San Francisco. Its official motto is Oro en paz, fierro en guerra — “Gold in peace, iron in war.”

William Howard Taft contributed its most famous slogan when he called it “The City that knows how,” to which disgruntled present-day citizens add: “But when?” Countless other notables have lavished their praise on Baghdad-by-the-Bay, but it remained for a visiting Chicagoan named Keith Wheeler to contribute a line that, in the two years since he first uttered it, has already become a classic: “East is East, but West is — San Francisco!”

– The Late, Great Herb Caen, 1949

“A True City refuses to sit still, to be one place and one people.  There are so many San Franciscos, for example, so many San Franciscans.  You walk and you talk, you look and listen, and the truth goes dancing brightly — just beyond reach.

What is This City?  The cliches flood into mind, making their familiar patterns; the Powell Street wooden merry-go-round (and the brass ring of the cable bell); Siciliano fishing boats, colorful corks bobbing in the debris-laden waters of The Wharf and even Coit Tower.

The picture-postcard dream city of a million tourists, and, strangely and wonderfully, of close to a million people.” – The Late, Great Herb Caen – 1967

In his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin thus recalls his first visit to California, in 1910. His observations are unremarkable, to be sure, but how eagerly we who are fascinated by San Francisco read these words, as we read everything we can lay hands on about the mysterious City That Was.

We keep trying to solve the riddle that haunts us all our lives: what was it about Old San Francisco that made it so special in the eyes of the world?

Why did the small city, pulsating at continent’s end under a cocoon of fog, capture and fire the imagination of sophisticates who had been everywhere? If there was real magic, where did it go, or is it still in the air; and if it has vanished indeed, how responsible are we who came in the wake of the myth-makers?

The Late, Great Herb Caen in 1976