Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
arrange festivals and scholarships and
ensure local history is preserved.
After 2 blocks on Stockton Street,
stop at Pacific Avenue.
7
Pacific Avenue
The specific ethnicity of Chinatown
stops abruptly around Pacific Avenue.
Within a few steps more, you'll be on
the lower fringe of Italian American
North Beach, historically the Italian
part of town. Because of the city's
quirky topography, you may also be
enjoying better weather than you did at
the start of your tour—this area is less
likely to be cloaked in fog than other
parts are.
In the 1800s and very early 1900s,
Pacific Avenue (look right, toward the
Bay) was considered to be the spine of
the notorious Barbary Coast area.
Think of a wooden shantytown leading
down to a bustling, curved wharf,
which, in its earliest days, was called
Yerba Buena Cove. Over time, the set-
tlement grew, but it always retained its
male-heavy population and its rough,
low-class profile. From the gold rush,
respectable men with families didn't
come out West to seek their fortunes;
that was the province of drifters, oppor-
tunists, and poor laborers. San
Francisco was founded by these men.
This hellish hamlet, in its early days
called both Sailortown and Sydney-
Town (after an Australian gang that once
brutally ruled it), was a den of sin, pleas-
ure, and crime. Routinely, young men
on a night of carousing at the saloons
and opium dens would pass out and
wake up the next day on a ship already
well out to sea, where they'd be forced to
join the crew for months on end until
they'd be able to return home. This
impression-by-kidnapping method was
called being “shanghaied,” which meant
it often involved drugs slipped surrepti-
tiously into beer, and it was so common
that the police barely kept track of inci-
dents. The brilliant underworld journal-
ist Herbert Asbury, famous today for his
book
Gangs of New York,
wrote in
The
Barbary Coast
that the period was
“the nearest approach to criminal anar-
chy that an American city has yet
experienced.”
Pacific was the first street in these
parts to be cut through to the water (it
now stops 2 blocks short), so it became
a vital thoroughfare. By the ragtime era,
the neighborhood got classier, if only
by a notch. It hopped with dance halls,
street barkers, “working” women, and
worse. It was a vigorous, often sleazy,
thoroughly dangerous, cavalcade of
pleasure for San Francisco's consider-
able working-class population. San
Francisco, a city at the end of a frontier,
was a place without limits.
The Barbary Coast is now gone.
Because of the fire, barely a plank of the
original place remains, and even the
neighborhood name fell out of favor
around World War I after local cam-
paigns succeeded in shutting most of
the straggling merriment down. The
land is also no longer on the coast,
thanks to subsequent landfilling. But
the Barbary Coast's 70-odd-year reign
gave San Francisco its dominant repu-
tation as a devil-may-care town of
hedonistic inclinations, a reputation it
no longer deserves but which persists
among people who have never actually
visited.
Proceed 1 block to Broadway and turn
right. Go 1 block to Grant Avenue and
cross the short block to Columbus
Avenue.
8
The Condor
The old Barbary Coast frolic hasn't
completely died out—it limps along
here, along Broadway between Colum-
bus Avenue and Montgomery Street,
where a fleet of XXX stores and go-go
