Thursday, August 7, 2008

San Francisco/Barbary Coast, Part Two


Or maybe they were doing something less "arty" at their place of work --I'm not sure.

From Asbury book on San Francisco's Underworld, Chapter Ten "Company, Girls!":
"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."



Here's a bit more on early San Francisco from the Herbert Asbury book and other sources. The opening video is from a 1905 film taken by an unknown photographer. It represents the only moving picture footage of San Francisco's main thoroughfare that has survived from before the Great Earth quake and Fire of 1906. It was only rediscovered by accident in the 1980's. This footage was taken only ten years after the Lumiere Brothers' early short silent films were first shown in Paris.
The large tower in the background is The Ferry Building, which mainly withstood the terrible 1906 disaster and still stands today. Many of the other buildings in this shot were destroyed. One Market Street Building to be burnt to the ground was the Palace Hotel, the largest and most opulent of its kind on the West Coast.

23 comments:

  1. I am restoring the text that goes along with the photgraphs at this time. Bear with me please and come back later for more detailed info on the background of those persons and places pictured. Thank you.

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  2. that is some hily country. the lynch sqaud looks like new englanders, what with those pork chops and boat caps

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  3. Yes it is. I've walked up Montgomery Street, one of the oldest in the city and the former waterfront before the mud-and-fill came in, and I can tell you it is one hell of a hill to traverse on foot at a decent clip.

    Yes, that's why I thought those guys were Union soldiers at first. General Sherman, not one of your favorite people I know, was a bank manager in San Francisco at the time of the Vigilance Committees. He was stationed with a small contingent of the US Army outside San Francisco about 1850 at a Federal Arsenal in the town of Benicia, north of the city. He later resigned his commission to make some real money.

    The bank he worked still stands on Montgomery Street. The locals call it "Sherman's Bank". He was called up into the California Militia in 1856 by the Governor of the state to try and curb the Vigilance Committee. But when he went to Benicia to get arms for his men, the commandant there, perhaps afraid of the Committee, refused to arm his militia properly. Sherman resigned the Governor's Commission and the troops were dispersed.

    U.S. Grant was also in California in 1856,on the West Coast at Fort Humboult in the far north of California . Missing his wife and bored, he was forced to resign from the regular army up there due to excessive drinking.

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  4. Hi there Doug. Thank you for the interesting link on Donaldina Cameron. She was quite a woman!
    One wonders what kind of abuse she had to put up with herself. I can well imagine her going into many dens of iniquity and standing her ground to achieve her aim. Thankfully there were and are women like her, who want to help the less fortunate. It seems many Chinese women and indeed boys, owe her a great debt!

    Cassie

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  5. Ah, times have changed, as you say, now the problem is where to park ones car! *Sigh*.

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  6. There are a good few interesting photos there Doug. Each one tell a story in itself! Thank you...

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  7. She is definately one Iady I would like to know more about. There is a still a Donaldina Cameron Home that helps kids deal with family issues. Her life makes me realize how much more I could do to help others less fortunate.

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  8. It's funny, isn't it? I've probably looked for a parking space on that very street to hit a restaurant or something---and never realized what a history it had! I find that its a lot nicer traversing SanFrancisco totally on public transit, which I've tried to do in my couple trips down there. . There's even talk of baning private vehicles on parts of Market Street, which might be a very good idea at this point in history.

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  9. lol it would be nice to think that being born in NZ had a good effect on her but a bit of a stretch considering she left here at the age of two. Nice piece of NZ connection.

    I find it interesting just how much to-ing and fro-ing there was between our countries back then, for a long time I imagined people being more static in this era, but the more you read the more you find people country-hopping frequently, perhaps often following the gold or thecoal or whatever the latest dream was.

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  10. I'm thinking a skateboarding kid would enjoy this piece of road.

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  11. That was a fantastic piece of old film Doug.

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  12. Quite right. When I first got serious about studying the Gold Rush--beyond the cursory stuff you are taught in California state schools--I was amazed at how many thousands of people from both China and Australia came so quickly on the news about the gold strikes. (I should also note that according to Walton Bean's book, "California", most of those Australians who sailed to the new American territory were actually law-biding gold seekers,, no better nor worse than any other group, and not amongst the criminals gangs that made up the gangs of "Sydney Ducks".) American criminals had already set the standard for gang activity with "The Hounds", a group that came down particularly hard on any Mexican or South American groups "guilty" of competing with the US miners.

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  13. If i lived in San Fran and had a teenaged kid, I'd be afraid he'd break his dumb neck hitting a parked or moving car on one of these streets.
    Luckily, from what I've seen, there are enough stakeboard parks (with helmet laws) about the city parks, so you rarely see some thrillseeker careening down a street like this. It's hard enough to WALK up some of these hills and driving a clutch-shift car can be nerve-racking. You get to the to of a hill at a stop and you pray the clutch doesn't give out so you you won't roll backwards into whatever is behind you.

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  14. I am probably going to sound like such a bad parent but when we used to live in Lyttelton (a port town rising up into hills and full of steep streets) my two eldest kids used to get on their bikes and skateboards and "hoon" down the hills. I must admit it made me nervous but hey I used to do that sort of thing as a kid (well out of sight of my mum) so I wasn't going to stop my kids. I didn't look though.

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  15. lol....yeah, I did some amazing dumb things as a kid in San Jose on a bicycle or skates where hills were concerned, so you have to cut the young ones some slack ... (No self-respecting boy would be caught dead on skates today...it's all skateboards and rollerblades over here since the 1980's.)

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  16. Yes, it is...I've become more and more interested in early silent footage because it was the dawn of motion-pictures and affords us moderns the opportunity to see a lost world as it were. This film was shot in September of 1905 by a fellow named Jack Kutttner and it played as a simple simulated trolley car ride in vaudeville houses (music halls) in the city at least once in 1907.
    It was lost from public view for about eighty years. A similar "streetcar" film was made in Vancouver, B.C., in 1907, and was only recently rediscovered as well.

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  17. true, same here but rollerblades were just coming in back in the 1980's which is when I lived in Lyttelton.

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  18. My son (one of) was just watching it here too, we both enjoyed it. We were figuring out it must have been taken from a "trolley car" only we were calling it a "tram" lol. Its a wonderful piece of film and I really enjoyed this whole post, thank you so much.

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  19. You're welcome. Thanks for the feedback.

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  20. What a wonderful old film this is. It is impossible to tell whether cars drive on the left or the right from this footage, they seem to frequently choose a diagonal course. I am just about to go to work, but I will watch the video again when I get back, it really is a fantastic find. I'll also look in more detail at the other shots you have included here. Great stuff Doug.

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  21. I came back to watch the video, I had reach the shattered point in the early hours of the morning. I love that film, there appears to be no rules of the road whatsoever! They are going every which way!
    So it wasn't only gangsters, disease, and starvation that got you, there was the road! Hahahahaha, wonderful! Thank you Doug...

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  22. Yes, it is wonderful. The automobile laws seemed to be very "liberal" in those days. Going back and looking closer at the film--some versions of "1905 Market Street" run about ten minutes on You Tube--I was struck by how some of the cars had drivers steering from the LEFT side of the car--as British cars do. Standardization must have come later. Also, there are no pedestrian "islands" to protect foot traffic amidst all the horse-drawn, electric and gas powered contraptions going up and down the street. And not even a crosswalk in sight!

    Here's a brief article on a lady who filmed a reenactment of the trolley car film in 2005.

    http://www.sf360.org/features/five-moments-on-market-street-1905-2006

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  23. You're welcome Cassandra. It does look like "survival of the fittest" out there on "Edwardian" Market Street! It's hard enough to be a pedestrian across that broad thoroughfare now, but back then had to be worse. One would have thought traffic even on Market would have been more sedate. It;s interesting to see how the people stare up at the camera--I'd love to have heard their reactions to what must have been a rare sight.

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