The Barbary Coast

With the disbanding of the second Vigilance Committee, life in San Francisco settled into its accustomed grooves. There it moved along more or less sedately for half a dozen years, a period of extraordinary growth in population, in commercial and financial activity, and in importance as a seaport. The very factors which contributed to the city’s progress, however, not only opened the Golden Gate to a new influx of criminals, but lessened the probability of another uprising of a busy and prosperous citizenry. Consequently the human flotsam of the seven seas began to wash against the shores of San Francisco for the third time in its brief but eventful history. By 1862 old Sydney-Town and its environs were once more an Alsatia of dives, dancehalls, and depravity, and the transformation of the region into the more modern Barbary Coast had begun. The identity of the nomenclatorial genius who first bestowed this savage but glamorous designation upon San Francisco's underworld has not been preserved for posterity, but in all likelihood he was a sailor who had been impressed by the similarity of the quarter, in men if not precisely in methods of murder and robbery, to the Barbary Coast of Africa. In any event, the phrase was not generally used in San Francisco until the middle eighteen-sixties. Soon afterwards the newspapers began referring to the dive-operators and the thieves and swindlers who frequented the section as Rangers, an appellation which remained in use for almost twenty years.

In later times the Barbary Coast meant only the single block on Pacific Street between Kearney and Montgomery streets, a short stretch of dangerous and disreputable thoroughfare, which was also widely known, after the middle eighteen-nineties, as Terrific Street. But originally, and until the Coast was devastated by the earthquake and fire of 1906, the term was applied to the entire area, including the red-light district, wherein criminals and prostitutes congregated. (5a) Owing to periodic spasms of civic virtue, to the encroachments of residential and business developments, and to other causes, its limits naturally varied with the years. Roughly, however, it always occupied a greater or lesser portion of the territory bounded on the east by the waterfront and East Street, now the Embarcadero; on the south by Clay and Commercial streets; on the west by Grant Avenue and Chinatown; and on the north by Broadway, with occasional overflows into the region around North Beach and Telegraph Hill. During most of the long period in which the Barbary Coast was the almost universal synonym for debauchery, its most iniquitous features were confined within the rectangular district limited by Broadway and Washington, Montgomery, and Stockton streets. On November 28, 1869 the San Francisco Call described the Barbary Coast as commencing on Pacific Street near Montgomery and following the former through to Stockton, with various channels “leading into it from Kearney Street, Grant Avenue, and other thoroughfares. Within this area were innumerable alleys, a few of which have since been widened into streets, while others have vanished with the building up of the city. Among them were Murder Point, and Hinckley, Pinckley, Bartlett, China, Dupont, Sullivan, Bull Run, Moketown, and Dead Man’s Alley. Many of these dismal little passages were culs-de-sac, and in all of them, as well as in the main thoroughfares from which they sprouted, were to be found what the Call described as scenes of wretchedness and pollution unparalleled on this side of the great mountains.” The Call continued, on the same high note of horror:

“The Barbary Coast! That mysterious region so much talked of; so seldom visited! Of which so much is heard, but little seen! That sink of moral pollution, whose reefs are strewn with human wrecks, and into whose vortex is constantly drifting barks of moral life, while swiftly down the whirlpool of death go the sinking hulks of the murdered and the suicide! The Barbary Coast! The stamping ground of the Ranger, the last resort of the blasé and ruined nymphe du pavé, the home of vice and harbor of destruction! The coast on which no gentle breezes blow, but where rages one wild sirocco of sin! . . .Night is the time to visit the Coast. In the daytime it is dull and unattractive, seeming but a cesspool of rottenness, the air is impregnated with smells more pungent than polite; but when night lets fall its dusky curtain, the Coast brightens into life, and becomes the wild carnival of crime that has lain in lethargy during the sunny hours of the day, and now bursts forth with energy renewed by its siesta.”

Some eight years later, in 1876, an indignant local historian, who made an extensive study of the district, was able to find no improvement. He thus described it:

“The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where blear-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also." (5b)

And in 1878 the New Overland Tourist, to an article giving minute directions for reaching the dens of the Barbary Coast, shudderingly added this solemn warning:

 “We give the precise locality so our readers may keep away. Give it a wide berth as you value your life!”

The first boat-landing on the San Francisco waterfront was at the northeast corner of Pacific and Davis streets, where a flight of slippery stone steps led downward to a rude bulkhead, at which skiffs and other small vessels were moored. During the first year or two of the gold rush, Pacific Street was thus the most important thoroughfare in San Francisco, and since it was the first street cut through the sand-hills behind Yerba Buena Cove, it was also the main highway to Portsmouth Square and the western part of the town. It declined rapidly in importance, however, as other streets were opened and wharves constructed, and soon abandoned all pretense of respectability. It was the heart of old Sydney-Town, and it was, likewise, the heart of the Barbary Coast throughout the years of its existence. For more than half a century practically the entire street was given over to vice and crime in one form or another. Eventually a few garages and cheap restaurants crept in between the dives and grog-shops, but for many years, and particularly during the eighteen-sixties and the eighteen-seventies, there were only two types of establishment which could by any stretch of the imagination be called legitimate enterprise. They were the cheap John clothing-stores, which catered principally to sailors and fleeced them unmercifully with shoddy and worthless merchandise; and a few auction places where goods of all sorts were disposed of at public outcry, at prices far above their actual worth. Various articles of wearing-apparel, called by the seamen” flags of Jerusalem,” dangled from long poles above the doorways of the clothing-emporiums, while the sidewalks in front of them were cluttered with stuff of every description. One of the earliest stores of this type, and also one of the busiest, was that operated by Solomon Levy on the south side of Pacific Street between Montgomery and Sansome streets. Before Levy’s door was an immense pile of old blankets, chained and padlocked to huge staples driven into the front of the building. Above hung his sign—an elaborate tailed overcoat, with brass buttons and an enormous moth-eaten fur collar. On the back and front of this impressive garment were pinned large pieces of cardboard bearing this legend:

BOUGHT & SOLD
SOLOMON LEVY.

Every customer who bought more than a dollar’s worth of goods received from Levy, with much ceremony, a card on which the storekeeper had painstakingly written a verse of his own composition. The sailors considered it very excellent poetry, and sang it to every tune to which they could fit the words:

My name is Solomon Levy,
And I keep a clothing store
Away up on Pacific Street—
A hundred and fifty-four.
If you want to buy an overcoat,
A pair of pants or vest,
Step up to Solomon Levy,
And he’ll sell you all the best.

Levy’s most troublesome competitor was Mrs. Dora Herz, who, with the able assistance of her son, Ittzy, ran a store half a block down the street and consistently undersold the poetic Solomon. Ittzy Herz was popularly believed to bear a charmed life. He appears to have spent at least half his time being knocked down by fire-engines, carts, and runaway horses; and when he was not thus engaged, he was falling from piers, boats, and windows. His accidents were innumerable, but he invariably emerged unscathed. The climax of his career of escape came in his twentieth year, when a Barbary Coast Ranger, to whom he had sold a pair of shoes which collapsed at the first wearing, tried to shoot him in a saloon on East Street. Although the muzzle of the pistol was within two feet of Ittzy’s chest, the bullet missed him and killed a bystander. Several awed witnesses of the affray declared that an unseen force had twitched the Ranger’s hand just before he pulled the trigger. Thereafter for several weeks, so many people came to see Ittzy that his mother locked him in a back room and charged ten cents to peek at him through a hole cut in the door.

The most celebrated of the auction houses was the Great Eastern Auction Mart, of which Abe Fromberg was the presiding genius. It had neither doors nor windows, but was open to the street along its entire frontage. Inside, behind the pulpit from which Abe conducted his daily sales, were shelves piled high with goods—caps, jewelry, neckties, and other articles of wear and adornment which were much in demand by the shore-going sailors and others who frequented the Barbary Coast. Above the doorway was an immense stretch of canvas, about twenty-five feet long by eight feet wide, on which was painted a picture of the steamship Great Eastern driving before a gale. On the sidewalk outside the Auction Mart, where it served as an effective ballyhoo, was the first lung-testing machine ever seen in San Francisco. For five cents a man might blow into it, the strength of the blow being registered on a dial in pounds. This very popular apparatus was tended by Terry Shiner, who called himself Professor and claimed the blowing-championship of the world. To prove his right to the title he wore an enormous leather belt, studded with glittering pieces of vari-colored glass. For an additional fee of five cents Professor Shiner would himself blow into the machine, which promptly shivered as if it had been struck by a cyclone, while the pointer whizzed madly around the dial.

Except for the clothing-stores and the auction places, Pacific Street from the waterfront westward to Kearny Street and beyond was a solid mass of dance-halls, melodeons, cheap groggeries, wine and beer dens, which were popularly known as deadfalls; and concert saloons, which offered both dancing and entertainment. Most of the dance-halls and concert saloons were in cellars, and practically all of them, so far as physical appearance was concerned, were identical—a low-ceilinged, rectangular room, with a bar along one side, in the center a cleared space for dancing, and at one end a platform whereon the performers cavorted and the musicians dispensed more or less melodious sounds. In some of the cheaper places the only music came from a piano, but the more popular resorts boasted not only a piano but a squeaky fiddle and a blaring trombone and sometimes a clarinet. The melodeons resembled the dance-halls and concert saloons except that they had no dance-floors; they offered only liquor and theatrical diversion. Originally the melodeons were so called because, when first introduced in San Francisco, each was equipped with a musical instrument bearing that name—a small reed organ worked by treadles which acted upon a suction bellows, the air being drawn in through the reeds. In time, however, the word became the common designation of a type of resort which offered entertainment for men only, no women being permitted to enter except the performers and the waitresses. The shows consisted, usually, in bawdy songs, skits, and dances, principally the cancan; and, in a few places catering principally to Mexicans and Negroes, obscene poses by ”finely formed females.”

Many resorts similar to those on Pacific Street were in operation on Montgomery, Kearny, and Stockton streets and on other thoroughfares within the purlieus of the Barbary Coast, while the northern limits of the quarter were marked by a row of Mexican fandango houses on Broadway opposite the County Jail. In these last-named places, which were particularly disreputable, the principal musical instrument was the guitar, and the favorite dance was a very torchy version of the fandango. From late afternoon until dawn all of the dives were thronged with a motley crew of murderers, thieves, burglars, gamblers, pimps, and degenerates of every description, practically all of whom were busily gunning for the sailors, miners, countrymen, and others who visited the district through curiosity or in search of women and liquor. Every variety of vice and crime was almost constantly on display. For many years, and especially during the eighteen-sixties and eighteen-seventies, it is doubtful if a night passed in which the Barbary Coast was not the scene of at least one murder and of innumerable robberies.

When the police patrolled the district, they went in pairs or in even greater numbers; they were no more welcome than they had been in old Sydney-Town. Nor were they any more successful in preserving order and protecting the lives and property of visitors; not only was it well-nigh impossible to obtain convincing evidence against habitués of the Coast, but the Rangers had plenty of political friends who came to their aid as promptly as earlier politicians had succored the Sydney Ducks in times of stress. The resorts ran wide open, and murders and robberies continued to occur, despite occasional regulatory statutes and frequent outbursts of journalistic horror and indignation. After an exposé of conditions in 1869, in which the Barbary Coast dives were called “pest holes of debauchery and corruption,” the San Francisco Call compelled the enactment of an ordinance prohibiting the employment of women in melodeons, dance-halls, and concert saloons. Although the law was passed with a considerable fanfare of editorial hosannas, no effort was ever made to enforce it. Another ordinance of similar intent, enacted in 1876, suffered a like fate. Under its provisions the presence of any female in a drinking cellar or saloon between the hours of six p.m. and six a.m. was unlawful, and sufficient cause for the summary closing of the resort. The Barbary Coast, however, never even knew that such a regulation existed. Three years after this gesture, in 1879, at the behest of the San Francisco Chronicle, the police suddenly became greatly concerned over the horrific effects of the cancan, which was on exhibition in practically every melodeon and concert saloon on the Barbary Coast. They forbade its performance and arrested Mabel Santley, a member of the Rentz Troupe, which played an engagement at the Standard, a comparatively high-class theater, in March 1879. Miss Santley was accused of indecent exposure after Charles Warren Stoddard, a noted San Francisco journalist and historian then writing for the Chronicle, had described her rendition of the rollicking French dance as immodest and indecent.’’ His principal objection appeared
to be that although the dancer was decorously clad in long skirts, she failed to keep them down around her ankles, where, in his opinion, they belonged. A jury convicted Miss Santley, largely on Stoddard’s testimony, and she was fined two hundred dollars. Satisfied with this notable victory, the Chronicle and the police relaxed their vigilance, and the Barbary Coast danseuses not only restored the cancan to their repertoires, but embellished it with new gestures.

The lowest type of deadfall employed only a few women, never more than half a dozen. They were, invariably, aged and infirm wrecks, attractive only to men of particularly myopic vision. In varying stages of dishabille, they sat at the tables, or on hard wooden benches placed against the walls, and acted as decoys. To each resort which offered dancing or entertainment, however, were attached from ten to fifty females, the number depending upon the popularity of the dive. Some were as young as twelve or fourteen years, while others were toothless old hags whose lives had been almost continuous saturnalias of vice and dissipation. At least ninety-nine per cent of them were harlots, even the children. Regardless of their youth or decrepitude, they were called pretty waiter girls. They wore gaudy costumes calculated to display or accentuate their charms, if any, and in some of the lower dance-halls and concert saloons a free-spending visitor who was dissatisfied with the degree of revealment was permitted, on payment of a small fee, which rarely exceeded fifty cents, to strip any girl he desired and view her unadorned. Many of the younger, prettier women were subjected to treatment of this sort every night, and even several times a night. During the early eighteen-seventies the manager of one of the Mexican fandango dens introduced an innovation in dress which he reasoned, and rightly, would enormously increase attendance at his resort. He clad his pretty waiter girls in short red jackets, black stockings, fancy garters, red slippers—and nothing else. From the viewpoint of the customer, this was probably the most successful costume ever worn on the Barbary Coast. It was abandoned after a few weeks, however, partly because the girls complained of the cold and dampness and partly because such crowds visited the establishment that it was impossible to maintain even a semblance of order.

As regular wages the pretty waiter girls were paid from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a week. They also received a commission on the liquor they sold, usually twenty per cent; half the proceeds of their own prostitution if carried on during their hours of employment, and half the income from dancing, the price of which varied from ten to fifty cents. Occasionally a girl earned as much as fifty dollars a week, practically all of which she gave to her pimp, who promptly spent it on another woman, as has been the custom of his kind from time immemorial. In the melodeons, as well as in the concert saloons, the female performers were paid upon practically the same basis as the pretty waiter girls. Between their appearances upon the stage they were required to sell liquor, and, in most of the resorts, to prostitute themselves to any men who desired them. Very few possessed any histrionic ability, and scarcely any could sing or dance. Sometimes, however, their lack of talent was so obvious that they were, unconsciously, very comical, and so were in great demand as entertainers. In this category were six Barbary Coast artistes of the middle eighteen-seventies, who were widely known as the Galloping Cow, the Dancing Heifer, the Roaring Gimlet, the Waddling Duck, Lady Jane Grey, and the Little Lost Chicken. The Galloping Cow and the Dancing Heifer, two enormous women who had forsaken the wash-tub for a fling at high life in the melodeons and the concert saloons, were a sister act; they performed a classical dance, lumbering about the stage like a brace of elephants. The Roaring Gimlet was very tall and extraordinarily thin, but from her scrawny throat issued a voice which would have shamed a bull of Bashan. Lady Jane Grey was a rather handsome, sad-faced woman of middle age, who was more than half-cracked on the subject of the nobility. She confided to everyone who would listen that she was the illegitimate daughter of an English earl, and during her waking hours, on or off the stage, she wore a coronet fashioned from cardboard and embellished with bits of colored glass. The Waddling Duck was a singer, sinfully fat, who was advertised as the only female who could sing in two keys at one and the same time. As a matter of fact, she sang in none; she simply opened her mouth and screeched what she called scales, along which her voice bounded like a frightened mountain goat. She was, perhaps, the first crooner in San Francisco. The Little Lost Chicken was a tiny girl in her middle twenties. She knew but one song, a ballad which began: “The boat lies high, the boat lies low; she lies high and dry on the Ohio.” This she sang in a quavering falsetto, invariably bursting into tears at the last note. She so obviously required protection against the cruel blasts of the world that many gentlemen very chivalrously offered it; but always to their financial distress, for in her artless way the Little Lost Chicken was a first-rate thief and pickpocket. All of these women were very popular for a brief period, but none made any lasting impression on the Barbary Coast except the Galloping Cow. She saved her money and, about 1878, opened a saloon on Pacific Street, in a large room shaped like a half-moon, with a balcony, in which were tables and benches. On the day she opened her establishment, the Galloping Cow announced that she had had enough of men during her career in the concert saloons and melodeons, and that anyone who tried to take advantage of the fact that she was a lone woman would rue the day he was born. Only one man ever violated her rule against flirtations. He chucked her under the chin one night when she served him a bottle of beer, and she promptly smashed the bottle against his head. Then she flung him over the balcony railing and broke his back. Next day a huge sign appeared above the bar:

NO BULLS WANTED. THIS MEANS YOU! (Signed) THE GALLOPING COW.

During the early days of the Barbary Coast, most of the dance-halls and concert saloons provided, in the building above their cellars or in a sub-cellar, a large room which had been partitioned into tiny, stall-like cubicles, furnished only with cots or pallets on the floor. Thither the pretty waiter girls and female performers repaired with the men who had succumbed to their blandishments and wished to go further into the matter. In a few of the lowest resorts, instead of the cubicles, which provided at least a measure of privacy, the room upstairs contained only rows of cots placed side by side. To give the girls plenty of time in which to sell liquor and attend to their other duties, there was usually a fifteen or twenty-minute interval between dances, while the acts presented on the stage were similarly spaced. Also, before a man visited the cubicles or the rows of cots he paid the manager of the resort, or the bar-tender, the seventy-five cents or dollar which was the usual price for the woman’s services. He was likewise required, by custom, to purchase two drinks at the bar, one for himself and another for his partner. Usually the bar-tender made a great show of putting an aphrodisiac into the girl’s glass, but in reality she was served cold tea at whisky prices.

In none of the Barbary Coast dives of this early period—or, for that matter, of any other period—was a man’s life or property safe. The first duty of the girl who served drinks to a visitor or with whom he danced was to determine if he possessed any considerable amount of money. If he did, the whole machinery of the place was set in motion to despoil him. So long as he spent freely and drank heavily, he was not molested, but if he once displayed an inclination to keep his pocketbook closed, or betrayed a restlessness which might presage departure, he was immediately drugged. The usual procedure was to invite him to have a few drinks at the expense of the house. If he drank beer, a pinch of snuff was dropped into it; if whisky was his tipple, it was liberally dosed with the juice of plug tobacco; if he chose a mixed drink, the bar-tender added a little sulphate of morphine. But if a man imbibed sparingly and showed no interest in the women, experiments were made upon him with cantharides, or Spanish fly, which in those days was highly esteemed as an aphrodisiac and was much used throughout the Barbary Coast. Thereafter he was either very sick or so much putty in the pretty waiter girl’s hands and willingly turned his pockets inside out to obtain her favors. If the visitor survived the drugs and was of a particularly husky build and pugnacious disposition, he was allowed to depart. But as he made his way unsteadily through the narrow passage which almost invariably was the only entrance to the den, he was knocked senseless with a hickory club. He was then robbed and rolled into the gutter.

Two handsome young girls attached to one of the Mexican fandango dives, neither of them more than twelve years old when they entered the resort, achieved considerable local renown during the late eighteen-sixties for the unvarying efficacy of their method of robbery. They always worked together, or in cahoots, as the slang phrase of the time had it, and it was their proud boast that no man had ever received from them what he had paid for. Selecting their victim, usually a sailor or a countryman, they excited him with caresses and, if necessary, a drink flavored with cantharides, and then invited him to accompany them to one of the cubicles, generously offering to halve the customary fee. Having reached one of these tiny stalls, he was invited to choose a partner for the initial flight into the delightful realms of love. Without hesitation, and also without suspicion, he clasped one of the girls in his arms, whereupon the other cracked him on the head with a slung shot. They then emptied his pockets and summoned the bouncer, who rolled the unconscious form of the victim into the alley, while the murderous little señoritas divided their loot and returned to the dance-floor, still their charming and vivacious selves. Several men are said to have died as a result of their attentions, but that, so far as anyone ever knew, worried them not at all.

No exact computation was ever made of the number of dance-halls, melodeons, concert saloons, and other dives which flourished during the twenty years that followed the reincarnation of the old Sydney-Town quarter as the Barbary Coast, but there must have been several hundred. Many of them, with various changes in name and ownership, maintained a continuous existence until the holocaust of 1906 devastated the entire district. They included such celebrated resorts as the Bull Run, Canterbury Hall, the Louisiana, the Thunderbolt, the Cock o’ the Walk, the Opera Comique, the Dew Drop Inn, the Rosebud, Every Man Welcome, Brooks’ Melodeon, the Tulip, the Occidental, the Arizona, the Montana; and the Coliseum, the management of which called it the Big Dive. During the middle eighteen-seventies there was also a particularly vicious deadfall in a cellar at Pacific and Kearny streets. It was known as the Billy Goat because of the peculiarly repulsive combination of odors, compounded of stale beer, damp sawdust, and unwashed humanity, with which its smoke-laden atmosphere was permeated. The proprietor, bouncer, and chief bar-tender of the Billy Goat was a middle-aged Irishwoman called, in the expressive nomenclature of the Barbary Coast, Pigeon-Toed Sal. She kept order in her establishment with a derringer and a hickory wagon-spoke and was very adept in the use of either. She not only encouraged but if necessary assisted in the commission of any sort of crime so long as she received half the proceeds. She sold beer at a dime for an enormous mug, and vile whisky at five cents a large glassful. When served to a man who was known to have a few dollars in his pockets, they were more likely than not to contain knock-out potions.

For several years this fragrant den vied with the Bull Run for the distinction of being the toughest place in San Francisco. The police, however, were inclined to award the palm to the latter, which was also known as Hell’s Kitchen and Dance Hall. This notorious dive opened its doors in the fall of 1868 and celebrated its first Christmas with a free-for-all fight in which half a dozen men were seriously hurt. During its period of greatest popularity, in the eighteen-seventies, the Bull Run was managed by an Irishman called One Year Tim, who was master of ceremonies and chief bouncer. Its owner, however, was Ned Allen, called Bull Run Allen because he had fought in the Union Army at both the first and second battles of Manassas. Allen was a huge man who always wore a snow-white ruffled shirt, in the bosom of which sparkled an enormous cluster of diamonds. He also possessed a very large and very red nose, about which he was extremely sensitive and which might have outshone his gems if he hadn’t kept it coated with flour. This he dusted upon his mighty proboscis from a large salt-shaker which he always carried in his pocket. He was at length killed by a Barbary Coast Ranger named Bartlett Freel, who stabbed him with a clasp-knife after Allen had run amuck in his dive with a large ivory tusk. Fred was sent to the penitentiary, although at his trial the judge remarked that Allen’s death would work no hardship upon the community.

Allen’s resort occupied a three-storey building at Pacific Street and Sullivan Alley, with a dance-hall and bar in the cellar, another on the street floor, and an assignation house upstairs. Before the main entrance stood a large screen covered with violently colored wall-paper, which was renewed two or three times each week, so that it always appeared fresh and immaculate. But the moral tone of the establishment was anything but immaculate. Allen often said that the motto of his place was “Anything goes here.” He employed between forty and fifty girls during the Bull Run’s period of greatest prosperity, and they were notorious as the most brazen, hopeless, and abandoned women on the Barbary Coast. In most of the dives the drinks served to the pretty waiter girls and the female performers were innoxious, and it was considered right and proper for them to dispose of unwanted beverages by dumping them into the big brass spittoons which were scattered about the floors. At the Bull Run, however, the girls were given real liquor and were compelled to drink it, as their antics when drunk were considered an amusing feature of the resort, the more so since Allen was very liberal in the use of cantharides to stimulate those of his employees whom he considered sluggish. Practically all of the Bull Run women drank beer by choice, having full knowledge of the dynamitic effect of the dive’s whisky and brandy. But regardless of the number of glasses which they poured down their throats, they were not permitted to leave the dance-floor or the stage often enough to obtain the relief which the consumption of large quantities necessitated. Consequently they wore diapers instead of the frilly undergarments which the prostitute, even more than her virtuous sister, prefers. If one of Bull Run Allen’s pretty waiter girls or performers became unconscious from liquor, as frequently happened, she was carried upstairs and laid on a bed, and sexual privileges were sold to all comers while she lay helpless in a drunken stupor. The price ranged from twenty-five cents to one dollar, depending upon the age and beauty of the girl. For an additional quarter a man might watch his predecessor, an extraordinary procedure which was supposed to give an additional fillip to the senses. It was not unusual for a girl to be abused by as many as thirty or forty men in the course of a single night. She was supposed to receive half the revenue from this sort of prostitution, but she was invariably cheated.

The Opera Comique, at Jackson and Kearny streets, better known as Murderer’s Corner, employed French and Spanish women, both as performers and as pretty waiter girls, and offered the bawdiest and most obscene shows of any melodeon or concert saloon on the Barbary Coast. It was owned by Happy Jack Harrington, who was considered the Beau Brummel of the Coast and was invariably attired in the height of fashion. His favorite costume consisted of a high-crowned plug hat, beneath which his hair was puffed out in curls; a frock coat, a white shirt with a ruffled bosom, a fancy waistcoat, and cream- or lavender-colored trousers so tight that he looked as though he had been melted and poured into them. His principal adornment and greatest pride, however, was his silky brown mustache, which was so long that he could tie its ends under his chin. With the aid of a woman variously known as Dutch Louise and Big Louise, Happy Jack ran the Opera Comique for several years, but he was an earnest drinker and spent all their profits on liquor. Early in 1878, while recovering from an attack of delirium tremens, Happy Jack came under the influence of the Praying Band, a temperance organization of devout women who periodically invaded the Barbary Coast and annoyed the dive-keepers with their efforts to reclaim the debauched wrecks who lurched along the dismal thoroughfares. They were not particularly efficient, as their usual procedure was to surround a drunken man and ask him with great earnestness: “Have you seen Jesus? “ Few had. They caught Happy Jack as he rebounded from the fearsome realms of the pink elephant and the purple crocodile; and almost before he knew it, he had professed religion, sold his dive, received a Bible with his name in it, and been installed as manager of a little restaurant in California Street, far from the temptations of the Barbary Coast. He announced that he had forsaken his erstwhile evil ways forever, much to the disgust of Big Louise, who flatly refused to accompany him on what she considered a perilous adventure. A few weeks later she married a rich miner and left San Francisco. She always retained a measure of affection for Happy Jack, however, and frequently sent him money.

Having pointed out to Harrington the sunlit summit of the mountain of salvation, the ladies of the Praying Band left him to make his way upward as best he could. Naturally, he failed to make progress, since he was by nature a drunkard and a thief. Less than a month after his supposed regeneration he was found lying drunk in the gutter before his new restaurant, his Bible clasped to his breast. Within another few weeks he had abandoned the business, which in March 1878 was disposed of, lock, stock, and barrel, at a Sheriff’s sale for less than two hundred dollars. Happy Jack returned to the Barbary Coast, where he opened a resort at Pacific and Sansome streets, and became again a shining light among the Rangers. He cherished a bitter hatred of the Praying Band, and soon after the opening of his new dive he engaged an auditorium, Platt’s Hall, and announced that he would lecture on “The True Inwardness of the Gospel Temperance Movement, or, The Potato Peeled.” He hired a brass band for the occasion, but when he mounted the rostrum, he found that his audience consisted of six newspaper reporters and one drunken tramp who had wandered in by mistake. Nevertheless, Happy Jack lectured, berating the Praying Band for luring him from his dive and the comforting warmth of the Barbary Coast and casting him, alone and unprotected, into the midst of comparatively honest men, among whom he knew not how to conduct himself. He complained that when he finally abandoned the restaurant project, he had not a cent in the world, and that only by putting through a little deal with marked cards had he been able to amass enough money to open another concert saloon.

“Oh, King Alcohol! “cried Happy Jack.” Great is thy sway! Thou makest meaner creatures, kings, and the unfortunate fellow of the gutter forget his miseries for a while!

“Hooray!” applauded the drunk. “More wind to you!”

"I was proprietor of one of those popular places of amusement known as dives,” continued Harrington, “and all was serene and calm and I was happy, but they came down and took from me during the night my beautiful place where fortune and comfort in this life were to be mine. My beautiful soubrettes and Spanish dancers have gone, and when I look back on the scenic effects of those beautiful melodramas and the midnight dances with lighting effects, it’s no wonder that I stand before you as a frightful example of the destructive effects of temperance. But though crushed to earth, I will rise again!"

One of the favorite loafing and drinking places of the Barbary Coast Rangers, especially those of sporting proclivities, was Denny O’Brien’s saloon, across the way from the Opera Comique. In the cellar below O’Brien’s resort was a pit wherein were staged dog-fights and battles between terriers and rats, which the street boys trapped under the wharves and sold to O’Brien at from ten to twenty-five cents, depending upon the size and ferocity of the rodent. On a Saturday night about a month after his appearance upon the lecture platform Happy Jack Harrington went to O’Brien’s and began drinking steadily. During the evening he became involved in a quarrel, over some trivial matter, with Billy Dwyer, who had just arrived in San Francisco from Virginia City, where he had acquired considerable renown as a prize-fighter and a rough-and-tumble brawler. Dwyer raised his arm to strike Harrington, and Happy Jack drew his bowie-knife, which he carried slung under his left armpit, and stabbed the pugilist in the stomach. Dwyer died within a few hours, and Harrington was convicted of manslaughter and sent to San Quentin Prison. Nothing more was ever heard of him on the Barbary Coast.

Although Pacific Street was never actually toppled from its proud position as the heart of the Barbary Coast, there was a long period before the earthquake and fire of 1906 when its supremacy was seriously threatened by Kearny Street, which runs from Market Street northward past Telegraph Hill to the waterfront. But the fact that Kearny Street provides a direct route from the northern part of the city to the business and financial districts prevented it from superseding Pacific Street as the most sinful thoroughfare in San Francisco, for it increased rapidly in commercial importance, while Pacific Street, so far as legitimate business was concerned, declined steadily from the early days of the gold rush. Nevertheless, for some thirty years Kearny Street boasted many dives which were fully as low and disreputable as those for which Pacific Street was so deservedly notorious. During the middle eighteen-eighties, about a decade after the murder of Bull Run Allen and the elimination of the dashing figure of Happy Jack Harrington as a factor in underworld activities, the center of sin in San Francisco was the diagonally cut block bounded by Broadway and Kearny and Montgomery streets—a comparatively small area, but so reeking with depravity that it was known both to the police and to its habitués as the Devil’s Acre. In its issue of February 28, 1886 the San Francisco Call described it as “the resort and abiding place of the worst criminals in town,” and complained that respectable citizens could not traverse Kearny Street on their way to and from business without witnessing “the utter shamelessness of the denizens.” Said the Call:

“The women of the locality are of the lowest class. These females air themselves with offensive publicity and boldness. There is not an hour of the day or night when the vulgarity of the females. . .is not unveiled to everybody who happens to be going past. The wonder is that such exhibitions should have so long escaped the notice of those who ought to be able to suppress them, and have the authority to do so. . . .The inhabitants sun themselves at the doors of their dens and exchange Billingsgate. Drunkenness among these low creatures is common, and when they have imbibed too much liquor they are anxious to display their fighting tendencies on the thoroughfare, and their command of vituperative language. . . .For some reason the only occasion when police restraint is imposed on the female inhabitants of the quarter are when a brawl or fight has to be checked, or some noisy one has to be arrested for continuous disturbance of the peace. . . .Police officers who are acquainted with the history of the Devil’s Acre say that it is the lowest spot of its kind in the city."

Perhaps the most disreputable resorts in the Devil’s Acre were the dozen or more bagnios, deadfalls, and cheap dance-halls on the eastern side of Kearney Street—a line of dens which was appropriately called Battle Row. Much of the Call’s indignation arose from the fact that none of the windows in the brothels were equipped with shades or curtains, so that whatever went on inside was visible to whoever passed in the street. Otherwise there was nothing spectacular about these dives; they catered to the lowest of the Barbary Coast hangers-on and were chiefly remarkable for their sordidness and viciousness. Scarcely a day ever passed in which each of them was not the scene of at least one robbery and half a dozen brawls, many of which ended fatally; for many years Battle Row is said to have averaged a murder a week. Equally notorious was an underground saloon at the southern end of the row. Originally this dive was known as the Slaughterhouse, but later it was ceremoniously rechristened—on a night in the latter part of 1885 the proprietor served free drinks to all comers and at the conclusion of the festivities smashed a bottle of beer against an inebriated customer’s head and announced that thenceforth his place would be called the Morgue. It was the particular rendezvous of the macks, or pimps, and of the lush-workers who thronged the Devil’s Acre; that is, thieves who specialized in robbing drunken men, having first, if necessary, knocked them unconscious with a slung shot or a section of lead pipe. The Morgue was also headquarters for the many drug addicts, better known in those days as hoppies, who lived in the alleys of Chinatown and the Barbary Coast. They eked out a bare existence by panhandling, by running errands for the brothel-keepers and inmates, and by collecting wood and old boxes, which they sold to Chinese merchants and householders. Occasionally they earned a few pennies by showing the holes in their arms to tourists. Few of the hoppies could afford a hypodermic needle; instead, they used an ordinary medicine dropper, filling it with cocaine or morphine and forcing the point into their flesh. They obtained most of their supplies of narcotics at an all-night drug-store in Grant Avenue, where enough cocaine or morphine for an injection cost from ten to fifteen cents.

A few blocks south of the Morgue, at Kearny and California streets, was a cellar deadfall and dance-hall which was opened during the middle eighteen-eighties. It flourished for some ten years, and after the Bull Run and the Billy Goat had run their allotted courses, was described by the police as “the wickedest place in San Francisco.” The resort was confined within one large rectangular room, half of which was filled with rough tables and chairs, while the remainder of the space was cleared for dancing. Against one wall was a row of hard benches, and along the other was a bar which extended the entire length of the room. Music for the dancing was provided by a pianist and a fiddler, who were enthroned upon a platform at the end opposite the entrance. Behind the platform were several curtained booths, each fitted with a table, chairs, and a dilapidated couch. A dozen pretty waiter girls were employed to serve drinks, dance with, and otherwise entertain the visitors. When the dive was first opened, these accomplished ladies were clad in short skirts and silk stockings, but wore nothing at all above the waist. After a few months, however, the police ordered them to don thin blouses, which were virtually useless for purposes of concealment, the more so since they were not required to keep them buttoned. The moral tone of this establishment is further indicated by the fact that the proprietor maintained a standing offer of five free drinks to any man who found one of his pretty waiter girls wearing undergarments.

Despite the notoriety acquired by this extraordinary dive and the dens of Battle Row, the most celebrated resorts on Kearny Street, at least during the pre-earthquake period, probably were the Eureka Music Hall, a few doors north of Pacific Street, and the Strassburg Music Hall, which was at Jackson Street, near the site of Happy Jack Harrington’s old Opera Comique. The Strassburg was operated for some twenty years before the fire of 1906 by Spanish Kitty, a tall, dark, strikingly handsome woman who was also known as Kate Lombard and Kate Edington. Although her place provided liquor, dancing, and bawdy shows, much of its fame was founded on the proficiency of Spanish Kitty at fifteen-ball pool, at which she was the recognized champion of the Barbary Coast. After the great conflagration, in which the Strassburg Music Hall was destroyed, Spanish Kitty retired with a fortune. She resumed her real name, which was neither Lombard nor Edington, and built an imposing home in an exclusive residential section. Her old haunts knew her no more.

The Eureka, an enormous barn-like structure, combined the worst features of the deadfall, the dance-hall, and the concert saloon, although it never ventured so deeply into depravity as did the resorts at Kearny and California streets. Its pretty waiter girls are said to have been really pretty, and many very noted Barbary Coast artistes appeared in its shows, particularly during the late eighteen-nineties. Among them were the Four Fleet Sisters, Little Josie Dupree, Dago May, and Big Louise Marshall. The Fleet Sisters, who did a dance act, were so called because they had married four chief petty officers of the United States Navy while the fleet was in the harbor about the time of the Spanish-American War. One of the husbands finally killed three of the sisters and himself. Dago May was also given to marrying sailors, but she had no use for the Navy. She preferred whalers or men of the merchant marine, who were less likely to return to San Francisco. She once boasted that she had twenty husbands scattered throughout the Seven Seas. Big Louise Marshall weighed three hundred pounds, possessed unusually long blond hair, of which she was very proud, and sang sentimental ballads and cowboy songs. She also had an extremely irascible disposition and was almost continuously embroiled with the other ladies of the establishment. Her strategy was both simple and effective—she seized her opponent, hugged her as tightly as possible, and then fell on her. She met her Waterloo, however, in the summer of 1899, when she attempted to chastise Little Josie Dupree, a dancing girl who weighed but 115 pounds, but made up in agility what she lacked in heft and strength. Big Louise seized her and toppled to the floor as usual, but Little Josie squirmed from beneath the ballad-singer’s bulk. Then she clambered astride Big Louise’s back and belabored her on the head with a heavy beer-mug. To treat the serious scalp-wounds inflicted by Little Josie, the physician found it necessary to shave Big Louise’s head, and the loss of her blond locks broke her proud spirit. She refused to return to the Eureka from the hospital and was never again seen on the Barbary Coast.

The crime and debauchery of the early days of the Barbary Coast was accompanied by the gurgle of enormous quantities of liquor, the consumption of which probably reached its peak in 1890. In that year the city granted the right to sell beer, whisky and other intoxicating beverages to 3,117 places, or one for every ninety-six inhabitants. And there were at least two thousand blind pigs, or blind tigers, as speakeasies were called in those days, which operated without licenses. The municipal authorities estimated the annual expenditure for liquor over the legal bars at $9,124,195. Although San Francisco more than doubled its population before prohibition went into effect, some thirty years after the publication of these figures, the number of saloon licenses never again exceeded three thousand.