San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
City lost a little bit of its character this month
To have character, a city has to have characters — citizens who go beyond the ordinary and bring a special flavor to the place. San Francisco lost three such people within a few days in August. One was an impresario, another was a poet, and the third had spent the past 25 years writing an encyclopedic history of the city’s drinking establishments.
Each of them, in his own way, brought something to San Francisco that helped make the city unique. To say these three will be missed is the understatement of the month. Here’s a bit about the three of them.
First up is Harry Denton, whose ambition it was to be larger than life. He came to San Francisco on a Greyhound bus in 1977 from a small town in Idaho and soon drifted into the hospitality business. He learned bartending from the best: Norman Hobday at Henry Africa’s and from Ed Moose at the Washington Square Bar & Grill. Next thing you know Denton owned four bars, all named for him. He reached the top, literally, at Harry Denton’s Starlight Room, on the 21st floor of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, which opened with great fanfare in 1996.
There he presided, the king of San Francisco nightlife. He turned the Starlight Room into a kind of throwback to the glory days of San Francisco hotels. There were dozens of roses at the entrance, and beyond that the Starlight Room glittered: It was “glitz and glam,” as one critic called it.
And there was Harry Denton himself, wearing a tuxedo — he owned 13 tuxes — presiding over it all. He knew everyone, it seemed, and if he called you by name it was proof you were on San Francisco’s A-list. There was a big dance floor and the customers dressed to the nines, hard to believe in these T-shirt-at-the-opera days.
It was a gay scene in the best sense: Harry was a big supporter of the LGBTQ community, and the Starlight Room’s Sunday Drag brunches were famous.
But Harry Denton had a stroke in 2013 and lived out the rest of his days in Seattle. He died in a nursing home there on Aug. 21.
That was the same day Jack Hirschman left us. Hirschman was a poet, and he’d given a reading at the Foreign Cinema in the Mission District only three days before he died. He’d caught a cold.
He was a poet in the old San Francisco tradition: He lived in North Beach, for some years in a single room he called the Shoebox. For years, he presided over a gathering of poets at the North Beach Public Library. Anyone was welcome to read, and afterward, Hirschman would lead the poets in a kind of scraggly parade down Columbus Avenue to Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Cafe, where they would talk and argue and recite poetry until all hours.
If Harry Denton welcomed the rich and famous to the Starlight Room, Jack Hirschman was the exact opposite: He was a noted lefty in another San Francisco tradition. He was a Marxist, a college teacher who got fired from UCLA for his views. He once gave a reading for an audience of homeless people on the theme of home. Many wept, it was said. Hirschman had a voice like a load of crushed gravel and until recently could be found most any day at Caffe Trieste, talking poetry.
“It’s a city where he flourished,” David Bonanno, editor of the American Poetry Review, said of Hirschman and San Francisco. “I don’t know where else in America he could be as comfortable.” Hirschman wrote all the time. Three years ago he wrote, “If death is peace, when can I truly die? You will never know and yet you do …”
I saved Jim Jarvis for last. He was neither a poet nor a celebrity. He was a historian instead, a researcher into the world of San Francisco saloons, bars and dens of iniquity. His research was all original, all primary sources: maps, directories, newspaper files, old stories. He knew more about the subject than anyone else.
He knew, for example that the Saloon, on upper Grant Avenue, was the oldest continually operating bar on the same site in the city. It dates from 1860 and has that worn look of hard use, a mahogany bar and a faded gilt sign. It nearly burned down in the 1906 fire but survived, and Jarvis could prove it. It was all in his book, which was a marvel of research. He’d been working on it for 25 years, and the book is now 2,000 pages, 18 inches thick. His brother, Bob Jarvis, says it must weigh 50 pounds. Not counting three hard drives packed with notes. It’s that big, Bob Jarvis said, because his brother liked accuracy and left nothing out.
Jim Jarvis’ real job was working at Safeway, but he liked San Francisco, history, and bars in equal measure. It wasn’t so much that he liked drinking, said Larry Burdick, who was his best friend. “He was a great lover of the warmth and fellowship that comes when people get together over food and drink. That’s what drew him.”
There is one more thing that unites these three — all of them are transplants who came to San Francisco from somewhere else. Denton was from Idaho, Hirschman was a New Yorker, and Jarvis was born in Vermont. Denton was a star here, Hirschman flourished in San Francisco, and Jarvis burrowed into its past. Which goes to show you don’t have to be a native to be a San Franciscan.
Harry Denton, Jack Hirschman and Jim Jarvis — they all brought something special to San Francisco.