Two years before, and not two miles away, another boy was born to a newspaper man and his school teacher wife. This child spent his first eleven years in San Francisco, trailing his father up and down the hills, watching him swim in San Francisco Bay, and cringing from the blows that a drunken dad might aim at his head. When the father died, the boy and his sister accompanied their mother back to the East Coast where he grew up to be the poet Robert Frost.

In his biography of Frost, Jay Parini sketches a boyhood in which the young Robert was torn between his parents’ differing drives. His father was a newspaperman with political aspirations, a member of the Bohemian Club, and a heavy drinker. His mother was a Swedenborgian six years older than her husband. The family moved often out of necessity. Parini gives several addresses for the Frost family although these all predate the fire of 1906.

An assessment of the ways in which climate and family atmosphere shaped the young Frost is beyond the scope of this brief piece. Frost’s national reputation and long life has produced an abundance of biographies and critical pieces, which the reader is invited to examine. There is, however, a significant literary site to be noted in the city of his birth.

Frost’s life in San Francisco is remembered by a monument on Market Street and Drumm, in front of the Hyatt Hotel and at the foot of the California Street cable car. The poem whose first stanza is cast on this marker, “A Peck of Gold,” captures the quality of life in San Francisco at the time, as well as Frost’s perception of the contradictions that colored his home life. In the 1870s, San Francisco was bursting with life, a city attracting sixty thousand immigrants a year, many arriving by sea. All of the early Frost addresses are a short distance from the busy waterfront. Horse drawn carts traveling over unpaved streets would have been the background to his writing: