The Barbary Coast

At twelve minutes and six seconds past five o’clock on the morning of April 18, 1906, the San Francisco peninsula began to shiver in the grip of an earthquake which, when its ultimate consequences are considered, was the most disastrous in the recorded history of the North American continent. The shocks continued for one minute and five seconds, and while the actual damage done to property by the temblor was comparatively slight, it made possible the greater calamity of fire by shaking down chimneys and breaking water-mains and electrical connections throughout San Francisco. Within a few minutes after the earth had ceased to rock, sixteen fires were throwing their menacing glare against the morning sky from as many sections of the city south of Market Street. No water was available except a relatively small quantity found in a few abandoned cisterns, and the Fire Department was practically helpless. By noon a square mile had been devastated, and during the early afternoon the conflagration crossed Market Street at Third and Kearny Streets. Driven by a strong southeast wind, it spread rapidly northward and westward, through the business and financial districts, the Barbary Coast, and Chinatown. For two days the holocaust raged unchecked, while the trains and ferries, and the roads throughout the countryside, were crowded with frightened and unhappy refugees. The fire finally burned itself out, but not until it had destroyed 28,188 buildings in 522 blocks, covering an area of more than four square miles, or 2,593 acres, of which 1,088 acres were north of Market Street. The property loss was estimated at about four hundred million dollars, while 315 persons were known to have lost their lives, and 352 had been reported to the police as missing. Only a few were ever found.

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone from heaven was scarcely more complete than the devastation of Chinatown and the Barbary Coast by fire and earthquake from, perhaps, the same source. On the morning of April 20, 1906, the opium dives and slave dens, the cow-yards and parlor houses, the cribs and deadfalls, the dance-halls and bar-rooms, the melodeons and concert saloons—all the abode and paraphernalia of vice, from the waterfront to Grant Avenue and from Morton Street to Telegraph Hill, lay a mass of smoking ruins. Only an occasional dive or brothel remained, looming stark and solitary in the cloud of murky smoke which overhung the whole of San Francisco, and they were immediately closed by the police and the troops of the United States Army, who patrolled the burned area to protect the city from looters. At the request of the San Francisco authorities, the bagnios in Oakland, across the Bay, were likewise compelled to shut their doors. But they were reopened almost at once. As Walter J. Peterson, Chief of the Oakland Police Department, told Pauline Jacobson of the San Francisco Bulletin in an interview seven years later:

"San Francisco was still smoldering, the earth still rocking, and we didn’t know when the Almighty might send another visitation, yet on the incessant demand the authorities [of Oakland] had to open up the houses of prostitution. All day long and at night men were lined up for blocks waiting in front of the houses, like at a box office at a theatre on a popular night.”

As an organized center of vice and crime Chinatown virtually came to an end on that catastrophic spring day; the underworld of the Oriental quarter was never able fully to overcome the cleansing effect of the fire and earthquake, and very few of the opium resorts and slave cribs were rebuilt. But unlike Chinatown and its own Biblical prototypes, the Barbary Coast immediately rose, phoenix-like, from its ashes. While the municipal and military authorities, aided by committees of reputable citizens, struggled with the vast problems of reconstruction and rehabilitation which the disaster had created, the overlords of vice loosened their purse-strings and devoted their ill-gotten treasure to the erection of a new and bigger Barbary Coast upon the ruins of the old. Within three months after the flames had subsided, half a dozen brothels and as many deadfalls and dance-halls were in prosperous operation in Pacific and adjacent streets, and by the beginning of 1907 the Barbary Coast was once more roaring in full blast. The final cycle of its career of vice and crime had begun.

The distinction of being the first important resort to flaunt its iniquities after the fire—and the further glory of being perhaps the lowest dive in all the post-earthquake period—belongs to the Seattle Saloon and Dance Hall, which was opened in Pacific Street, near Kearny Street, during the early summer of 1906 by Ed Pincus and Tom Magee, with Billy Harrington as manager. The Seattle was not as pretentious a place as the old Bull Run of more or less hallowed memory, but otherwise it suffered little by comparison with that celebrated dive of an earlier day. The Pincus-Magee enterprise was housed in a large, two-storey frame building, with a U-shaped entrance lobby decorated by framed panels containing gaudy paintings of women in varying stages of undress. The upper floor was occupied by an assignation house, and the saloon and dance-hall were downstairs in a long, rectangular room, at one end of which was a small stage whereon bawdy shows and hoochy-coochy dances were presented. Behind the stage were a few small dressing-rooms hung with curtains, where the performers changed their costumes and into which drunken men were enticed and robbed. Rough tables, chairs and benches were scattered about the dance-floor.

Pincus and Magee employed twenty girls, who were paid, as wages, from fifteen to twenty dollars a week, according to their beauty and popularity. They wore thin blouses cut very low, skirts cut very high, and black silk stockings held in place by fancy garters. Mindful of the success of the notorious deadfall and dance house at Kearny and California streets, which in pre-earthquake days had aroused a considerable commotion throughout the Barbary Coast by its rule forbidding underwear, Pincus and Magee enforced a similar fashion in their establishment and advertised the fact by cards discreetly distributed in saloons and other places where men were wont to gather. In general, duties of the women employed in the Seattle were the same as those of the pretty waiter girls, but in one respect Pincus and Magee introduced an innovation which was soon adopted by most of the other Barbary Coast resorts. They employed men to serve drinks to customers at the tables and benches on the dance-floor and thus gave their girls more time to dance with and otherwise entertain the men who succumbed to their charms. Drinks could be purchased over the bar of the Seattle at the prices which prevailed in ordinary saloons, but if a man seated himself at a bench or table with one of the dive’s female attachées and ordered liquor, he paid a dollar for a pony of whisky, the same for a pint of beer, three dollars for a small bottle of bitter wine known as Dago red, and five dollars a bottle for a beverage labeled champagne, which was in reality aerated cider. The girls were paid a small percentage on drinks sold in the dance-hall and were also entitled to half of whatever they managed to abstract from their partners’ pockets during the close contact of the dance. Pincus often complained, however, that most of his female employees were dishonest and failed to render true accounts of their stealings.

Another and even more important source of income was developed by the girls in the Seattle and was their own particular racket; it was practically the only activity of which they were not supposed to share the proceeds with their employers. A woman employed in the dive was not permitted to leave the premises for purposes of prostitution, but if a man expressed a desire for her company in ways other than dancing, she would immediately promise so to arrange matters that she might spend the night with him, or rather what remained of the night after the Seattle had closed its doors, which was usually about three o’clock in the morning. She would point out, however, that there were great difficulties to overcome, and that they must proceed shrewdly and with caution. It was impossible, she would explain, for her to meet him anywhere or for him to wait for her at the back door of the resort, for her lover was extremely jealous and always walked home with her to make certain she didn’t get into mischief. But after much discussion and many drinks she would evolve a plan whereby they might hope to circumvent the watchful sweetheart. She offered to sell, for a dollar or two dollars or whatever she thought the traffic would bear, a key to her room, so that the enamored visitor might join her there an hour or so after she had finished her work at the dance-hall. If he objected to thus buying a pig in a poke, she would indignantly retort that, after all, she didn’t know him, and that if he failed to appear with the key she would have to employ a locksmith to make another. To a man befogged by bad liquor and confused by the joys of propinquity, all this sounded very reasonable. Nearly always he bought the key and carefully noted the address she gave him, which was usually a street number of a near-by tenement, but never that of the house where she actually lived. Some of the more popular girls sometimes sold as many as a dozen keys a night, at prices ranging from one to five dollars each, and for several hours after the Seattle had closed, furtive figures could be seen flitting through the streets searching hopelessly for doors which their keys would open. This lucrative scheme was practiced for more than a year, not only by the girls of the Seattle, but by those of other dives also. It was finally stopped by the police. They received too many complaints from honest householders who had been annoyed by drunken men trying to unlock their doors.

Pincus and Magee operated the Seattle until the early spring of 1908, when they sold the property to a syndicate headed by their manager, Billy Harrington, and thereafter confined their activities to brothels, in several of which they owned large interests. The names of Harrington’s partners were not generally known until October 1908, when the San Francisco Call, during one of its periodic crusades against Judge Carroll Cook, revealed that they were two officers of Judge Cook’s branch of the Superior Court. Harrington and his associates changed the name of the resort to the Dash, and remodeled the interior, installing a row of curtained booths on either side of the dance-floor. They also discharged most of the dancing girls and in their places employed male degenerates who wore women’s clothing. From one to three of these creatures were always to be found sitting in each of the booths, and for a dollar they would perform in a manner which may be imagined, but which may not be described. It was with good reason that the Call described the Dash as one of the vilest saloons and dance halls ever maintained in San Francisco. ”The place was not very successful under the new régime, however, and was closed late in 1908, soon after Judge Cook had been defeated for re-election by the narrow margin of two thousand votes.

The most vicious dives of the new Barbary Coast were the wine dumps—dismal cellar dens in the alleys and along the waterfront which catered to the very dregs of Barbary Coast humanity, where the floors were covered with damp sawdust, where wine was sold for five cents a pint, and where the bars were rough boards laid atop kegs. They provided neither dancing nor entertainment—nothing but a few hard benches on which men and women sat and guzzled wine. And the wine, as often as not, was simply raw alcohol colored and flavored. These places were the particular rendezvous of the bums, the oldest and most hopeless of the streetwalkers, the sneak-thieves and pickpockets, and the many Fagins who took street boys and girls under their wings and taught them to steal. Most of the wine dumps had been closed by the middle of 1913, principally because of the viciousness of their habitués—who, of course, were utterly without political or other influence—and the innumerable serious brawls which occurred in them. In one place known as the Morgue (no connection with the saloon of that name in the old Devil’s Acre) the police averaged twenty-seven arrests a night over a period of almost a year.

The early traditions of the Barbary Coast were effectively maintained by the wine dumps, by the Seattle and similar establishments, and by the houses of prostitution; but as a whole the district underwent a radical change after the earthquake and fire. The decade that followed the rebuilding and reopening of the Barbary Coast was an era of glamour and spectacularity, of hullabaloo and ballyhoo, of bright lights and feverish gayety, of synthetic sin and imitation iniquity. Practically everything that occurred in the dives of this period was deliberately planned to startle and impress, and if possible to shock, the tourist and sightseer; in its last incarnation, particularly from about 1910 to the end of its existence, the Barbary Coast was a veritable slummers’ paradise, although underneath there still flowed the same old current of vice and corruption which had been the life-blood of the quarter since the days of the Sydney Ducks. In earlier years visitors from the upper strata of society had been both infrequent and unwelcome, but virtually every dance-hall on the new Barbary Coast provided, as a special and very remunerative feature, a “slummers’ balcony,” which was filled each night by palpitant, wide-eyed spectators. They were firmly convinced that they were watching the underworld at its revels, and seeing life stripped to its elementals, and so they submitted meekly to exorbitant charges for admission and liquor. Beer was never less than a dollar a pint in the sightseeing galleries, and a highball, which might or might not contain a trace of whisky, was likewise a dollar, and sometimes even more. During this same period the maximum price of any mixed drink at the best bars in San Francisco was twenty-five cents, and of beer, except the finest imported brews, a dime. In the manner of the modern moving-picture cathedral, most of the better-known resorts on the Barbary Coast employed gaudily uniformed sidewalk barkers and doormen, who bellowed the glad tidings of glamour and excitement almost without cessation from early afternoon until long past midnight. They were usually fellows of little or no imagination, and their patter was fairly well standardized after this fashion:

“Right this way to the visitors’ gallery, folks! Everybody happy! Everybody welcome! Everybody safe! 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!"

While most of San Francisco’s reputable citizens publicly bemoaned the iniquities of the Barbary Coast and performed lip-service in the many campaigns designed to eliminate its more objectionable features, secretly they were, for the most part, enormously proud of their city’s reputation as the Paris of America and the wickedest town on the continent. A tour of the district, under proper police supervision, was usually a part of the itinerary of the distinguished visitor to San Francisco, and if through some oversight it wasn’t, the distinguished visitor very frequently included it on his own account, for no area of similar size in the Western Hemisphere had been so widely publicized or was so universally known. And since comment upon the evils of the quarter was eagerly sought by the newspapers, few celebrities set foot in San Francisco without seeing it. Sarah Bernhardt always visited the Barbary Coast when she played in San Francisco on her frequent tours, and pleased local journalists immensely by declaring that she had found it more fascinatingly wicked than Montmartre. Anna PavIowa, the famous dancer, often visited the dance-halls, and avowed that she had obtained many ideas for her own dance creations by watching the gyrations of the light-footed Barbary Coasters. And when John Masefield, now Poet Laureate of England, arrived in San Francisco some sixteen years ago, the first thing he said when he disembarked from a ferry-boat at Market Street was: “Take me to see the Barbary Coast.”

Although prostitution and robbery remained the basic industries of the Barbary Coast, the resort features which brought thousands of sightseers into the district after the earthquake and fire were the dance-floors and the low variety shows. The latter usually consisted in skits, songs, and exhibition dancing, all carefully designed to shock, but not disgust. They were undeniably bawdy, coarse, and vulgar, for otherwise they would not have interested the slummers; but they were not nearly so obscene as the shows which were given as a matter of course in the old-time concert saloons. And, of course, in comparison with the peep-shows which were extremely popular features of San Francisco’s brothels until the red-light district was abolished, they were as innocuous as so many Sunday-school tableaux. The pièce de résistance of a Barbary Coast variety program was the lewd cavorting of a hoochy-coochy artiste, or the Dance of the Seven Veils as interpreted by a fat and clumsy Salome dancer, who simply wiggled a muscle dance to semi-classical music. Occasionally a few of the veils were omitted, and the dancer squirmed and twisted in very scanty raiment indeed. For some curious reason, perhaps to show that her strength and agility were not confined entirely to her abdominal muscles, the Salome dancer almost invariably concluded her performance by gripping a chair between her teeth and swinging it about her head.

The variety shows, particularly those which included hoochy-coochy or Salome dancing, were very well liked, but it is doubtful if they alone could have made the Barbary Coast the extraordinarily popular place that it became during the last ten years of its existence. The principal attraction was dancing. The whole Barbary Coast was dance-crazy, and practically every dive of any pretentiousness was a combination dance-hall and concert saloon, offering both theatrical entertainment and an opportunity to trip the light fantastic or to watch it being tripped. The number of resorts which sprang up after the earthquake and fire and enjoyed their comparatively brief flurries of success and prosperity was really extraordinary—by 1910, four years after the disaster, there were no fewer than three hundred saloons and dance-halls crowded into six blocks, centering, of course, in Pacific Street, which was more than ever intrenched in its position as the main thoroughfare of the Barbary Coast. Throughout the quarter, rentals soared to amazing heights; basement and street-level store-rooms, which if rented to legitimate businesses would never have brought more than thirty to a hundred dollars a month, were let for ten times those amounts to be used as saloons and dance-halls—one dive-operator paid nine hundred dollars a month on a ten-year lease for a cellar about sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. Many of these places were still in operation, though the names of some had been changed and they were under different managements, when the Barbary Coast was finally closed in 1917. The most important, or at any rate the best-known, were the Hippodrome, the U. S. Café, the Jupiter, Coppa’s, the Golden City, the Folies Cabaret, the White House, the House of All Nations, the Dragon, the Bella Union, the Thalia, the Cave, the Comstock, the Golden Star, the Turkish Café, the 0. K. Café, the Ivy Café, the Moulin Rouge; the California Dance Hall, which was the first place in San Francisco where Filipinos were permitted to dance with white girls; Spider Kelly’s, the Red Mill, the Bohemian Café, the Dance Hall, the Bear, the Manila, the Queen Dance Hall, the So Different, the Olympia Café, the Frisco, the Old California, the Scandinavian Dance Hall, Thorne’s, the Criterion, the Headlight; the Belvidere, also called the Old Ladies’ Home because it employed women who were more than thirty-five years old; Lombardi’s, Dew Drop Inn, Purcell’s, Dutch Emma’s, Squeeze Inn, the Owl Dance Hall; the Admiral, owned by Billy Finnegan of Municipal Crib fame; the Cascade, Menio’s, the Palms, Marconi’s, the Elko, and the Neptune Palace.

The House of All Nations was operated by a Portuguese named Louis Gomez, who boasted that among his dancing girls were to be found women of all civilized nations. Purcell’s, the Dew Drop Inn, the Squeeze Inn, and the So Different were Negro places, employing Negro women, but catering to white men and particularly to white slummers. For a year or so the Owl Dance Hall was the property of one of the Barbary Coast’s most celebrated characters, Black Tony Parmagin. As a boy Black Tony learned the ways of crime under the tutelage of Buzzard Maloney, a well-known sneak-thief and lush-worker of the eighteen-nineties. Later he left the protecting wing of the Buzzard and organized a gang of juvenile pickpockets, who varied their arduous labors in this field by robbing drunken men as they staggered from the dives in the early hours of the morning. In the late autumn of 1906 Black Tony acquired control of the Owl Dance Hall, but the venture was not very successful, and a year or so later he sold the property to Irish Annie Davis. Black Tony joined the bunco gang headed by Mike Gallo and is said to have acted as a go-between in the payment of graft to the police and politicians. Another of Gallo’s workers was Jim Le Strange, who was interested in the Cave, the Cascade, Menio’s, and the Bella Union. When Gallo’s gang was finally smashed, Black Tony Parmagin entered the bail-bond business, but this was a comparatively honest occupation and held little attraction for him. He soon abandoned it to sell dope and operated with fair success until 1931, when he was arrested and sent to prison for seventeen years.

The number of girls employed in the dives during the final ten years of the Barbary Coast varied as the tide of prosperity ebbed and flowed, but ranged from about eight hundred to three thousand. Their principal duties were to dance and drink with the customers and to appear in the ensemble and chorus numbers of the shows. They received as wages from twelve to twenty-five dollars a week and were also paid a small commission on all liquor sold through their efforts. Many of the girls took beer when their dancing partners bought them a drink, but most of them ordered whisky—and were served the usual jigger of cold tea or colored water, called in this period a Kelly. It is doubtful if there were as many prostitutes in the dance-halls as in the early days of the Barbary Coast, and most of those who dabbled in the ancient profession of harlotry did so after they had finished their work in the dives. They were required to remain on or near the dance-floor during their hours of duty, from about one o’clock in the afternoon until closing-time. Legally this was one a.m., for the law prohibited music and dancing in saloons and public dance-halls between that hour and six a.m., but actually it depended upon the temper of the police, the political influence of the dive-keeper, and, to some extent, whether the city’s reform element was quiescent or on a rampage. In many of the resorts the girls wore their regular street dresses, and in others evening gowns were compulsory, while in a few, notably the Midway, the Turkish Café, the Cave, and the Tivoli, they were clad in silk stockings, short skirts, and low-necked blouses or shirt-waists. The manager of the Tivoli prescribed blue skirts and black stockings, but the operators of the other places permitted their girls to wear whatever color they preferred. Even these special costumes, however, do not appear to have been particularly seductive. The San Francisco Call described them in the summer of 1911 as “of the cheapest fabric, many of them torn and stained, none reaching below the knees, and here and there hooks missing and bodices yawning in the back, but always the silk stockings as the inevitable mark of caste.”

During this period the Midway, on the south side of Pacific Street near Montgomery Street, was one of the shabbiest dives on the Barbary Coast, but early in 1913 it came under the management of George Kelley, better known as Red Kelley, and for several years thereafter it was one of the most pretentious resorts in the district. It was also a favorite haunt of the sightseers, for Kelley was an accomplished showman and could always be depended upon to provide entertainment calculated to thrill and to shock the outlander. For a considerable period the bright particular star of his variety programs was a fat Salome dancer appropriately called Gyp. She performed the sensual twistings and writhings of a muscle dance in a very lascivious manner, but the effect of her contortions was less exhilarating than it might have been because from start to finish of the dance her face was wreathed in a sweet, infantile smile. In later years the name of the Midway was changed to Hippodrome, and finally it was called the U. S. Café, while another Hippodrome was opened directly across the street by Frank Scivio. It was during the Midway’s days as the Hippodrome that new decorations, by far the finest and most celebrated ever seen on the Barbary Coast, were installed in its entrance lobby—six bas-relief panels in plaster, depicting a group of satyrs happily and purposefully pursuing as many nymphs, with anatomical details all complete. These details, however, aroused such a storm of shocked comment that they were eventually removed, and the areas in dispute were covered by bands of ribbon, done in reddish plaster, which trailed upward over the shoulders of both nymphs and satyrs. The figures were the work of Arthur Putnam, who later became one of America’s most noted sculptors. According to one story, his only compensation was a few drinks, but according to another—and probably the correct one—he was paid $175 for the job. (11a)

The operators of most of the large resorts of the post-earthquake period, in direct violation of the ancient code of the Barbary Coast, did their best to protect their sightseeing customers, and casual visitors were safer than at any other time in the history of the quarter, as long as they kept out of the alleys and avoided the wine dumps, the deadfalls, and the brothels. Thieves and other criminals continued to frequent the dance-halls and, as of old, made them their headquarters, wherein they planned their depredations and spent their gains on wine and women; but actual robbery on the premises was frowned upon as tending to frighten away the slummers and so kill the geese that laid so many golden eggs. The revenue of the better-known places was derived almost entirely from the dancing (for a dance of two minutes they charged from ten to twenty-five cents) and from the sales of liquor and tickets of admission. The prices of the latter ranged from a quarter to a dollar, although sometimes on gala nights the tariff was boosted to two dollars. For the benefit of the sightseers, who looked on from the slummers’ balconies, fake fights were staged on the dance-floors, with occasionally the flash of a knife-blade or the dull gleam of a pistol-barrel; and each night several couples were ceremoniously ejected for indecent dancing. In many of the dives, of course, especially the Negro joints, it was seldom necessary to fake a row, for plenty of real fracases occurred in the natural course of events. And as far as indecent dancing was concerned, if a man bought a dance ticket and ventured upon the floor with one of the high yallers employed in these places, his conduct was determined only by his conscience and the amiability of his partner. The best-known of the Negro dance-halls, and the most turbulent, was Purcell’s, which occupied a long, narrow room on the north side of Pacific Street between Montgomery and Kearny streets. It was furnished only with a bar, a few rough tables and chairs, and a score or more of wooden benches which faced a splintery dance-floor. No nonsense about buying liquor was permitted in Purcell’s; a visitor either drank, and drank frequently, or he was thrown into the street by several husky bouncers who patrolled the dive. The bar in Purcell's was at the left of the entrance and was set against a thin wooden partition which separated the resort from the saloon and dance-hall operated by Spider Kelly, who in his earlier years had acquired considerable renown as a light-weight prizefighter. Kelly’s bar was also against the partition, at the right of his entrance. Shooting affrays were of frequent occurrence in Purcell’s, and bullets often ripped through the flimsy wall and endangered Kelly’s bar-tenders. To protect them Kelly lined his “back-bar" and mirror with sheet-iron boiler plate. And to safeguard them against stray bullets in his own place, where life was also uncertain and filled with surprises, he likewise covered the front of his bar. Captain Meagher of the Chicago Police Department, who made a tour of the Barbary Coast in December 1912, described Spider Kelly’s saloon and dance-hall as “undoubtedly the worst dive in the world.” Captain Meagher also expressed his dismay at the great number of young girls whom he found in the Coast resorts as members of slumming parties, and declared that “compared to San Francisco, Chicago's vice districts are as nothing.”

Not only did the dance-halls of the Barbary Coast attract enormous crowds, but they exercised a tremendous influence upon the dancing habits of the whole United States. In these dives originated dance steps which practically every dancing young man and woman in America strove to master. For the turkey trot, the bunny hug, the chicken glide, the Texas Tommy, the pony prance, the grizzly bear, and many other varieties of close and semi-acrobatic dancing, which swept the country during the half-dozen years that preceded the World War despite the scandalized roaring of the nation's pastors, were first performed in the dance-halls of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast for the delectation of the slummer. The birthplace of the best-known of these terpsichorean masterpieces—the turkey trot and the Texas Tommy—and of several others also, was the Thalia, which for many years was the largest dance-hall on the Pacific Coast. From eighty to one hundred girls were employed there during its heyday, and double shifts of bar-tenders, with from four to six men in a shift, worked like beavers behind the long bar. The original dive of that name was a cheap saloon and dance-hall in the Uptown Tenderloin at Mason and Turk streets, about where both thoroughfares run into Market Street. It catered particularly to sailors and was a worthy rival of the Midway Plaisance, a few blocks farther east. But the old Thalia fell on evil days a few years before the earthquake and fire of 1906 and passed out of existence. When the Barbary Coast was rebuilt, a new Thalia was erected on the north side of Pacific Street, about half-way between Kearny and Montgomery streets. Throughout its existence the new Thalia always seemed to be especially favored by the police and the political powers and almost invariably led the way in tilting the lid which, for various reasons, was occasionally clapped upon the Barbary Coast. Such a period of comparative quietude was imposed upon the district in the late spring of 1911, during a reorganization of the police force undertaken, as the Police Commission announced, “for the good of the department.” Early in July, however, the Thalia came under the management of Eddie Englehart and Louis Parente, who was one of the owners of Parente Brothers’ Saloon on the northeast corner of Kearny and Pacific streets. They immediately made the necessary political arrangements for removing the disabilities under which the Barbary Coast was then languishing, and distributed handbills announcing the “grand opening” of the Thalia on Thursday, July 6, 1911, with “entertainment and dancing all night.” All the other resorts, the disgruntled managers of which had been reluctantly closing their doors at one a.m., followed the Thalia’s example and arranged special all-night programs. But by far the most important of the “grand openings” was that of the Thalia, for the guests of honor were Joseph Sullivan, president of the Board of Police Commissioners, and Chief Jailer Walter McCauley of the county jail. The San Francisco Call thus described the dive on this memorable occasion:

“Different from all the others is the Thalia, where early Thursday evening the president of the police commission and a party of friends were made guests of honor at the ‘opening.’ It is a great barnlike structure, with the dance floor in the center fenced off at each end, and at either side the drinking places raised in double tiers of low balconies. To the extreme right from the entrance lobby is the higher section whither the ‘slumming’ parties are directed and where the habitués of the place are scarce. Below, on the same side, are the tables for the dancers and their companions. Opposite, in the lower balcony, just a few feet from the dance floor, are long rows of wooden benches, where beer may be had for five cents a glass, and where women of the place seldom go.

“Above the ‘nickel a glass’ section is the real money getting section of the hall. Here, in half open booths, the women of the dance hall ply their trade. Here are invited the sailors who drift into the place. Here men are plied with liquor and urged to part with their cash. In these booths Thursday night were many sailors, drunk or nearly drunk, each with a woman at his elbow. Others were there, too—men showing signs of labor and young fellows in good clothing and bearing evidence of coming from decent homes. Below, in the cheaper section, were many men sprawled asleep or in a drunken stupor. On the dance hall floor a few couples cavorted and displayed the fancy steps of the newest tenderloin dances.

“The lobby of the Thalia is a great open space before the bar, and here the women congregate and attempt to entrap every patron who enters. Hesitation means a dozen groping hands and a dozen voices clamoring for drinks. ‘Be a sport; buy just one.’. . .The Thalia provided a ’Salome dance‘ just before one o’clock as the final ‘big’ attraction of the night. The ‘Salomes‘ danced and strained and twisted, received a faint spattering of applause, and then, throwing coats or loose gowns over their scant costumes, joined the throngs of dancers in the comparatively conservative steps of the Grizzly Bear, the Bunny Hug, and the Texas Tommy.

“Three o’clock in the morning, and the dancing at the Thalia was beginning to lag. An hour later, and the place was half deserted. The few remaining were men and women listless in appearance, with bloodshot eyes and pasty faces. Still the piano strummed on for an hour.”

Red Kelley acquired control of the Thalia about a year or so after the president of the Board of Police Commissioners had honored it with his presence, but after operating the dive successfully for a few years, he transferred it to his floor manager, Terry Mustain, a former pugilist. During the Mustain régime a frequent visitor to the Thalia was an old man of whom attachés of the resort knew nothing except that his name was Frank Mulkey and that he lived in Portland, Oregon. Every few weeks Mulkey spent several evenings at the Thalia, sitting always in the same corner, buying many drinks, which he never touched, watching the shows, and talking to the girls and waiters. When he was especially pleased with one of the girls, or when a waiter showed unusual courtesy, he entered his or her name in a note-book and said, benignly: “I’ll remember you in my will. I’m a rich man, you know.”

The employees of the Thalia regarded Mulkey as a harmless old coot, and not until he died in Portland, in 1927, did they learn that he was a lumber and real-estate operator and as wealthy as he had claimed to be. He was as good as his word and bequeathed a considerable sum of money to Terry Mustain and to each Thalia girl and waiter whom he had promised to remember.

Besides the Thalia, the Midway, and other elaborate dance-halls on the Barbary Coast property, there were at least fifty cheap resorts on the outskirts of the quarter, principally toward North Beach, where five minutes of dancing cost only five cents. These places sold no liquor, provided no entertainment, and employed no women, depending entirely upon those who came in from the streets, most of whom were of the factory-girl class. Admission was free to the women, but men paid a nickel each. The managers of the five-cent dance-halls professed to require very circumspect conduct from their customers, and the walls of most of the resorts of this type bore large signs thus inscribed:

ADMISSION ONLY ON THE FOLLOWING RULES AND CONDITIONS: Turkey Trots, Couples With Their Heads Together, Walking, Bowerying, Dipping, Or Gentlemen Introducing Themselves to Ladies in the Hall STRICTLY PROHIBITED! Introducers on the Floor.

Under proper supervision the nickel dance-halls might have filled a very real need in San Francisco and provided opportunities for amusement and recreation to hundreds of poor but honest working girls. But all of the elaborate rules in which the operators of the resorts took such apparent pride were more honored in the breach than in the observance. No man, regardless of his appearance or what might be known of his character, was denied admittance, and the doors were likewise flung wide to young girls scarcely in their teens, who were easily led astray by the experienced pimps and recruiting agents for the dives and brothels of the Barbary Coast. In consequence, these dance-halls soon became little more than supply depots for the red-light district. Nevertheless, they were permitted to operate without effective interference for several years. But late in 1908 the Reverend Terence Caraher, unfavorably known to the Barbary Coast as Terrible Terry, turned his attention to them and began an energetic campaign to drive them out of existence, complaining that the children of the parish had to pass many of them on their way to church. He was supported in his crusade by Charles F. Skelly, secretary of the Board of Police Commissioners, who on February 9, 1909 told the Downtown Association that the nickel dance-halls should be abolished as soon as possible.

“Little girls fifteen and sixteen years old frequent these places,” said Mr. Skelly, “and often it leads to their ruin. Unfortunately these nickel dance halls do not come under the jurisdiction of the Police Commission, and we are powerless to prevent the spread of these dens of vice."

Under pressure exerted by the Reverend Father Caraher and several business men whom he and Mr. Skelly had interested, the Board of Supervisors finally enacted regulations which enabled the police to proceed against the nickel dance-establishments. Within another year or so the last of them had been closed.