Matchbooks shed light on Tenderloin’s past
and a neighborhood with little recorded history. At one point in time, before its economy collapsed, Conry says, it was the “nightlife capital of the whole Bay Area.”
The ephemera project, which runs through March 28, is broad in scope. It includes an array of public programming, walking tours and a temporary exhibition of different sorts of ephemera (and some objects that might stretch the definition) from the private collection of Glenn Koch.
But matchbooks are the cornerstone.
The museum’s founder, Randy Shaw, had his collection of 150 or so digitized and turned into a book named, simply, “The Match Book.” (The book’s spine is a striking pad.) “I wanted to figure out some way to display these things so everybody could see them,” Shaw says. “It really gives you a flavor of the Tenderloin.” Artist Alexander von Wolff has rendered some of them large scale for a show at the museum. And the entire collection has been pinned to a digital map, which will become part of the museum’s permanent collection. Viewers can, essentially, wander around a neighborhood that vanished decades ago.
Conry has tried to flesh out the narrative for the places the books represent. It’s not always easy. Sometimes she just learns that a place was “accused of overcharging for food on Feb. 23, 1914” and nothing more. “That’s all that exists now about that business.”
But even then, the matchbooks have a lot to say.
There was once a diner called Sterns at Powell and Ellis streets. Its matchbook was white, with red and black ink. Sterns was, apparently, proud of its “ham ‘n eggs,” served, it noted, “in the pan.” The owner might have had a sense of humor there, too — a pig in an apron offers some eggs over easy to an empty-eyed chicken.
The Music Box — which is now the Great American Music Hall — had a wide book, wider than most, with more colors than most — yellow, purple, orange and pink. A woman stands in a music box, smiling, hands held high. She’s naked and a banner covers her only slightly. It reads: “The Most Beautiful Nite Club in America.” The Music Box, the book notes, has “a continuous floor show” and no cover.
The book for a place called Exodus is all black with gray text. On the cover it reads, very simply, “Exodus.” A drawing of a torch leans against the name. On the back is just the address. The book gives a lot away by giving nearly nothing away.
All of this has changed.
In the collection on loan from Koch, you learn other things. A postcard reveals a Market Street once bathed in neon; a collection of dining ware and menus tells the story of competing restaurants, owned by four brothers, all named Poodle Dog; a keepsake coin that somehow never got lost memorializes a Bulldog Bath House on Turk Street.
It’s people like Koch and Shaw who ensure that these objects survive, and through them various legacies and histories.
In his Walnut Creek home, Koch pulls boxes from behind cupboards. Each is organized according to a theme or event — the World’s Fair or maybe luggage tags. His postcards are held in binders, covered in plastic. His matchbooks are kept in a small metal tin. “It would have been more likely to find these in a gutter in the Tenderloin back then,” he says.
Nostalgia is at the root of his collection — and of Shaw’s and so many others. There are other reasons Koch collects: The hunt, the community of collectors he’s joined, the simple pleasure in owning something beautiful. But when he lists these reasons he starts with nostalgia. “I love history,” he says. “I think there’s a certain amount of liking to dwell in the past.”
Recently, Koch found a sepia-toned postcard of Eddy Street, the same street the Tenderloin Museum sits on, just one block away. The scene it shares is from many, many decades ago, probably the 1880s, though he isn’t sure. The photograph on the front depicts a mishmash of flats, all lined up. Maybe a church, too. Of course, there’s nothing like that there now. The scene has been washed away by time, replaced with apartment buildings and corner stores. The postcard serves as a tool to reveal the past — and to measure it against the present.
Change may be inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less tragic. And if it’s inevitable, Koch, Shaw and Conry seem to say, the past might as well be remembered.