelling the ranks of the poor. By 1877, San Francisco’s unemployment rate was as high as 25 percent. … ‘Bankruptcy, suicide, and murder and robberies were the order of the day,’ recalled one workingman. The city’s literary fortunes had undergone an equally steep decline. The last remnants of the Bohemian scene had vanished.” For more information on The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature by Ben Tarnoff, please click here Photo: Courtesy of the Society of California Pioneers Now reading. -- source link