The Barbary Coast

The foundation upon which the Barbary Coast reared its fantastic structure of crime and debauchery was a system of commercialized prostitution that occupied a semi-lawful status in San Francisco for more than sixty years. Throughout that period the harlot was the divekeeper’s greatest single asset and his most important attraction; whatever she did worked to his advantage, whether she labored as a streetwalker, as an inmate of the brothels, as a decoy in the deadfalls, or as a waiter girl and performer in the dance-halls, concert saloons, melodeons, and peepshows. Without the drawing power of the professional bawd it is doubtful if the Barbary Coast could have maintained, for more than a few years, a profitable existence as a so-called amusement center. In the final analysis a great majority of the men who visited the quarter did so because of the lewdness and depravity of the women who were to be found there; and when open prostitution was driven out of the shadow of the Golden Gate, the Barbary Coast soon followed it into oblivion.

The first bagnios in San Francisco were the tents and slab shanties of the Chileno harlots who, during the early days of the city, plied their ancient trade on the slopes of Telegraph Hill and at various points along the waterfront. To a very large extent these shabby dens vanished with the filling in of Yerba Buena Cove and the development of the harbor, and during the final years of the gold rush the center of prostitution shifted to Portsmouth Square. From there the harlots were expelled by the encroachments of business—an unwilling exodus which was virtually completed by the late eighteen-fifties. Thereafter, until the pressure of public and journalistic opinion compelled the enforcement of laws which abolished the public bawdy-house, most of San Francisco’s brothels were to be found in or adjacent to the Barbary Coast. The red-light district was thus more or less confined within an area bounded, roughly, on the north by Broadway, on the east by the waterfront, on the west by Powell Street, and on the south by Commercial Street, with a southwestward dip to Morton Street, later called Union Square Avenue and Manila Street and now, ironically enough, Maiden Lane. These boundaries encompassed portions of such main thoroughfares as Pacific, Kearny, Sacramento, Clay, California, Jackson, Washington, Montgomery, and Stockton streets and Grant Avenue, in all of which were many blocks containing nothing but saloons and houses of prostitution. Innumerable alleys and short passageways, among them Belden, Bacon, and Berry Places and Hinckley, Pinckley, and Virginia alleys, were almost entirely given over to vice.

In later years, especially after the great conflagration of 1906, attempts were occasionally made to open bagnios in the Western Addition and other residential sections, but because of the strenuous opposition of indignant property-owners, only a few met with even temporary success. A woman known as Madame Labrodet opened a resort at Turk and Steiner streets and operated it successfully for several months in 1906, and long before that, for a few years in the middle eighteen-seventies, Johanna Schriffin considerably annoyed her neighbors and the police by the manner in which she conducted the House of Blazes, a large three-storey rookery in Chestnut Street between Mason and Powell streets. This aptly named establishment contained two or three open brothels, and many rooms which were always available to streetwalkers. It was a refuge for criminals of every description and was so tough and dangerous that if it could have been transferred to the Barbary Coast, it would have added luster to the reputation of even that celebrated quarter. A policeman once went alone to the House of Blazes to arrest a thief, and before he could escape, his handcuffs, pistol, cap, and blackjack had been stolen. The place was finally raided and closed in November 1878.

About the beginning of the present century a comparatively small colony of prostitutes succeeded in gaining a foothold among the gambling houses, shady saloons, and cabarets of the Uptown Tenderloin—parts of Mason, Larkin, Eddy, Ellis, O’Farrell, Powell, Turk, and other streets leading northward or westward from Market Street, the principal business thoroughfare and traffic artery of San Francisco. In this region were also many important hotels and restaurants, and most of the theaters. It was the center of the city’s more reputable night life, but was never a part of the Barbary Coast. The brothels of the Uptown Tenderloin were generally regarded as being of a higher class than those of the Barbary Coast, meaning that their prices were higher, that they were usually more elegantly furnished, and that as a rule they provided handsomer and more accomplished girls. The inmates of these resorts, too, considered themselves infinitely superior to the women who dragged out their miserable lives in the comparative squalor of the cheaper dives, a viewpoint in which the latter shared. The ambition of every Barbary Coast prostitute, unless she had sunk so far in sin and degradation that she no longer cared what happened to her, was to obtain a post in a fashionable uptown bordello; while the bagnio-keeper who had amassed sufficient money to abandon the Coast and open a place in the vicinity of Market Street felt that she had taken a distinct step upward.

The differences between the brothels of the Barbary Coast and those of the Uptown Tenderloin, however, were more apparent than real; precisely the same profession was practiced in the latter as in the former, and in much the same fashion. But in one particular the Uptown Tenderloin reached heights of distinction never attained by the Barbary Coast—soon after the earthquake and fire of 1906 it harbored, in a two-storey building in Mason Street, a house of prostitution which catered to women and offered a dozen handsome, stalwart young men for their amusement. The price was ten dollars, half of which went to the male harlot, although it was common gossip at the time that several had refused to accept any payment for their services, feeling that the experience was in itself sufficient compensation. The active management of the establishment was entirely in the hands of an old Negro woman known as Aunt Josie, who operated it as a call house; that is, the members of the—well, staff—were not actually resident upon the premises, but were chosen from photographs, and from charts which furnished all needful information as to color of the eyes and hair and other physical details. Once selected, the male Magdalen was summoned by telephone or messenger.

Aunt Josie took every possible precaution to prevent recognition of any women who might visit the house. All entrances and exits were so arranged that they might come and go with slight danger of detection, and the lower floor of the building was divided into small reception-rooms, hung with heavy curtains and opening into a darkened hallway, wherein the visitors inspected the photographs and selected their lovers. All the bedrooms were upstairs and could be securely bolted from the inside; and as an additional safeguard against any accidental disclosure of identity, Aunt Josie furnished her customers with silk masks, so that not even a woman’s partner could see her face unless she so desired. These elaborate arrangements, however, were wasted, for it is doubtful if any woman ever entered the resort except a few professional prostitutes who were intrigued by the idea of paying instead of being paid, and so embarked upon a sort of busman’s holiday. The bagnio was closed within a few months, partly because of lack of business, and partly because of threats made by the macks, or pimps, who flourished in large numbers throughout the city. These gentry complained that the harlots were spending their money foolishly.

The name of the owner of this unique brothel was not generally known—even the police disclaimed knowledge of his, or her, identity—but the resort was popularly believed to be one of the many underworld properties of Jerome Bassity—his real name was Jere McGlane—who was once described by Pauline Jacobson in the San Francisco Bulletin as possessing a moral intelligence scarcely higher than that of a trained chimpanzee. Miss Jacobson also, in her article on Bassity, invited her readers to “look at the low, cunning lights in the small, rapacious, vulture-like eyes; look at that low, dull-comprehending brow; the small sensual mouth; the soft puffy fingers with the weak thumb, indicating how he seeks ever his own comfort before others, how his will works only in fits and starts.” (10a) Despite these undesirable characteristics, or rather, perhaps, because of them, Bassity was for more than a dozen years the veritable lord of the Barbary Coast and the red-light district—he probably owned more houses of prostitution than any other one person in San Francisco. He was by far the most powerful figure in the underworld during the three terms of Mayor Eugene Schmitz, from 1901 to 1907, when the city was at the mercy of the political machine created by Abe Ruef; (10b) and again during the régime of Mayor P. H. McCarthy, one-time president of the Building Trades Council, who was elected in 1909 on a platform of “make San Francisco the Paris of America.” To the realization of this more or less laudable ambition Bassity gave freely of his peculiar talents; he was manager of the McCarthy Non-Political Liberty League, and throughout McCarthy’s administration he was one of a triumvirate which really ruled San Francisco. The others were Harry P. Flannery, Police Commissioner and owner of the Richelieu Bar, at the junction of Market, Kearny, and Geary streets; and, of course, McCarthy himself. (10c)

At least two hundred prostitutes shared their earnings with Bassity during the long period in which his star was in the ascendancy, and in addition he derived a considerable revenue from his interests in dance-halls and other dives; and from his saloon in Market Street, which had a tamale grotto in the basement, and a dance-hall and low variety theater upstairs. For a year or so before the conflagration of 1906 he also operated, very successfully, a Market Street deadfall called the Haymarket, which was so low that it was shunned even by the streetwalkers. For many years Bassity’s income probably averaged from six thousand to ten thousand dollars a month, trifling sums when compared to the takings of modern racketeers, but a great deal in those days. He kept very little of it, however. As he often boasted, his living-expenses alone exceeded fifteen hundred dollars a month, and he spent enormous sums for jewelry and clothing, particularly for diamond rings and fancy waistcoats. Of the latter he possessed no fewer than half a hundred, all made to his order and decorated with embroidered flowers and hunting scenes. He wore three diamond rings on each hand, and a great gem glistened from his shirt-front. It is also said, perhaps apocryphally, that when he retired for the night, a diamond ring encircled each of his big toes. Most of his jewelry, besides a great deal of his cash, eventually found its way into the hands of prostitutes, for he was an assiduous patron of the brothels as well as an owner. Curiously enough, he seldom looked with favor upon any of the women employed in his own bagnios, although he usually claimed seigniorial rights when one of his places acquired a virgin or a very young girl. In the main, however, he frequented the establishments of his competitors. In few of them was he welcome, despite his lavish spending and his gifts of jewelry, for he always carried a revolver and he was generally drunk. He customarily climaxed a night of debauchery by shooting out the lights, or by firing at the girls’ toes to make them dance.

Bassity’s power and influence in San Francisco were never better shown than during the autumn of 1906. Although indictments had already been returned against Ruef and Mayor Schmitz, and the newspapers, particularly the Bulletin under the editorship of Fremont Older, were daily exposing the corruption of the Ruef machine, Bassity, in partnership with a woman known as Madame Marcelle, began the erection of a huge brothel in Commercial Street with accommodations for one hundred women, who were to be housed in small, box-like rooms. Another woman, named Peterson, was appointed resident manager of the bagnio and began scurrying busily about the Barbary Coast, recruiting girls and dickering with the procurers. The Grand Jury investigated Bassity’s activities and recommended that the police prevent the opening of the resort, but Bassity publicly boasted that he had arranged everything with Abe Ruef and Mayor Schmitz.

“I don’t care a snap for the Grand Jury,” he said. “I’m going to open, and they can’t stop me.”

And open he did, on December 17, 1906, with a wild debauch at which everything, for that night only, was free. He operated the brothel profitably until September 1907, when it and several other places were closed by the reform administration, headed by Dr. Edward R. Taylor as Mayor, which had succeeded Mayor Schmitz and the Ruef machine. The closing, however, was only temporary. Bassity reopened some of his bagnios even before Mayor Taylor left office, and the remainder resumed operations as soon as McCarthy had been elected. Bassity continued to be an important underworld personage until 1916, although his political influence declined considerably with the election of Mayor James Rolph, Jr., now Governor of California, in 1911. About a year before the beginning of the crusade which finally closed the Barbary Coast, Bassity saw the handwriting on the wall and retired from business. He went to Mexico, where he spent several years trying unsuccessfully to wrest control of the Tia Juana race-track from J. W. Coffroth. His last public appearance in San Francisco was in January 1921, when he was arrested on a warrant which charged him with swindling the seventeen-year-old son of a New Orleans newspaper publisher out of seven hundred dollars at the Thirty-third Assembly District Club in Turk Street. Neither the boy nor his father appeared in court, however, and Bassity was released. He died in San Diego, California, on August 14, 1929, leaving an estate of less than ten thousand dollars.

Only a few blocks from the extraordinary brothel managed by Aunt Josie, in O’Farrell Street, was the popular establishment presided over by Miss Tessie, otherwise Tessie Wall, a flamboyant, well-upholstered blonde who was a familiar figure in the Uptown Tenderloin for many years. She was particularly noted for her ability to consume enormous quantities of wine, and her resort was celebrated for the beauty of its inmates, all of whom were young, blonde, and plump. Tessie Wall’s early career is more or less cloaked in mystery, although she is believed to have spent several years, in one capacity or another, on the Barbary Coast. She first began to attract attention in the Uptown Tenderloin during the early part of 1907, when she opened a place in Larkin Street, between Ellis and Eddy. A year or so later she removed to O’Farrell Street and established the house which was much frequented by college boys and other roisterers of the younger set. In 1909 Tessie Wall became acquainted with Frank Daroux, a gambler who was interested in several so-called sporting houses, and at their first dinner together she fascinated him by drinking twenty-two bottles of wine without once leaving the table. They were married soon afterwards and gave a historic wedding feast at which one hundred guests consumed eighty cases of champagne, or 960 bottles, or about 240 gallons. Daroux could see nothing wrong in himself owning houses of bad repute, but he didn’t want his wife to be engaged in the same business. He tried repeatedly to induce her to sell her properties and make her home in the country, on an estate which he had purchased for her in San Mateo County. But Tessie Wall flatly refused to leave the bright lights.

“I’d rather be an electric light pole on Powell Street,” she said, “than own all the land in the sticks.”

After a few years of wedded bliss Daroux procured a divorce. He declined to return to Tessie Wall despite her anguished entreaties, whereupon that forthright lady armed herself with a twenty-two-caliber revolver and sent word to him that if she couldn’t have him, she would fix him so no other woman would ever want him. Daroux laughed at her warning, but she did her best to carry out her threat. One day in the summer of 1916 she met him on the street and fired three bullets into his body. She stood weeping over him until the police came. When they arrested her, she cried:

“I shot him because I love him—damn him!”

Daroux recovered, although the shooting permanently affected his health. He refused to appear as a prosecuting witness, and Tessie Wall was promptly released from custody. A year or so later, during the uproar of reform that ended with the abolition of the Barbary Coast and the more sordid features of the Uptown Tenderloin, Daroux went to New York, where he remained. He died there in December 1928. Tessie Wall closed her resort about the same time and retired with a modest fortune to a flat in Eighteenth Street, taking with her the enormous gilded bed in which she had slept for many years, and many other garish pieces of furniture from the O’Farrell Street establishment. There she lived until her death in April 1932, at the age of sixty-seven. (10d) During her latter years San Francisco journalists invested her with a glamour which was noticeably absent during the heyday of her career, and customarily referred to her as the one-time Queen of the Barbary Coast. As a matter of fact, Tessie Wall had very little, if any, connection with the Barbary Coast, and was never a figure of importance in that hive of vice and violence. Whatever prominence she enjoyed was achieved in the Uptown Tenderloin.

In that portion of the red-light district which formed a part of the Barbary Coast, there were three main types of brothel—the cow-yard, the crib, and the parlor house. The cow-yard was really just a group of cribs under one roof, usually a U-shaped structure or enclosure of from one to four storeys, divided into small cubicles on either side of long hallways. Some of these buildings provided accommodations for as many as three hundred women, and several were planned to accommodate even more, but all of the space was never rented. In addition to these establishments the Barbary Coast was crowded with call houses, and cheap hotels and lodging-houses to which streetwalkers took their customers. There were also the dens above and below the dancehalls and concert saloons, which were maintained for the convenience of the pretty waiter girls and female performers employed in the resorts, to whom prostitution was more or less of a side-line. Of all the so-called sporting houses, the cow-yard was probably the most profitable, while the crib was the lowest and most disreputable. The parlor house generally made a considerable pretense at refinement and a certain gentility and professed to cater to a higher-class clientele than did the others, although it is extremely doubtful if any man with money in his pockets was ever refused admittance. Prices in the cribs and cow-yards, over a long period of years, ranged from twenty-five cents to a dollar, while the inmates of the parlor houses received from two to ten dollars for their favors. Very young and handsome girls were sometimes paid as much as twenty dollars for entertaining visitors for a half-hour or so, as were a few older women who made up in skill and simulated passion what they lacked in youth and beauty. Only in a parlor house could a man remain throughout the night and have, during that time, the exclusive company of a particular girl. For this privilege he paid from five to thirty dollars, depending upon his own generosity and the standing and popularity of the bagnio.

The parlor-house girls were the aristocracy of San Francisco’s red-light district—as a class they were much younger and handsomer than the streetwalkers or the inmates of the cribs and cow-yards. Many, perhaps a majority, were small-town girls, brought into the city by the procurers, who operated with great industry and success throughout California and up and down the Pacific Coast—prolific sources of supply were the villages and towns on the eastern shore of the Bay of San Francisco and in the southern part of the San Francisco peninsula. Sometimes these girls were sold to the brothel-keepers for cash, but more often the procurer received a small percentage of their earnings and so in time built up a regular and substantial income. Other parlor-house inmates were girls who had come to San Francisco to obtain jobs or otherwise to better their fortunes and had been forced into prostitution by economic stress. Still others were former dance-hall women who found life easier and more remunerative in the bagnios than in the dives of the Barbary Coast. And there were, of course, some who became harlots simply because they followed the line of least resistance, or surrendered to their natural inclinations, or fell in love with a man who seduced them and then set them to work earning money for him. Occasionally a girl of good family appeared in a brothel, but most of the inmates came from the middle and lower classes and were deficient in both education and intelligence. They held their places in the parlor houses only so long as they retained something of their youth and beauty, which was seldom more than half a dozen years. Then they became streetwalkers or went into the cribs or cow-yards—or committed suicide. A few—very few—abandoned the life entirely and either married or engaged in work upon which society looked with more respect.

A woman who practiced the arts of harlotry in a crib or a cow-yard kept for her own—or rather, in most cases, gave to her pimp—all the money she earned, and paid a nightly rental of from two to five dollars for the space she occupied. In the parlor houses, however, various methods of dividing the revenue of the establishments were employed. In some the girls paid from twenty to forty dollars a week for board, lodging, and laundry and retained for themselves whatever they earned above that amount. In others the inmates were paid from one-fourth to one-half of their total earnings, and in still others they received a weekly wage, ranging from twenty to sixty dollars, and no other remuneration. They usually paid nothing for board and lodging or for the scanty raiment which they wore during their working hours. The girl who was employed on a percentage basis was compelled to depend upon her mistress for the proper determination of the amount due her at the end of each week, and it is doubtful if she ever received a correct accounting until the cash register came into general use. Thereafter in many houses the brothel-keeper or a trusted servant sat enthroned behind a cash register at the foot of the stairs which led to the bedrooms. When a visitor had selected the harlot who most pleased him, he paid the regular fee to the mistress of the bagnio, for payment in advance was an unalterable rule in all except a very few of the houses. The amount was rung up on the cash register, and the girl received a brass check, which she kept until pay-day.

The number of girls in a parlor house varied, of course, according to the brothel’s size and popularity, but it was seldom less than five or more than twenty. They were expected to be ready for work by noon of each day and remained on duty until dawn the following morning, unless excused for illness or other cause. Each girl had one day off a week, which she usually spent with her lover or drinking in the dives of the Barbary Coast. The income of a parlorhouse prostitute was sometimes considerable; an occasional girl, if employed in a popular bagnio, earned as much as two hundred dollars a week, the greater part of which went to her pimp. As a rule the owners of the resorts made enormous sums; many retired with fortunes.

The parlor houses also derived a considerable income from the sale of beer in bottles and hard liquor by the half-pint and from music. Practically every resort was equipped with some sort of automatic—and in later years electrical—musical instrument, which played only when fed with nickels or quarters. A great deal of the revenue from the music and sale of liquor went to the police and politicians as graft, in addition to the regular payments, which were usually based on the number of girls in a house. Sometimes besides taking most of the coins which had been dropped into the machine, the greedy grafters levied a special unofficial tax upon each musical instrument; or ordered all music stopped and then permitted its resumption upon payment of another so-called tax or license fee. Again, they used a method similar to that which proved so successful in 1911. In the late spring of that year the police forbade all music in houses of prostitution and ordered the removal and destruction of every musical instrument in the red-light district. A month later, in July, the proprietors of the houses were told that they might provide music for the entertainment of their guests, but that it must be the music of the automatic harp. There wasn’t such an instrument in the Barbary Coast, but the lack was soon remedied. A few days after the bagnio-keepers had been notified, a salesman for a Cincinnati piano house appeared in the district and offered automatic harps for sale at $750 each, about four times what they could have been bought for in the open market. But he bore references from important politicians and experienced no difficulty in making sales.

The location of every brothel on the Barbary Coast, whether crib, cow-yard, or parlor house, was indicated at night by a red light which burned before its door from dusk to dawn, and during the day by a red shade behind at least one of the front windows. From some of the parlor houses also flapped signs, gaudily painted on wood or metal, which bore the name of the establishment and, sometimes, pertinent information about its inmates. Madame Gabrielle’s bagnio in Dupont Street (Grant Avenue), which she rebuilt in Commercial Street after the fire of 1906, displayed an ornate sign which depicted a huge insect lying at ease in a bed of fragrant flowers, surrounded by sweet-faced, simpering Cupids. Her place was called the Lively Flea. Near-by, another and an equally flamboyant sign ornamented the entrance of the Parisian Mansion, which was owned by Jerome Bassity and Madame Marcelle. Also on Commercial Street, during the first year or so of the present century, was a very popular French bawdy-house before which swung the cast-iron figure of a rooster, painted a brilliant scarlet and with a red light burning in its beak. The talons of the metal bird clutched a placard on which was painted the legend: “At the Sign of the Red Rooster.” In the hallway of this brothel was a smaller replica of the figure, and a sign similar to that outside except that it bore a shorter synonym for “rooster.” The Red Rooster was the property of Madame Lazarene, who also owned several other resorts, some of which were in the name of her husband, Labrodet. Instead of using signs, some of the parlor-house proprietors in Commercial and other streets affixed to their front doors or walls brass or copper plates, on each of which was stamped the street number of the resort and the first name of the woman who operated it. One brothel-keeper in Sacramento Street, who had formerly conducted a tea-room, achieved undying fame in the middle eighteen-nineties by nailing to her door a copper plate on which had been engraved this startling  announcement:

MADAME LUCY YE OLDE WHORE SHOPPE.

Not unnaturally, this sign attracted a great deal of attention, but Madame Lucy removed it within a few days at the request of the police.

A few of the Barbary Coast parlor houses were managed by men, who, for some reason which never was quite clear, invariably wore pink or canary-colored silk shirts embellished with huge diamond studs. Most of the bagnios of this type, however, were operated by women, the great majority of whom were fat and—or had been—blonde. The mistress of such an establishment was always called Miss by the inmates, but the customers addressed her—and with considerable respect, too—as Madame. In time this title became generally used as a common noun to designate any brothel-keeper. When, as occasionally happened, one of these women was arrested and asked her occupation, for the purpose of the police record, she replied simply and with pride: “I am a madame.” Practically all of the parlor houses were in two- or three-storey buildings which had once been private residences. When they were transformed into bagnios, the interior arrangements were usually altered to provide additional bedrooms, and, if possible, the living-room or parlor was enlarged. The sleeping-chambers were each equipped with a dresser, a chair or two, and a strong iron or brass bed, while the parlor was a potpourri of gaudy rugs, erotic paintings or photographs, garish couches and divans, and heavily gilded chairs and tables. In one corner was the omnipresent automatic or electrical musical instrument, and in some places a small section of the floor was cleared for dancing.

When a man stepped across the threshold of a parlor house, the subsequent procedure was much the same as if he had gone into a store to buy a spool of thread. A Negro maid escorted him into the parlor, where he was greeted by the madame and immediately asked what type of girl he desired. If he intimated, as he usually did, that he preferred to look at the stock before buying, the madame summoned her harlots, who trooped into the parlor and were paraded for inspection. Whether or not the visitor made his selection immediately, he was importuned to purchase liquor or provide coins for the music. The dress of the prostitutes on these important occasions varied with changing fashions, but was always extremely scanty. In some houses they wore flannel or cotton night-gowns; in others the parade costume was a thin house-dress with nothing underneath; in still others the prostitutes were clad only in flimsy underwear. In a few resorts the girls wore no clothing whatever except slippers and stockings. The traditional call by which the harlots have been summoned into the parlors of American houses of prostitution for more than fifty years is said to have originated in a Sacramento Street bagnio kept by Madame Bertha Kahn. When visitors entered her brothel, Madame Bertha, who was a huge woman with a tremendous contralto voice, strode to the foot of the stairs and shouted: “Company, girls!”

Madame Bertha employed thirty girls, and dressed them in red sandals, long, white night-gowns lavishly trimmed with lace, and red velvet caps which perched precariously atop short, frizzed hair. During the middle eighteen-seventies this bagnio was one of the most famous houses in San Francisco and was especially popular with the so-called higher classes because of the refined and genteel manner in which it was conducted. Madame Bertha sold no liquor, permitted no obscene talk or ruffianly conduct, and sternly forbade the punching and prodding and public caressing with which the girls of other houses were greeted. When her harlots were summoned to parade, they came into the parlor like ladies and were formally introduced to the gentlemen present, after which they sat demurely in a row on a long couch, across the room from the men who desired to purchase their favors. If one of the latter fancied a girl, he indicated the object of his desire to Madame Bertha, who made the necessary arrangements and informed the prostitute that the gentleman wished to speak to her in private. No money was paid until the pair had ascended the stairs, and sometimes not even then, for many of Madame Bertha’s regular customers had charge accounts. Besides the automatic instrument which required nickels and quarters to burst forth into melody, Madame Bertha’s house boasted an organ, upon which the mistress of the bagnio performed with rare skill. On Sunday afternoons she closed the resort for an hour or two, except to specially invited guests, and during that time, becomingly attired in black silk, she played sentimental airs on the organ, while the harlots and the guests sang. At these functions tea and cake were served. The policy of this unusual brothel was aptly expressed by the signs which were prominently posted in the parlor and in every bedroom:

NO VULGARITY ALLOWED IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT.

Madame Bertha’s most important rival in the parlor-house field was Madame Johanna Werner, who also kept a place in Sacramento Street and prospered for some ten or fifteen years. The popularity of her resort began to decline in the late eighteen-seventies, however, when the police arrested the procurer who had kept her supplied with girls, and imprisoned him for sending a fourteen-year-old girl to a crib in Portland, Oregon. This human vulture was appropriately named Johnny Lawless. Madame Johanna specialized in girls between fourteen and seventeen years of age, and frequently offered her clients children whom she said were even younger. The services of the very young girls who fell into her hands were sometimes sold at auction, at which the bidding was usually very brisk. Besides these sales, the brothel was noted, about 1875, for the erotic exhibitions which were given there at regular intervals by three French girls known as the Three Lively Fleas, who also performed at other peep-shows on the Barbary Coast. A frequent spectator of these shows, and a customer of the bagnio on other occasions also, was Jeanne Bonnet, better known as the Little Frog Catcher, who wore men’s clothing and for a few years earned an honest living catching frogs in the marshes of San Mateo County. Early in 1876, however, she abandoned the ways of integrity and organized a criminal gang, the membership of which comprised a dozen young girls whom Jeanne Bonnet had induced to leave Madame Johanna’s and other brothels. They eschewed prostitution, had nothing to do with men, and eked out an uncertain living through shop-lifting and other forms of thievery. Their headquarters was a shack on an unfrequented part of the waterfront, south of Market Street. The life of the gang was short, for within a few months the Little Frog Catcher, then only twenty-five years old, was found dead with a bullet in her heart. She was believed by the police to have been murdered by the pimps whose girls she had taken.

Madame Johanna had still another claim to fame as the first bagnio-keeper who seriously attempted to publicize her resort outside of San Francisco, a practice which was soon adopted by other madames. The ordinary channels of advertising, of course, were closed to them, but they procured mailing-lists from various sources and sent to towns and cities throughout the West, and particularly to those along the Pacific Coast, circulars describing their girls and dwelling lyrically upon the delights of the brothel. Many offered reduced rates to parties from out of town. At first some of the circulars were extremely frank, and the illustrations were photographs of naked girls in various poses, but in later years both text and pictures were considerably changed to avoid prosecution by the Federal authorities under the laws which prohibited the sending of obscene literature through the mails.

Logical developments of this system of advertising were the custom of using business cards and the extensive use of wall mottoes and signs. From about the middle eighteen-eighties until the closing of the Barbary Coast, practically every prostitute in San Francisco, even those who occupied the lowest cribs and cow-yards, kept a supply of business cards on hand and distributed them whenever an opportunity offered. On most of them nothing more was printed than the name of the girl and the address of the bagnio to which she was attached, but some were more fanciful in design and offered information which, to say the least, was likely to be a bit startling. Few, however, aroused as much favorable comment as the card of a gigantic Negress who lived in a Hinckley Alley cow-yard. It was designed and written for her by a San Francisco newspaper reporter, and bore this inscription within a border of forget-me-nots:

BIG MATILDA THREE HUNDRED POUNDS OF BLACK PASSION. HOURS: ALL HOURS. RATES: 50C EACH: THREE FOR ONE DOLLAR.

The wall mottoes and signs were particularly prevalent during the eighteen-nineties. Most of the former were handsomely done in embroidery, and many were the work of the prostitutes, who made them in their hours of leisure. Others were burned in wood or leather, for in those days the art of pyrography was highly regarded in all strata of society. All were extremely sentimental in character; they extolled the virtues of home and mother, set forth highly moral precepts, or advised whole-hearted participation in various aspects of the good life. In each room of a Pacific Street brothel was a framed motto saying: “God Bless Our Home,” while in another place, in California Street, was a great profusion of burnt leather masterpieces asking: "What Is Home Without Mother?” A great favorite, found in many parlors, offered this good advice: “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.” In some of the brothels hung printed signs offering to refund whatever money a man had spent in the event that illness resulted from the visit, while in others this was prominently displayed:

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED OR MONEY REFUNDED.

The man who asked for his money back on the ground of dissatisfaction, however, did not receive actual cash. Instead he was given a sort of due bill—a metal disk on which had been stamped: “Good for One.” Attached to the disk by a fine wire was a pointed, flat-topped sliver of steel in which circular threads had been cut.

A few years before the abolition of open prostitution in San Francisco a bitter price war raged among the cheaper parlor houses, and in most of the establishments which had previously maintained a standard fee of two dollars appeared this sign:

UNION HOUSE PRICE: $1.50.

The French parlor houses in Commercial Street and Grant Avenue (Dupont Street) were at the height of their prosperity and popularity during the late eighteen-nineties and for some ten or twelve years after the turn of the present century. They were by far the lowest brothels of this type in San Francisco; it is doubtful, indeed, if viler dens were ever operated anywhere in the United States than Madame Gabrielle’s Lively Flea, Madame Lazarene’s Red Rooster, and the Parisian Mansion, owned by Madame Marcelle and Jerome Bassity. In each of these places, and in other Commercial Street bagnios as well, was a special chamber called the Virgin’s Room, the walls and ceiling of which were covered with mirrors, while the furniture, except for a huge brass bed decorated with rosettes and streamers of ribbon, was upholstered in gaudy plush and velvet. Between the mirrors were cleverly concealed peep-holes. Whenever a visitor entered who seemed to be sufficiently gullible—usually a countryman or a sailor with his wages in his pocket—he was offered a virgin at double or triple the usual fee. If he accepted, he was escorted into the Virgin’s Room, and places at the peep-holes were sold at from five to ten dollars each. Occasionally a real virgin was available, but more often this rara avis was impersonated by an inmate of the brothel who had retained, despite the ravages of her profession, an appearance of youth and demureness and who was enough of an actress to simulate fright and bewilderment. In every bagnio there was always at least one such girl, and as the official virgin of the establishment she was usually paid slightly more than the customary percentage of her earnings.

The Virgin’s Room was also the scene of most of the erotic exhibitions, called circuses, for which the Commercial Street resorts were particularly celebrated, although in some resorts they were staged in a large cabinet which was wheeled into the parlor. Both men and women participated in these shows, and sometimes, instead of men, dogs, goats, and other animals were used. Perhaps the most extraordinary performance of this character ever seen in San Francisco, or, for that matter, anywhere else, was that given about 1900 in Madame Gabrielle’s Lively Flea, then in Dupont Street [Grant Avenue]—an exhibition in which a woman and a Shetland pony took part. (10e) This spectacle was shown every ten days or two weeks for several months, and the admission charge was twenty-five dollars. In another bagnio owned by Madame Gabrielle, at Geary and Stockton streets, a weekly show was presented in which the actors were Negro men and white women. The Commercial Street houses were much frequented by degenerates, largely because of the so-called circuses, and also because they were encouraged to do whatever their erotic fancies might dictate. Perhaps the most noted of these was Theodore Durrant, San Francisco’s most celebrated murderer, who in his saner moments was a medical student and an assistant superintendent of a Sunday school, prominent in the work of the Christian Endeavor Society. For a year or so during the early eighteen-nineties Durrant visited the brothels in Commercial Street several times a week. He always brought with him, in a sack or a small crate, a pigeon or a chicken, and at a certain time during the evening’s debauch he cut the bird’s throat and let the blood trickle over his body. (10f) Another Commercial Street character of this period, about whom there was considerable mystery, was a middle-aged man who appeared each morning at the Parisian Mansion, carrying a bundle which contained a complete outfit of women’s clothing. These garments he donned, and then he swept and dusted the brothel from cellar to garret. His work completed, he resumed his proper attire and departed, leaving a silver dollar on the parlor table. No one but Madame Marcelle knew his name, and she kept the secret.

The cribs and cow-yard cubicles occupied by white women and Negresses were very similar, in design and general construction, to the dens in which the Chinese slave girls were imprisoned. The single crib was simply a shanty with a narrow door, on one side of which were small double casement-windows, usually with padded ledges. It was divided into two small chambers, one of which, about six feet square, was used as a reception-room, while the other was known as the "workshop.’’ In the former there was seldom any furniture except a built-in window-seat and a chair or a couch, although the Mexican and Spanish harlots usually added a small altar with a figure of the Holy Virgin and other religious images. The ”workshop“ was just large enough for a three-quarter-size iron bed, a wash-stand with a marble top, and a kerosene stove on which always bubbled a kettle of hot water. Otherwise the room contained a tin wash-basin, a large bottle of lysol or carbolic acid, and a small chest or trunk, in which the prostitute kept her street attire. During her hours in the crib she wore nothing but a white night-gown, a gaudy kimono, or a short skirt. The walls of both the reception-room and the “workshop “ were decorated with sentimental mottoes, calendars, and chromos, while above the bed hung a framed placard on which had been painted or printed, usually within a border of flowers, a woman’s name, supposed to be that of the occupant of the crib. If these identifications were accurate, however, the cribs of San Francisco must have been largely populated by girls named Rose, Daisy, Martha, or Leah. The bed itself was always dirty and usually rickety and dilapidated. It was covered by coarse sheets and a bright-colored spread, and across the foot was thrown a piece of red or brown oilcloth. This was to prevent the spread’s being soiled by the boots or shoes of the customers, for in the twenty-five- and fifty-cent cribs, and in the others on busy nights, a man was not permitted to remove his foot-wear, or, for that matter, any of his garments except his hat. He was always requested to take off his hat. No self-respecting prostitute would entertain a man while he had his hat on.

The only exceptions to the rule which forbade the removal of clothing were to be found in a type of crib known as a “creep joint.” In the “workshops” of these places were small closets, the back walls of which were really doors which could be opened from the outside. A visitor was encouraged to hang his clothing, particularly his coat, waistcoat, and trousers, in the closet, and when his attention was otherwise engaged, as it usually was, an accomplice of the harlot opened the door and removed all money and valuables from the garments, leaving in their stead a shiny new dime. The origin of the custom of putting a dime in a pocket of the rifled raiment is unknown in present-day San Francisco, although the coin was obviously meant for car-fare home. Men who had been robbed in these places seldom made a complaint, for it was widely known that most of the cribs were connected by push-button with the nearest barroom. When trouble arose, the alarm was answered by the saloon bouncer, and a man who demanded the return of his stolen property was fortunate if he managed to keep the dime. Many of the cribs and other brothels were also protected by special watchmen, who received five dollars a month from each inmate.

The cribs were not confined to any particular section of the Barbary Coast, but were scattered throughout the red-light district. From the early eighteen-seventies until the abolition of open prostitution they were to be found in large numbers in Pacific, Jackson, Washington, Kearny, Montgomery, Stockton, Commercial and many other streets, in Broadway and Grant Avenue, and in scores of alleys which opened into these thoroughfares. In Hinckley and Pinckley alleys, and in Broadway between Grant Avenue and Stockton Street, were most of the Negro cribs, as well as many such dens filled with Spanish and Mexican women. French harlots occupied a row of cribs in Commercial Street, and in order to meet the competition offered by the Parisian Mansion and other parlor houses many of them employed barkers, who stood before their doors and cried: “Only fifty cents for a French girl, gents!“ Some of the women did their own ballyhooing, leaning from their windows and shrilly enumerating the variety of amorous entertainment which was to be found within. French women also predominated in the cribs of Bacon and Belden Places, in the southwestern part of the Barbary Coast, each of which was entered through heavy iron gates which stretched across the street. During the eighteen-nineties and for some three years of the present century both of these thoroughfares were entirely devoted to prostitution. In Bacon Place alone there were fifty-four cribs, for each of which the owner of the property received a daily rental of four dollars, and almost as many in Belden Place. A crusade against these dens was begun early in 1898 by the Reverend Father Otis of the Paulist Community and the Reverend R. C. Foute of the Grace Episcopal Church. They were soon joined by the Society for the Prevention of Vice and the St. Mary’s Square Association, and in December 1898 the embattled crusaders made a mass attack against Bacon Place, tearing down the iron gates and wrecking several cribs. A similar onslaught was made upon Belden Place, and the prostitutes were driven out of both thoroughfares. They soon returned, and were again expelled in 1903. Once more they came back to their old haunts, however, and were not finally dispersed until the cribs were destroyed by fire in 1906.

The worst cribs in San Francisco were probably those which lined both sides of Morton Street (Maiden Lane), a short thoroughfare of only two blocks running from Union Square at Stockton Street across Grant Avenue to Kearny Street, and now in the heart of the retail shopping district. These dens were occupied by women of all colors and nationalities; there were even a few Chinese and Japanese girls. And not only were the Morton Street cribs the lowest in San Francisco’s red-light district; they were also the most popular, partly because of the great variety and extraordinary depravity of the women to be found there, and partly because the police seldom entered the street unless compelled to do so by a murder or a serious shooting or stabbing affray. Ordinary fights and assaults were ignored. Occasionally a respectable woman came through Morton Street on a slumming tour, but she seldom made a second visit, for the prostitutes greeted her with ribald jeers and curses, and cries of “Look out, girls, here’s some charity competition! “ and “Get some sense and quit giving it away!”

Every night, and especially every Saturday night, this dismal bedlam of obscenity, lighted only by the red lamps above the doors of the cribs, was thronged by a tumultuous mob of half-drunken men, who stumbled from crib to crib, greedily inspecting the women as if they had been so many wild animals in cages. From the casement-windows leaned the harlots, naked to the waist, adding their shrill cries of invitation to the uproar, while their pimps haggled with passing men and tried to drag them inside the dens. If business was dull, the pimps sold the privilege of touching the breasts of the prostitutes at the standard rate of ten cents each or two for fifteen cents. But on Saturday nights some of the more popular women, who had built up a more or less regular clientele, remained in their “workshops“ from dusk to dawn, while the pimps kept the men standing in line outside, their hats in one hand and money in the other. It was not uncommon for a Morton Street prostitute to entertain as many as eighty to a hundred men in one night.

Prices in Morton Street ranged from twenty-five cents for a Mexican woman to one dollar for an American girl. The regular rate in the cribs occupied by Negresses or by Chinese or Japanese girls was fifty cents, while the Frenchwomen sold their favors for seventy-five cents. Even higher prices than any of these, however, were sometimes obtained by prostitutes of unusual youth and attractiveness, and particularly by red-haired girls. It was a popular superstition in San Francisco for many years that a woman with auburn tresses was exceedingly amorous, and that a red-haired Jewess was the most passionate of all. A pimp who owned two or three such girls was on the highroad to fortune. Curiously enough, the principal owner of red-haired Jewish girls in San Francisco's red-light district was an extraordinary woman known as Iodoform Kate, who flourished in the eighteen-nineties. She was herself a prostitute for several years, during which time she gained considerable renown by refusing to have any dealings with the pimps. Instead Iodoform Kate saved her money, and about 1895 she was able to purchase a dozen or more Morton Street cribs. In each of them she installed a red-haired Jewess, and after a few years she retired with a comfortable fortune.

Another noted Morton Street prostitute was a young woman known as Rotary Rosie, an appellation which perhaps sufficiently described her. Rotary Rosie, like Iodoform Kate, maintained no pimp and was also distinguished among the crib women for her erudition; she read books and appeared to have the rudiments of an education. A year or so before the fire of 1906 she fell in love with a student at the University of California, and he introduced her to several of his fraternity brothers. For a few months thereafter she entertained these young gentlemen without expense to them, requiring only that they read poetry to her for half an hour. Her ambition was to quit the brothel and attend college, but after a few years she became discouraged and committed suicide.

Except for a brief period in 1892, when they were closed as a result of a crusade by the Civic Federation, the unholy dens in Morton Street maintained a continuous existence for more than forty years. They were finally destroyed in the conflagration of 1906 and were not rebuilt, principally because the land on which they had stood was too valuable for business purposes.

For at least forty of the more than sixty years in which open prostitution flourished in San Francisco, cow-yards were to be found in all parts of the Barbary Coast and the red-light district; they were probably as numerous as the parlor houses and the single cribs. Three of these monstrous kennels stood out among the others like veritable sore thumbs upon the hands of the body politic—the Nymphia, in Pacific Street near Stockton; the Marsicania, in Dupont Street (Grant Avenue) near Broadway; and the celebrated Municipal Brothel, also called the Municipal Crib, in Jackson Street near Kearny. The last-named lingered for several years under the protection of the politicians and city officials and finally died a more or less natural death; but the Nymphia and the Marsicania succumbed, after comparatively brief periods of prosperity, to the crusading prowess of the Reverend Terence Caraher, pastor of the Roman Catholic Church of St. Francis and chairman of the Committee on Morals of the North Beach Promotion Association. Father Caraher was an Irishman who came to the United States in 1873. After nine months at the Mission San Rafael he was sent to the Church of St. Francis, and except for fifteen years at the Mission San Jose—from about 1885 to 1900—he remained in San Francisco until a few months before his death, which occurred in October 1914, at a sanatorium in San Jose.

Throughout his San Francisco pastorate Father Caraher waged incessant warfare against the red-light district and the Barbary Coast. He blockaded the brothels and the dives, particularly the former, with volunteer pickets; he exerted religious and political pressure upon the real owners of the property used for prostitution; he hauled the operators and inmates of the bagnios into court and otherwise harried them in every possible fashion. In common with most reformers, however, he was not long content to confine his activities to the special field in which the value of his work was unquestioned and in which he had the support of every right-thinking citizen; he was soon heavily engaged in what might best be described as a general denouncing business. Scarcely a week passed in which the newspapers did not contain at least one statement of violent protest signed by him, and scarcely a sermon did he deliver in which something or someone was not denounced in language which left no doubt as to his meaning. He inveighed against public dancing as vicious and immoral and against the nickelodeons as possessing the same undesirable attributes; he condemned most of San Francisco’s trolley cars, and especially those which traversed Kearny Street, as “dance halls on wheels. . .full of lewd women and beastly men”; and during his latter years he fell into the habit of fulminating against practically every public amusement and pastime which threatened to obtain a foothold in San Francisco. At mass on January 27, 1907 he delivered this typical attack upon roller-skating rinks, which were then becoming popular throughout the city:

“While I approve of athletic sports and games in general, I have only words of condemnation to utter against skating rinks. I condemn public skating because it is dangerous both to body and soul. Many receive injuries at the skating rinks from which they never recover. In skating the bones are oftentimes broken, limbs are twisted, and the body severely bruised. While the danger to the body in the skating rink is great, the danger to the soul is greater. Skating rinks are frequented by the worst elements of society. Some of the male skaters speak to one another afterwards of their experiences and their conquests of young women in the rinks, and where do the skaters go after they leave the rinks? I answer, some of them go to perdition. Skating is not only a foolish, silly exercise, but it is most dangerous to body and soul. I request you to avoid the skating rinks and thereby show a good example to the rest of the community.” (10g)

The Nymphia, the first important brothel to feel the weight of Father Caraher’s wrathful hand, was a flimsy U-shaped building, three storeys in height, with about a hundred and fifty cubicles on each floor. It was erected early in 1899 by the Twinkling Star Corporation and soon after its completion was leased to a syndicate composed of four gifted impresarios of vice—Emil and Valentine Kehrlein, Sam Blumenberg, and a man known on the Barbary Coast only as Mr. Frey. It was opened about the middle of the summer of 1899, with three hundred cubicles occupied by as many women, each of whom paid a daily rental of five dollars. Had everything gone well with this enterprise, it would within a short time have become by far the largest brothel on the Pacific Coast, for the syndicate planned not only to fill the remaining cubicles with girls, but to erect an annex with accommodations for five hundred more. The original intention of the Kehrlein brothers and their associates was to call their cow-yard the Hotel Nymphomania and to people it with women suffering from that condition The police, however, refused to permit the use of the name, so the syndicate compromised by calling it the Nymphia and filling the cubicles of only one floor with nymphomaniacs, or, at any rate, with harlots who were advertised as such. Each inmate of the Nymphia was required to remain naked all the time she was in her crib; she was obliged to entertain every man who applied, regardless of race or color, or lose her place in the brothel; and she was subject to constant inspection through a long, narrow window cut in the door. A shade covered each of these windows, but it was automatically raised for a few moments by a dime dropped into a slot outside the door, so that anyone with the necessary coin could see what was taking place in any of the cubicles at any time. This novel feature was immensely popular, but it was abandoned after a few months. Instead of dimes, too many customers used slugs, which were sold for a few cents each by venders on the Barbary Coast.

The Nymphia had been in operation only a short time when Father Caraher returned to San Francisco from his fifteen-year sojourn at the Mission San Jose. He found the cow-yard running full blast, with two uniformed policemen mounting guard at the entrance. They were there to maintain a semblance of order, however, and not to interfere with the operation of the resort. After a Saturday-night inspection of the brothel, when he found the hallways swarming with drunken men and saw things which he had supposed went out of fashion with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Father Caraher immediately launched a vigorous offensive. He found the heads of the police department and other city officials in a somewhat sympathetic mood, for the blatant depravity on exhibition at the Nymphia had caused considerable talk even among the hardened debauchees of the Barbary Coast. The priest finally succeeded in enlisting active police support, and in January 1900 the Nymphia was raided. Thirty-three women were arrested, and the four members of the operating syndicate. Some of the women were convicted in police court and fined, and others were released, while the Kehrleins, Blumenberg, and Frey were found guilty of maintaining a nuisance and operating an immoral resort. Each was sentenced to six months in prison, but on appeal a higher court reduced the penalty and directed their release on payment of a fine of two hundred and fifty dollars.

One of the prostitutes arrested in this raid was a nineteen-year-old girl named Polly Knight, who called herself Reine Adams. She was released, but was again arrested on August 25, 1900, for shooting Billy Abbott, who owned a brothel in Grant Avenue and a small cow-yard and saloon in Pacific Street, in the rear of which was a garden in which erotic exhibitions were staged. The girl told the police that when she was eighteen years old, Billy Abbott had induced her to leave her parents and live with him, and that after a few months he had compelled her to become a streetwalker. But she was too shy to be successful in this exacting profession, and Abbott put her in his brothel in Grant Avenue, which catered principally to Chinamen. When the Nymphia was opened, he sent her there with several other girls whom he had sold to the Nymphia operating syndicate. The Adams girl finally realized that Abbott’s treatment of her had not been of the best, and she determined to kill him. She shot him with a twenty-two-caliber revolver, but he was not seriously wounded, and soon recovered. He refused to prosecute her, however, and she was released. What became of her afterwards the police never knew. When she was brought into police court for dismissal from custody, Judge Conlan remarked: “This case resembles that of Kitty Turner, who stabbed a member of the same class of men recently. . . .It is to be regretted that in neither instance was the wound fatal.”

The Nymphia syndicate reopened the cow-yard as soon as its members had paid their fines, but Father Caraher and the police harassed them so successfully that they abandoned it in disgust early in 1901. It was again in operation, under new management, in August 1902, and the police immediately began to arrest the inmates, all of whom demanded jury trials. One or two convictions were obtained and promptly appealed to higher courts, and for the next year or so, pending the final outcome of these cases, the police contented themselves with blockading the resort. Uniformed police were once again stationed at the entrance, but they now had orders to take the name of every man who entered, and to keep him out if possible to do so without using force. Judging from the lists of names these policemen turned in to their superior officers, no one except John Smith ever visited the Nymphia. In the early spring of 1903 Judge J. C. B. Hebard of the Superior Court, who had heard one of the appeals in an early case against the Nymphia, handed down a decision in which he said that Chief of Police George Wittman could send policemen into the Nymphia to make arrests if he had reason to believe that the law was being violated, but that he could not legally blockade the resort. Chief Wittman thereupon began a series of raids, and within a few weeks the doors of the Nymphia once more were closed. They never opened again, although in July 1903 B. Ferner and F. J. Drake announced that they had leased the place for five years at a rental of $18,000 for the fIrst year, $36,000 for the second year, and $48,000 for each of the next three years and would operate it as a “high-class” bagnio, whatever that might mean. But Chief Wittman told them that he would raid the brothel the moment it reopened, and when the Superior Court refused to grant an injunction against the police, Ferner and Drake abandoned the project.

Much the same plan of campaign that had proved so successful against the Nymphia was followed by Father Caraher in his attack upon the Marsicania, which the San Francisco Call described as “one of the vilest dens ever operated in San Francisco.” This was a smaller cow-yard than the Nymphia, with only thirty-three cribs, in a stable-like enclosure at the end of a long passageway which opened into Grant Avenue less than two blocks from Father Caraher’s church. Some of the cribs were larger than ordinary dens of the sort, however, and were occupied by from two to five women, so that the population of the brothel was usually about one hundred prostitutes. Each paid five dollars nightly rental. While the Marsicania appears to have been a resort of singular depravity, catering especially to the riff-raff of the Barbary Coast, it possessed none of the special features which distinguished the Nymphia and other bagnios of the same type. It was opened about the middle of 1902, while Father Caraher was in Europe on a vacation, on property owned by P. Marsicano, but leased to P. Vincent and subleased to George Sellinger. According to the Call, the brothel was actually operated by Auguste Houges and Emil Kehrlein, the latter of whom had been one of the owners of the Nymphia, with Sellinger as manager and figure-head.

Also, while Father Caraher was away, several parlor houses had been established in the immediate vicinity of his church. A blockade by volunteer pickets soon compelled these bagnios to close their doors, but this sort of systematic annoyance failed to daunt the frequenters of the Marsicania; on the contrary, they seemed delighted to divulge their names to whoever asked for them, and many even insisted upon giving the names of their friends. They became frightened, however, when the priest induced Chief of Police George Wittman to post uniformed policemen before the brothel as pickets, and the operators of the Marsicania appealed to the courts, many of which had already shown a friendly attitude toward various brothels. In February 1903 George D. Collins, attorney for Sellinger, obtained a temporary injunction from Judge Carroll Cook of the Superior Court, restraining the police from blockading the Marsicania or from entering the premises except in serious emergencies. The brothel thus operated under judicial protection and enjoyed a period of great prosperity until May 28, 1903, when Judge Cook, having heard arguments and testimony in April, dissolved the injunction. He held that Sellinger had not come into court with clean hands and so was not entitled to relief. Attorney Collins at once filed notice of appeal, whereupon Judge Cook issued an interlocutory injunction pending a decision by the California Supreme Court. It imposed the same restrictions upon the police as had the temporary writ.

The Marsicania was now safe from molestation, either by the police or by Father Caraher, for at least two years, for a decision by the Supreme Court could not be expected in less than that time. The night the injunction was granted, there was a great celebration at the Marsicania, and several women were badly beaten by drunken customers. Next day Emil Kehrlein and his associates began the erection of additional cribs. But such a storm of protest arose, not only from Father Caraher and clergymen of other denominations, but from the newspapers and various civic societies as well, that Attorney Collins arranged another series of legal shenanigans. Jean Pon, who was cook and housekeeper for the inmates of the Marsicania, installed a stove, a dozen chairs, and two or three tables in the passageway leading to the brothel, and set himself up as a restaurant-keeper. Then Attorney Collins appeared before Judge Cook on behalf of Pon, and in June 1903, without publicity, obtained an injunction restraining the police from interfering with the business of Pon’s restaurant. The court held that any sort of surveillance over the Marsicania would have that effect. Judge Cook then dissolved the interlocutory injunction, whereupon Chief of Police Wittman, knowing nothing of the writ which had been granted to Pon, ordered a raid upon the brothel. Twenty-eight women were arrested. They were all released upon arraignment in police court, and Chief Wittman and Father Caraher, who was accused of being responsible for the raid, were cited to appear before Judge Cook on charges of contempt of court.

The priest was purged of contempt when he said that he had no knowledge of the raid, but Chief Wittman was found guilty. An appeal was immediately taken, and in July 1905, after two years in which the Marsicania was the most thoroughly protected brothel in San Francisco, the Supreme Court handed down a decision reversing Judge Cook and dissolving Pon’s injunction. Justice Lorigan, who wrote the opinion, said: “It would be preposterous to say that where the public may freely enter to violate the law a police officer is excluded from entering to enforce it.” The decision also characterized the Marsicania as “the scene of bestial and unnatural crimes” and found that Pon and his so-called restaurant were being used as a subterfuge to prevent police interference. With the way thus cleared, Chief Wittman began a vigorous offensive which soon closed the bagnio and so added another scalp to Father Caraher’s collection of trophies.

The famous cow-yard in Jackson Street, variously called the Municipal Brothel and the Municipal Crib, was erected in 1904 on the site of an underground Chinese tenement known as the Devil’s Kitchen and the Palace Hotel, which was condemned by the Board of Health. When originally opened, the Municipal Crib was a three-storey structure with ninety cubicles, but it was destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906 and was replaced by a four-storey building and basement, containing 133 cribs and a saloon. The basement cubicles were occupied by Mexican prostitutes, and those on the fourth floor by Negresses, while on the other floors were representatives of various nationalities, with American and French girls predominating. The women were more or less graded by floors and sections according to their youth and beauty, and prices varied accordingly. The standard rates were twenty-five cents in the Mexican basement cribs, fifty cents on the first floor, seventy-five on the second, and one dollar on the third, which was occupied entirely by French prostitutes. The Negresses on the top floor charged fifty cents, with the customary reduction for parties of two or more.

Billy Finnegan, a well-known character in the Barbary Coast dives, recruited for the original crib, and promised immunity from arrest to all harlots who rented space in the building, at from two to five dollars a day for each crib. The brothel was then known simply as 620 Jackson Street, but within a short time it was popularly called the Municipal Crib, for it was soon common knowledge that most if not all of the profits flowed into the pockets of city officials and prominent politicians. Saloon-keepers and others who wished to curry favor with the political powers advertised the brothel whenever possible; strangers who asked policemen where women could be found were directed to it, and it was a regular stop for the Jackson Street cars. If there were no women on the trolleys, the conductors usually shouted: “All out for the whore house!” Several parlor houses and cow-yards in the immediate neighborhood were closed because they attracted men who might otherwise have gone to the Municipal Crib. Among them was a cow-yard in Pacific Street near Grant Avenue, which was operated by A. Andrien, Jerry Driscoll, Dick Creighton, and three others. Driscoll was a cousin by marriage of Mayor Eugene Schmitz and had been a lieutenant of Christopher A. Buckley’s during the height of the latter’s power as the political boss of the city. Each of the six men interested in the project had invested twenty-five hundred dollars, and the Pacific Street brothel was opened a few weeks after the fire of 1906, with forty-eight women in as many cribs. Some seven months later Andrien testified before the Grand Jury that he had regularly paid a city official $440 a week for protection, and Creighton told the jurors that Abe Ruef had personally received $250 a week.

As Billy Finnegan had promised, the Municipal Crib was protected for more than two years, until the Grand Jury began its inquiry into the corruption of the Ruef political machine and Mayor Schmitz’s administration. The crib was investigated by the Grand Jury and was frequently in the limelight during the graft prosecution that followed the indictment of Ruef, Mayor Schmitz, and several members of the Board of Supervisors, who were described by Ruef himself as “being so greedy for plunder that they’d eat the paint off a house.”  (10h) On December 4, 1906, while the Grand Jury was trying to determine the source of the unusual protection accorded the Municipal Crib, one Paul Hendiara testified that the profits of the brothel since the fire had averaged $3,830 a week, and that Herbert Schmitz, the Mayor’s brother, owned a one-quarter interest in the place and received one-fourth of the earnings. According to Hendiara, the other owners were James Finnegan, Emilio Lastreto, and Joseph Michel. Herbert Schmitz denied Hendiara’s testimony in toto, and Mayor Schmitz and Abe Ruef likewise disclaimed any connection with the bagnio. In November 1906 the members of the Grand Jury visited the crib and were greeted by the inmates with jeers and curses. The jurors were told by the manager, Louis Peterson, that the real owner of the cow-yard was Joseph Alexander, a traveling salesman who had no permanent address and whom Peterson admitted he had never seen. A few days later, on November 23, the first raid was made upon the resort, and six women were arrested. They were immediately released when arraigned in police court. On January 28, 1907 the police again invaded the crib and locked the doors. They were reopened in February, and the place was raided once more on February 20 by order of the Grand Jury. Eighty-two women were driven from the cubicles, but no arrests were made. In March the crib resumed operations, and five raids during that month, upon this and another brothel in Pacific Street, resulted in the arrest of fifty-seven women. They were all released on bail of twenty dollars each, which they forfeited. Despite these frequent attacks by the police and the Grand Jury, the cubicles of the Municipal Crib were again filled with prostitutes during the summer of 1907. It was finally closed in September of that year, a few days after Chief of Police William J. Biggy had visited the resort and found the halls and cribs swarming with boys from fourteen to eighteen years of age. During the summer of 1910 Louis Michel attempted to open the place as a brothel, but the police compelled him to close after the crib had been in operation for less than a week. About a year after his visit of inspection Chief of Police Biggy was ordered removed from office for reasons which were not divulged. He refused to accept dismissal and on the night of November 30, 1908 crossed the Bay of San Francisco in a police launch for a conference with Hugo Keil, a member of the Board of Police Commissioners and one of his supporters. He left Keil’s residence in a cheerful mood and was seen by several people to embark in the launch for the return trip to the city. But when the boat reached San Francisco, Chief Biggy had disappeared. His body, with no marks of violence upon it, was found floating in the Bay about a week later. What happened to him was never known, although it was common gossip in San Francisco for several years—the story is still heard occasionally—that the truth about the tragedy was contained in a police report which was suppressed by the authorities. In June 1911, three years after Chief Biggy’s death, the engineer of the launch, William Murphy, went insane, and in his ravings frequently cried: “I don’t know who did it, but I swear to God I didn’t!”

The Municipal Crib was the last cow-yard of any considerable size to operate openly in San Francisco, although only the interference of Father Caraher and the San Francisco Globe, the unsympathetic attitude of Chief of Police Jesse B. Cook, (10i) and the unusual position assumed by a property-owner prevented the opening of one in Pacific Street, near Montgomery Street, in the early spring of 1909. The men who conceived this project were Tom Magee and Ed Pincus, both of whom were widely known in red-light and Barbary Coast circles. Magee had been a blacksmith, a pugilist, and a saloon-keeper; Pincus had been about everything that it was possible for one man to be on the Barbary Coast. Both had at various times owned interests in brothels and deadfalls, and in partnership with Billy Harrington had operated the Seattle Dance Hall in Pacific Street for a year or so after the fire. Pincus was also renowned as a very dangerous man in a rough-and-tumble fight. One of his eyes was gouged out in a saloon brawl in Vancouver, B. C., whither he had gone after being expelled from Los Angeles and Seattle by the police of those cities. When he came to San Francisco, he was asked what had happened to his opponent. Pincus replied: “He’ll never blow his nose again.”

Early in 1909 Pincus and Magee obtained a sub-lease on a brick building in Pacific Street which had housed, successively, a brothel and a low variety theater, and began remodeling it into a cow-yard at an estimated cost of thirty-five hundred dollars. They installed sixty cubicles—tiny plastered cells some six feet wide and eight feet long—and rented them to prostitutes at thirty-five dollars a week each. By the first of April 1909 the brothel was almost ready for occupancy, and Pincus and Magee let it be known that they would open for business within two weeks. Up to this time their plans had attracted little or no attention, but they now made two serious mistakes, which brought the wrath of the entire city down upon them. Next door to the proposed cow-yard was a branch of the Whosoever-Will Mission, of which J. C. Westenberg was secretary. Pincus brazenly offered to pay Westenberg fifteen hundred dollars in cash if he would move the mission to another part of the Barbary Coast, and promised to send him enough fallen women to keep the mission busy. Then Pincus called on Father Caraher and tried to enlist the aid of the priest in a campaign to move all brothels and deadfalls east of Montgomery Street and concentrate them in a comparatively small area. He mentioned casually that he planned to open a little place of his own, which he hoped would start the exodus. Father Caraher not only refused to have anything to do with Pincus’s transparent scheme, but both he and Westenberg complained to Chief Cook, who sent for Pincus and Magee and told them that so long as he was head of the Police Department the cow-yard would not be permitted to open. Father Caraher also obtained the support of the San Francisco Globe in his campaign against the brothel, and the newspaper at once began a vigorous crusade, with editorials, front-page articles, and streamer headlines. The great clerical and journalistic uproar which ensued was increased when Tom Magee slugged S. Fred Hogue, publisher of the Globe, in a corridor of the Hall of Justice. Next day work on the new crib stopped, and the site swarmed with souvenir-hunters, who carried away everything that was loose or that they could detach from the building. Pincus and Magee were compelled to abandon their project entirely when they were informed by Henry C. Breeden, manager of the Butler estate, which owned the building, that all leases and subleases had been voided by their attempt to use the property for immoral purposes.

Both Pincus and Magee left San Francisco soon afterwards, but Pincus returned in about four months and approached William Maxwell, manager of the Zelle estate, with a scheme to erect a cow-yard on a vacant lot in Pacific Street near Sansome Street, which the estate owned. Maxwell refused to listen, and Pincus began following him about the streets, cursing and berating him. On August 20, 1909 the two men met at Market and Mason streets, and Pincus’s attitude became so threatening that Maxwell drew a revolver and killed him. Maxwell’s statement that he had acted in self-defense was accepted by the police.

While San Francisco’s reformers tolerated the red-light district and the Barbary Coast for almost three-quarters of a century, with only sporadic and usually ineffectual outbursts of opposition, they fiercely combated every effort to control or prevent the spread of diseases that are always rampant in a city which permits open but unregulated prostitution. For many years the reform element, particularly the clergy, successfully advanced the curious argument that since the brothels could not be abolished, fear of disease would keep men from frequenting them; they never seemed capable of realizing that vice regulated, even to a slight extent, is vice in retreat. They ignored the frequent warnings of reputable physicians and medical societies that venereal diseases were becoming alarmingly prevalent in all classes of San Francisco’s population. With equal obtuseness, they greeted with frenzied trumpetings of righteous denunciation and unbelief the publication of such unpleasant facts as were brought to light during the survey of Chinatown by the Board of Supervisors in 1885, when a member of the Board of Health and other physicians testified that they had found young boys, scarcely in their teens, suffering from diseases contracted in the Chinese cribs, and that they knew of no city in the world which harbored as many diseased children as San Francisco.

It was not until 1911, more than sixty years after the first Chileno harlot had set up her tent on the southern slope of Telegraph Hill, that a proper agency was formed to deal with a situation which competent medical men believed to be a serious menace to the health of the city. In March of that year, under the authority of ordinances adopted by the Board of Supervisors, the Municipal Clinic was established by the Board of Health and an auxiliary committee of physicians and business men. It was empowered to compel every prostitute in the city to submit to examination and, if necessary, treatment; and the police were instructed to enforce its regulations. No woman was permitted to enter a brothel without a medical certificate, and all harlots were required to report at the clinic every fourth day for medical inspection, which included a blood test. For this they paid fifty cents, but treatment in case of disease was free. Each prostitute received a booklet containing her photograph and a record of her examinations, and if she failed to produce this identification upon demand of a policeman or a member of the clinic’s staff, she was liable to arrest for vagrancy. If a girl was found to be diseased, her booklet was surrendered to the clinic, and she was ordered to refrain from prostitution until she had been cured. Not all obeyed this last regulation, of course, but those who didn’t ran a considerable risk of imprisonment.

The clinic opened its doors on March 21, 1911, with Dr. O. B. Spalding as supervising inspector, and existed for two years and one month. In that brief time it succeeded in reducing the prevalence of venereal disease in the red-light district sixty-six per cent, or from 148 per thousand prostitutes to about 40 a thousand. In the first month of its operation 14.69 per cent of the women examined were diseased; in its last month, May 1913, the percentage was 4.66. The daily average of women who reported for inspection was 125. In addition to this work, the clinic staff rehabilitated at least two hundred harlots and found respectable jobs for 140. Fifty girls who asked for permits to enter brothels were persuaded to abandon their intentions and seek other means of livelihood. Many minors were rescued from the bagnios and turned over to the Juvenile Court, and convicting evidence was furnished to the police in twenty-five white-slave cases. (10j)

Despite this record, the Municipal Clinic had to fight for its existence from the day of its establishment. Practically every clergyman of prominence in San Francisco, with the notable exception of the Reverend Dr. Charles F. Aked of the First Congregational Church, was violently opposed to it; the Reverend Terence Caraher denounced it as "a blow at marriage,” although the logic by which he reached this extraordinary conclusion was not divulged. Early in 1913 a large number of ministers held a meeting and demanded that Mayor James Rolph, Jr., abolish the clinic, and a little later a committee of preachers issued a long and violent attack in which they charged the clinic with operating a cow-yard containing one hundred women. At the conclusion of its statement the committee admitted that it had no proof whatever to support the accusation, which was immediately denied by Dr. George L. Eaton, president of the Board of Health.

The clergymen next brought political pressure to bear, and on February 13, 1913 the Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution forbidding the further use of the word “Municipal,” although nothing was said about the Municipal Bar, some fifty yards from the Hall of Justice. On May 20, 1913 the Board of Police Commissioners ordered police protection withdrawn from the clinic. Later the commissioners admitted that the order had been issued at the command of Mayor Rolph, who had previously been quoted as favoring the continuance of the clinic’s work. But, whoever was responsible, the order effectually destroyed the clinic’s usefulness; it retained the authority to compel prostitutes to report for examination and treatment, but lacked the means of enforcing its regulations. Soon thereafter it was closed and the work abandoned. Thus the clergymen were victorious—and disease again raged unchecked throughout the red-light district.