[ WP ] Light is one of the goods that can be traded and sold . The poor live in darkness , but for the the rich people , it 's time to shine .

& nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; It's a terrible and contrived metaphor, but you can really trade and sell light. Only in an industrialized, civilized era can you do such a thing. It's harder to tell in the great metropolises like London, so covered with fog, or Manhattan so flat like a pancake, but go to San Francisco with its rolling hills and you can see the madness of humanity buy and sell access to the sun. 
 
 & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; It was on California Street Hill. An undertaker from Germany by the name of Nicolas Yung bought a plot of land on that hill and settled his family into a house there.Before the streetcar it was a remote place removed from the hustle of the boomtown that sprawled around the wharves. If you could surmount the treacherous climb you would have been rewarded with a magnificent panorama stretching from the Golden Gate to the Berkeley hills. 
 
 & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; Enter the streetcar, and on its heels the wide eyes of newly moneyed millionares looking for a place to erect a mansion of their own. Charles Crocker was such a man, one of the Big Four railroad barons who brought the world to Gold Country. He bought a plot of land on the same block as Yung, determined to build the grandest, tallest mansion to best even his peers Stanford and Hopkins, who had build their own manses on what would become known as `` Nob Hill''. 
 
 & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; Crocker made several offers to buy Yung's home, but the undertaker who so cherished his views and the pride of his family would not sell. And so Crocker ordered his men to build a wooden fence on three sides of Yung's home, blotting out the air, the light, and the views, leaving the man and his family the gloom of the northern exposure. The `` Spite Fence'' as it was called, or sometimes `` Crocker's Crime'', attracted eyes and ire and indignation of that cruel and gilded age. 
 
 & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; Yung did not hold out for long afterwards. He eventually relented to the demands of Crocker, and the baron was happy. Everyone knew the joy of the sun, but it took a railroad baron to put a price on it, and not much more to corner the market on it. 
 
 & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; & nbsp; Some years later, The Great Fire swept through Millionaire's row and reduced Crocker's Mansion to ash.
