A Christmas Remembrance for 1922

Lawrence Norris Scammon

A view of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin as imagined from Portsmouth Square Plaza in San Francisco, with the Robert Louis Stevenson memorial seen at left. The view depicted here is not actually seen from where the memorial sits, as the plaza is surrounded by buildings and is not quite at the correct angle for such a view. However, the mountain does lie across the bay from the plaza, which Scammon, like Stevenson, frequented.

Scottish writer Stevenson had followed the woman he loved, the married Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, from Paris to San Francisco at her request in 1876, renting a room at 608 Bush Street until Osbourne was able to remarry. After his untimely death in 1894, the memorial - the very first dedicated to the writer in the United States - was created by landscape designer Bruce Porter and architect Willis Polk, and was placed in nearby Portsmouth Square Plaza.