Barbary Coast raid ended S.F.’s bad old days
all the nostalgia for the Summer of Love 50 years ago, San Francisco’s citizens have missed the marking this year of another piece of the city’s history: the 100th anniversary of the end of the infamous Barbary Coast.
The Barbary Coast was a six- to eight-block area not far from what is now the Financial District, and its business was crime and vice. It ran wide-open for more than 50 years and was closed for good after a major police raid on Feb. 14, 1917 — Valentine’s Day.
I realized the historic milestone while strolling through the Jackson Square retail district, a quiet enclave of brick buildings and tree-lined streets. This is the oldest part of town, now going through a chic renaissance. The buzz is so hot it made Page One of Monday’s Chronicle.
It came to me in the middle of a leafy block of Pacific Avenue. At the entrance to the Artist and Craftsman Supply store at 555 Pacific were a couple of bas-reliefs of fiendish satyrs chasing scantily clad nymphs.
“Holy smoke,” I said to myself. “Didn’t this used to be the Barbary Coast?” I looked it up. Indeed it was.
In another era, what is now the art store housed the Hippodrome dance hall, the top-of-the-line of low dives along this stretch of Pacific, which once was lined with places like Spider Kelly’s, the Red Mill, the Frisco, the So Different, the Owl Dance Hall, and the Neptune Palace. This block of Pacific — they called it “Terrific Street” back then — existed in a nighttime blaze of electric lights so bright it was said you could see the Barbary Coast from Oakland.
Barkers stood out front of the dance halls to lure customers: “The hottest show and the prettiest girls on the coast! Watch ’em wiggle, gents, watch ’em wiggle! Don’t talk about what you see in here, folks! It’ll shock you, but it’s worth seeing!”
At least that’s the spiel quoted by Herbert Asbury in his 1933 book, “The Barbary Coast,” which is the bible for San Francisco’s bad old days.
Asbury, who also wrote “The Gangs of New York” — almost made the Barbary Coast sound like fun, with a cast of colorful crooks, shady ladies and dance hall girls. And, much like the Summer of Love, San Francisco has glorified it since.
The Barbary Coast myth was celebrated in the film “San Francisco” with Clark Gable as Blackie Norton, the rapscallion owner of a Barbary Coast dance hall, and Jeanette MacDonald as the smalltown girl who is almost lured into a life of sin.
“San Francisco,” the rousing tune from the movie, became one of two city anthems. The other is Tony Bennett’s version of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
It’s easy to romanticize something from the past, to paper over the ugly reality with fond memories.
Benjamin Estells Lloyd described the district in 1876.
“The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and vile of every kind,” he wrote. “Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is also there.”
That florid description covered Barbary Coast, where gambling, drugs, robbery and prostitution flourished, protected, in part by a corrupt city gov With ernment. Destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire like the rest of the city, the Barbary Coast rose from the ashes, worse than ever. In 1912, a Chicago police captain who toured the coast called Spider Kelly’s dance hall and bar next door to the Hippodrome “undoubtedly the worst dive in the world.”
One institution, three stories high, housed more than a hundred prostitutes. The operators were tied so closely to the crooked mayor and the city government that the place was known as the Municipal Brothel.
The place was on Jackson Street, only a block or two from what is now fashionable Jackson Square.
The days when San Francisco was a wide-open town couldn’t last. Eventually, a new mayor, James Rolph, promised to close down the brothels and clean out the vice. A crusade by clergymen and the city’s civic-minded women put on the heat. The campaign was led in part by William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, which had front page stories exposing the evils of the Barbary Coast.
But the San Francisco Bulletin took a different approach. It ran a series called “A Voice from the Underworld” under the alias of “Alice Smith.” Smith, a prostitute, described the world inside a brothel and the economic forces that drove her to the city’s margins.
The series was republished last fall in a book called “Alice: Memoirs of a Barbary Coast Prostitute.” You can read for yourself what the colorful Barbary Coast was really like.