One quote was by Nora May French, a flamboyant journalist and poet, who once remarked famously over lunch, "I have an idea that all sensible people will ultimately be damned." It turned out to be a prophetic statement. One year after the 1906 earthquake destroyed Coppa's and its ambitious mural, Nora May French swallowed poison at Carmel-by-the-Sea, beginning a trend of self-destruction among the bohemian generation.
Sterling himself was the culmination of the trend, and his suicide by ingestion of cyanide in 1926 was perhaps the archetypal response to the city's turn-of-the-century bohemianism. As the unofficial Poet Laureate of San Francisco, Sterling was visible, social, yet discreetly dissolute. To many he embodied the heart of the Bay Area literary scene, and his death, the final and most publicized suicide associated with the San Francisco art scene, lent a grim legitimacy to the fate of his precursors, including: Nora May French (cyanide, 1907); Jack London (morphine, 1916); Carolyn Sterling (cyanide, 1918); David Lezinsky (gunshot, 1921); Richard Reaf (poison, 1922); and Herman Sheffauer (defenestration, 1926).
Nonetheless, in San Francisco today, the myth of Sterling still survives.
www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=GEORGE_STERLING 