2-889-327 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Blay-Place, San Francisco, 1850. Engraving from a Daguerreotype, showing '...Blay-place, with its shops and stores...But two years since...San Francisco was a hamlet of rude cabins: to-day it is a large town, a camp, or rather a caravanserai, of from 50,000 to 100,000 souls...M. Patrick Dillon, ex-Consul of France at the Sandwich Islands, and now Consul at San Francisco, estimates at 2000 per day the number of emigrants who arrive by sea at California; and there is a continued movement towards the [gold] mines from all sides, landward...The streets of San Francisco, parallel with the Bay, are very wide, straight, and level; but some of the streets are so steep as to render the passage of carriages impossible. The Californian sewer has to be made; the streets are just as if formed by chance, the shovel and broom are rarely used, and all kinds of filth is left to accumulate in the streets'. From "Illustrated London News", 1850.