THE ORIGINS OF SAN FRANCISCO VICE

Before the discovery of gold in the foothills to the east, Yerba Buena, as San Francisco was known, was a quiet, dune-filled peninsula with only a few hundred permanent residents, many thousands of sheep and cattle grazing on the “luxuriant herbage” and “not more than twenty or thirty houses of all descriptions in the place.”[1] Prior to the Mexican government ceding the territory to the U.S. in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the local magistrate ordered the name changed to San Francisco to avoid confusing it with a nearby cove of the same name.[2] In part due to its takeover by the U.S., and then as word of gold circulated, the city’s population grew rapidly and by the early 1850s, the village of San Francisco stretched “some eight or nine square miles.”[3] The origins of the city–its function as a center of immigration, exchange, and commerce for the Gold Rush–helps explain its relationship to what the “respectable” class, as they saw themselves, called vice.

Within months of John Marshall’s discovery in Coloma, profiteers erected scores of hastily built structures to entertain the Argonauts. During the first years of the Gold Rush, most ships landed at the end of Pacific Street, which made it “the most important thoroughfare in San Francisco,” and the ‘main “highway to Portsmouth Square and the western part of town.”[4] (Portsmouth Square shaded in blue on the adjacent map.) And it was Pacific Street, known by locals as “Terrific Street,” that became the center of the infamous Barbary Coast, “crowded with dives, grog shops, dance halls, melodeons, concert saloons, a few cheap restaurants, low-end clothing retailers, and a couple of auction houses.”[5] Although the origins of the district’s name remain a bit of a mystery, journalist Herbert Asbury speculated that it originated with a sailor who observed similarities “in men if not precisely in methods of murder and robbery, to the Barbary Coast of Africa.”[6]

The Barbary Coast was the first and most notorious vice district in the city, but it was by no means the only one. As the city grew so too did the number of neighborhoods that hosted saloons, dance halls, and brothels. The Uptown Tenderloin, “a colony of gambling resorts, cabarets, and houses of prostitution,” flourished to the west around Mason, Powell, Eddy, and Larkin streets.[7] In her study of sex workers in San Francisco, Jacqueline Barnhart found evidence of prostitution thriving in “fashionable parlor houses” in residential neighborhoods to the west of the city’s downtown core.[8] There was also Chinatown, “a popular tourist destination for the city’s visitors and a local place of amusement for its residents.” In later years, “South of the Slot,” North Beach, the Mission District, and Ocean Beach all offered places to enjoy evening entertainment.[9] 

Practically inseparable from the ubiquitous gambling halls were the saloons in which most gambling tables were found. San Francisco quickly became known as one of the nation’s “wettest” cities. This was due, according to one contemporary account, to “the great mass of the people [who] either have not, or will not avail themselves of any places of recreation or of retirement at the close of daily labor and business other than those where liquor is sold.”[10]More than one visitor claimed “No place in the world contains anything like the number of mere drinking-houses in proportion to the population, as San Francisco.”[11] As early as 1853, the Christian Advocate found “by actual count, the whole number of places where liquor is sold in this city to be five hundred and thirty-seven.”[12] Louise Clappe, more famously known as “Dame Shirley,” who spent several years in San Francisco before moving into the gold fields of the foothills, wrote in one of her letters that “nothing can be done in California without the sanctifying influence of the spirit; and it generally appears in a much more ‘questionable shape’ than that of sparkling wine.”[13] The numbers from the earliest reports may have been exaggerated for effect, but the number of liquor licenses issued by the city supports the claims that drinking was no small part of San Francisco life. In 1874, the police commission issued 6,264 licenses to “Inn Keepers, Taverns and Bars” (accounting for nearly half of the city’s entire license revenue stream); in 1889, according to the San Francisco High License Association, there were 4,459 places that sold liquor legally, amounting to “about one drinking place to every 70 souls, or to every 14 voters.”[14]

The options for amusement in the city’s first decade encompassed much more than the hastily erected tents offering liquor and games of chance. The marketplace of leisure included a wide range of activities and attracted a considerable portion of the city’s residents. Theaters, concert and lecture halls, jaunts across the sand dunes to the ocean, and “picnic excursions” around the bay also provided entertainment to a broader swath of the citizenry than lurid accounts would suggest. According to witnesses, there were “five American theatres (generally three or four of which are at all times open),” as well as a French, German, Spanish, and Chinese theater. The Metropolitan and Union theaters hosted English, French, and Italian operas, and “some of the most celebrated American actors and actresses made their regular nightly appearance” to adoring audiences.[15]

Women in an early San Francisco brothel, author unknown, FoundSF.org.

Another characteristic of vice in San Francisco, and one that attracted a disproportionate share of the blame for such conditions, were women employees and patrons. In the larger saloons, “beautiful and well-dressed women” dealt out the cards or turned the roulette wheel, “while lascivious pictures hung on the walls.”[16] Passenger lists examined by previous historians suggest that of the forty-thousand immigrants that arrived by ship in 1849, only seven hundred were women. There was such a dearth of women in San Francisco in the earliest days of the Rush that a woman was “almost as rare a sight as an elephant.”[17] Many came alone, and few wives accompanied the early immigrants. In mid-1850, the Daily Alta was “pleased to notice” the arrival of “of some fifty or sixty of the fairer sex in full bloom,” that had just arrived from the east coast of the U.S. as well as England and France. Their arrival occasioned “flotillas of young men” who floated out to catch a glimpse of the newly-arrived.[18] Due to their small numbers, most women had little difficulty in finding work in gambling houses or saloons that competed for the attention of male patrons.[19] This uneven sex ratio persisted throughout the nineteenth century and even by 1910 there were still 132 men for every 100 women.[20]

A significant number of the women who came to San Francisco in the early years came to earn money just the same as men and many were “professional prostitutes.” Jacqueline Barnhart asserts that professional prostitutes specifically moved to San Francisco to exchange sex and companionship for income in contrast to women who turned to sex work out of economic necessity.[21] The first prostitutes in the city typically came from Mexico, Latin America, and Chile, but were known “by the generic name of Chilenos, or, contemptuously, ‘greasers,’” and established a small enclave near Telegraph Hill, on the northern edge of the Barbary Coast.[22] Within a few years, San Francisco had a sex district “larger than those of many cities several times its size.” The cosmopolitan nature of the population in the early 1850s led one observer to claim “there was no country in the world that was not represented in San Francisco by at least one prostitute.”[23] Their scarcity also translated into “an unusual status of respectability” and they took an active part “in the social life of early San Francisco.”[24] According to Barnhart, the term “whore,” which referred to “a prostitute of the lowest class,” was almost never used in San Francisco between 1849 and 1851.[25] A number of accounts acknowledged that some prostitutes were astute business women who opened “elaborate establishments around Portsmouth  Square” and by “diligent attention…amassed fortunes.”[26] As will be explained in future articles, the women of San Francisco became a frequent target of anti-vice crusades usually by prohibiting them from working in certain neighborhoods and industries.

[1] Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1855), 154.

[2] “An Ordinance,” California Star, January 30, 1847.

[3] Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 159.

[4] Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1933), 101. A journalist by trade, Asbury’s other published works focus on urban crime around the turn of the century including Gem of the Prairie: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld (1940); The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld (1936); and The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (1928) that became the basis for Martin Scorsese's movie by the same name (2002). I must admit that the more I worked on this project the less reliable I thought of Asbury’s work and use it sparingly and try to avoid his characterizations of his topic.

[5] Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 61.

[6] Asbury, The Barbary Coast, 98.

[7] Asbury, The Barbary Coast, 99n1.

[8] Jacqueline Baker Barnhart, “Working Women: Prostitution in San Francisco from the Gold Rush to 1900,” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1976), 11.

[9] Berglund, Making San Francisco American, 97; “South of the Slot” moniker from the short story of the same name by Jack London and refers to the neighborhood extending about four blocks south of Market street between the bay and 7th street.

[10] Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 452-3.

[11] Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 645. See also Franklin Hichborn, “The Organization that Backed the California Red Light Abatement Bill,” Social Hygiene 1, no. 2 (March 1915): 199; San Francisco Center, “Report of the Committee Investigating Police Court Procedure in San Francisco, 1913,” 10, League of Women Voters Records, 1911-1979, Judicial System 1912-1932, California Historical Society, North Baker Research Library.

[12] Quoted in Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 452.

[13] Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851-1852, ed. Marlene Smith-Baranzini (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2001), 24.

[14] San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Municipal Reports for the Fiscal Year 1873-4 (San Francisco: Spaulding & Barto, 1874), 474; San Francisco High License Association, “High License,” [1890?], 4.

[15] Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 493-4, 551, 355, 368.

[16] Soulé, Gihon, and Nisbet, Annals of San Francisco, 248.

[17] Asbury, The Barbary Coast, 32.

[18] “Enlargement of Society,” Daily Alta California, May 7, 1850. Barnhart notes that “in full bloom” signified prostitutes. “Working Women,” 52.

[19] Barnhart, “Working Women,” 11.

[20] In 1920 the ratio was still 117:100. Edith Sparks, Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 216.

[21] Barnhart, “Working Women,” 12.

[22] Barnhart, “Working Women,” 49; Asbury, The Barbary Coast, 33.

[23] Asbury, The Barbary Coast, 33.

[24] Barnhart, “Working Women,” 11; Asbury, The Barbary Coast, 35. This is perhaps most famously exemplified in the shooting death of U.S. Marshal W.H. Richardson by a well-known gambler, Charles Cora. Cora brought his lover, “Belle Cora,” a suspected prostitute to a performance at the American Theater in November 1855. When the marshal’s wife insisted the Cora’s be removed from the theater, the management refused to comply, and she and her husband left. Several days later, Charles Cora shot and killed Marshal Richardson. This incident is often cited as one of the precipitating events for the Vigilance Committee of 1856’s reign of vigilante terror during which they hung Charles Cora for Richardson’s murder. Ethington, The Public City, 62; Mary Floyd Williams, “History of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance of 1851,” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1919), 396-8, 401

[25] Barnhart, “Working Women,” 14.

[26] Asbury, The Barbary Coast, 34.