San Francisco
Opium smoking arrived in North America with the large influx of Chinese who came to participate in the California Gold Rush. The jumping-off point for the gold fields was San Francisco, and the city's Chinatown became the site of numerous opium dens soon after the first Chinese arrived around 1850. By the 1870s, San Francisco's opium dens attracted non-Chinese residents, and the problem of opium addiction was acknowledged by the city at large. In 1878, the city of San Francisco passed its first anti-opium ordinance. In the early 20th century, huge bonfires, fueled by confiscated opium and opium paraphernalia, were used to destroy opium and create a public venue to discuss opium use. Due to opium-eradication campaigns, smoking opium was driven underground and was still fairly common in San Francisco and other cities in North America until around World War II. A typical opium den in San Francisco might be a Chinese-run laundry that had a basement, back room, or upstairs room that was tightly sealed to keep drafts from making the opium lamps flicker or allowing the tell-tale fumes of opium escape. A photograph of one luxurious opium den in 19th-century San Francisco has survived, taken by I. W. Taber in 1886, but the majority of the city's wealthy opium smokers, both Chinese and American, shunned public opium dens in favor of smoking in the privacy of their own homes.
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Famous quotes related to san francisco:
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Dianne Feinstein (b. 1933)
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—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
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—Merle Colby, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“There they are at last, Miss Rutledge. The will-o-the-wisps with plagues of fortune. San Francisco, the latest newborn of a great republic.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)