The Golden Gate

by Amy Chua

The other was the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, with San Francisco the nearest port. Within a year, a thousand people were pouring through that port every week. By 1849, San Francisco’s population had grown to twenty-five thousand. By 1853, fifty thousand. By 1869, one hundred fifty thousand. There was nothing on the West Coast remotely like it. San Francisco in 1869 was twenty-five times the size of Los Angeles. Over the next decade, the West’s four greatest railroad tycoons—Stanford, Hopkins, Huntington, and Crocker—began erecting fabulous residences on top of the commanding California Hill, which from then on would be known as Nob Hill, “nob” being slang for a grandee, from the Hindi word nabob. Of these residences, the Hopkins mansion was the most famous, staggering in its dimensions; they say its gallery rivaled the greatest cathedrals of France.