Cool Gray City of Love

by Gary Kamiya

  Union Square is the center of San Francisco’s downtown, the quintessential public space of Any Corporate City, 2013. An invisible capitalist force field (in the beginning was the Logo, and the Logo was with God, and the Logo was God) emanates down from the airline- and Midori-touting billboards looming over it. But you only have to walk a couple of blocks from the square’s bustling southwest corner at Geary and Powell to find yourself in a lurid demimonde populated by characters out of a Denis Johnson novel.

  All of which is to say that the Tenderloin is a large turd—often a literal one—floating in the crystal punchbowl that is San Francisco. So why is it still here?

  Because the city wants it to be here.

  For decades, the Tenderloin has been carefully protected by the city and various nonprofit organizations. It’s not that these officials, social workers, homeless advocates, and low-cost housing activists want to maintain a zone of crime and filth in the heart of San Francisco; it’s simply an inescapable consequence of their laudable commitment to defend society’s most vulnerable members. The problem is that by saving the baby, you also save the bathwater. No one has figured out a way to help the “deserving poor,” to use the condescending 19th-century parlance, without also helping the creepy, kooky, and dangerous poor. The result is, in effect, a protected urban wildlife zone, a Bottle City of Squalor.

  But the Tenderloin is more than that. It is also a memorial to a rich and vanished era—what geographer Richard Walker has called “the high tide of dense urbanism.” For it was here, in the neighborhood’s unique collection of single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels and apartment houses, that the great army that once made up the blood and guts and sinew of American cities lived. Tens of thousands of clerks and salesmen and stenographers and hoboes and longshoremen and cops and dressmakers and carpenters and factory workers inhabited these cheap but decent rooming houses. Most of them were single. Many of them were women. They were drawn to the city because they could find work here. As Paul Groth writes in Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States, for these newcomers, inexpensive rooming houses offered freedom, anonymity, and sexual liberation—all in the heart of the city.

  What is remarkable about the Tenderloin is that it has remained physically unchanged for more than 80 years. It is a time capsule. The same progressive forces that have kept out “progress,” and inadvertently created a Museum of Depravity, have also created a Museum of the Lost City, a vanished world memorialized in the neighborhood’s extraordinary collection of residential hotels. There are hundreds of these historic SROs in the Tenderloin, the largest number in the world. The SROs are the reason that in 2008 the Uptown Tenderloin was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the 24th San Francisco neighborhood to be so listed. All of these three- to seven-story brick and masonry buildings were built between 1906 and the Great Depression. Almost all of them are essentially unchanged, right down to their blade signs. These once-elegant buildings have fallen on very hard times, but they still conjure up the romance and mystery of the Naked City, with its 8 million stories. They are the ultimate urban hives.

  In an uncanny way, the Museum of Depravity helps bring the Museum of the Lost City to life. If all of those rooming houses were occupied by employees of Twitter—and that day may be coming—the ghostly romance of the Tenderloin’s past would not feel quite as rich and strange.

  The very first time I set foot in the Tenderloin was when I was a 17-year-old student at Berkeley High School. I went with my friend Ben, a black guy who smoked Kools and read Heidegger, over to the big city from Berkeley to meet up with a pal of his for some reason I have forgotten. We went into an old apartment building, took the elevator up, and walked into a studio apartment that looked out over downtown. It was the first time I had ever been in an apartment. I dimly remember that it was airy and spacious—there are a lot of beautiful rooms in those old buildings—but my memory is somewhat cloudy because his friend pulled out a water pipe (another first) and we proceeded to get stoned. This was an appropriate introduction to the Tenderloin: A longhaired half-Japanese dude and two black guys interrupting their vague urban mission to puff away on a water pipe (unless that was the mission). The die was cast. Most of my subsequent experiences in the Tenderloin have involved some kind of sin.

  I got to know the Tenderloin during the seven years I was a taxi driver in San Francisco. Sin and taxi driving go together like gin and tonic, and the Tenderloin was the smudged highball glass where they mixed. The ‘Loin was ground zero for sex, the sub-basement of the lower chakras. Sex radiated out of its innumerable windows and filthy sidewalks, from Frenchy’s K&T bookstore (the name Frenchy a subtle tip-off as to the types of books it carried) to the gaudy, teetering whores on Geary Street, from the bottom-of-the-barrel all-night Mini Adult Theatre on the lunar corner of Golden Gate and Jones (admission $2, no charge for an attempted blow job by the drunken homeless guy who just sat down next to you) to the scary Last Exit to Brooklyn drag queens on Larkin, from the gay male hustlers hanging outside the Peter Pan bar on Mason near Market (an intersection delicately known as “the Meat Rack”) to Jim and Artie Mitchell’s upscale flesh joint on O’Farrell Street.

  There was a major cross-dressing and transgender scene in the TL, catered to by unnerving bars like the Black Rose. One night at about 2 A.M., I picked up a 30ish straight man on O’Farrell. He was pretty drunk. He was a nice guy who seemed completely freaked out. He started babbling as soon as he sat down. “Oh my God,” he said, “the weirdest thing just happened to me. I picked up this girl and she turned out not to be a girl.” He had gone drunkenly through with the sexual encounter anyway and now he needed to exorcise the whole bizarre incident. I tried to reassure him that he would be OK, but he was as jangled and jumpy as if he had just poured 10 cups of espresso into his id.

  The Tenderloin was often involved in these libidinous journeys, either as a starting point or a destination. Two Japanese salarymen once asked me to take them to something that sounded like “hlibod sho.” I had no idea what they were talking about. They had to repeat it twice until I realized they were saying “ribald show.” I felt like calling up the editors of the OED and reporting the first conversational use of the word “ribald” since 1911. I took them to the Mitchell Brothers.

  Say what you will about Japanese businessmen, they are not self-conscious about sex. Indeed, for some of them, it appeared that having a naked woman shove her ass in their faces was a tourist activity to be checked off the to-do list, on a par with visiting the Legion of Honor or Golden Gate Park. During a trip to a slightly sleazier fleshpot than the Mitchell Brothers—the New Century on Larkin, if memory serves—I was surprised to suddenly hear a piercing whistle. I looked away from the gyrating woman on the pole to observe 10 or 15 Japanese men getting up and moving methodically toward the exit, heading back to the tour bus. It was the finest display of organized horniness I’d ever seen.

  I myself was a master of disorganized horniness. I once met a lunatic stripper who worked at one of the ‘Loin’s legendary strip clubs, the Chez Paree on Mason, famous for its neon sign of a long female leg, bent and ready to kick the can-can. I met this woman on the beach at Aquatic Park and took her the next day to Lake Anza in Berkeley. Unfortunately, her spectacular body turned out to be accompanied by a schizophrenic brain. We were sitting on our towels, talking about this and that, when she suddenly and suspiciously asked me if I was gay. Apparently, trying to make innocuous first-date conversation was a bad move. Later we did manage to get in a little groping in the back seat of my stepmom’s 1962 VW bug. It was pretty hot, but in the middle of it, she suddenly pulled a hairbrush out of her purse and began utilizing it in a way for which it was not designed. That would have been all right—in fact, it would have been all right to an unparalleled degree—except for the fact that (1) it felt like she had suddenly gone into her Chez Paree routine, and (2) I couldn’t convince her to come back to my apartment. When I dropped her off at her apartmen
t, she told me to come by the Chez Paree after 2 A.M., when she got off work. I did, and waited for half an hour, but the only person who came out was a large, violent-looking bouncer who told me to get lost. Hairbrush woman, in the extremely unlikely event that you are reading this, where did I go wrong?

  In addition to being haunted by such crackpot Circes, the Tenderloin also featured—and still does—more than its share of young males whose approach to life is summed up by the line delivered by the blackmailing George Sanders character in Rebecca: “I’d like to have your advice on how to live comfortably without working hard.” Two of these worthies, one a tattooed white guy who had long hair of the non-hippie kind and one an ominous-looking Latino blood, hailed me on Taylor and Eddy one night. I was a fairly new driver, and it was a slow night, so when they said they wanted to go to the airport, I agreed. Tilt! Taxi commandment number one: Do not pick up scary dudes in the Tenderloin who look like they just got out of the joint and say they want to go to the airport even though they have no luggage! Taxi commandment number two: If one of these scary dudes gets in the front seat and one gets in the back, directly behind you so you cannot observe the gun he is pulling out, immediately defecate in your pants, exit the vehicle, and run screaming down the street!

  Unfortunately, I failed to follow either of these easy rules. Instead, I drove down Sixth Street and got on the freeway. After a minute or two, I felt the unpleasant sensation of a gun barrel pushing up against the back of my head. I was informed by the muscle-y San Jose speed freak white dude in the front seat that this was a stickup. They made me drive around while they looked for a remote place. They got kind of chummy as we rolled along. Blood in the back seat said, “Hey, you drive pretty good. You ever think about a life of crime?” Laugh? I thought I’d die!

  Finally they told me to exit at Colma and had me drive into the vast city of the dead, where Wyatt Earp is buried in a cemetery called Hills of Eternity. I did not like this at all. They told me to get out of the car. I jumped out and sprinted down the road, screaming “Help!” while waiting for the bullets to rip into my back. But the only sound was the engine roaring as they drove off at top speed.

  The S.F. police soon came and picked me up. This turned out to be almost as arduous an ordeal as the robbery and kidnapping, because as we headed back to the city, they suddenly got a radio call about some heavy crime that had just gone down in the Geneva Towers, the scariest projects in town before they were blown up in 1998. They took off at 90 miles an hour toward Visitacion Valley. As we approached the terrifying high-rises, the cop riding shotgun actually pulled out, yes, a shotgun, and stuck it out the window. When the radio said the suspect was a black male, the driver sneered, “Oh, yeah, that’s a big fucking surprise.” They were total macho cowboys, but considering they were working the Geneva Towers beat during the crack-crazed 1980s, which would have to qualify as one of the worst jobs in the history of the world, I had to cut them a little slack. They finally dropped me off at the Yellow Cab lot. The next day the cab turned up hidden in an old railway cutting at the base of Potrero Hill, just a few blocks away.

  “If you were to throw a ball a thousand feet into the air from here,” Peter Field told me as we stood on the corner of O’Farrell and Mason, “wherever it landed, the chances are it would hit a building that was once involved in some kind of illegal activity.”

  Field probably knows more about the Tenderloin than anyone else. A social worker who worked in the neighborhood for 12 years—he himself slept on the streets for a while when he first came to town—he evinces the no-bullshit kindness of a man who has been exposed to the darkest side of humanity yet hasn’t given up hope. Field is obsessed with the Tenderloin’s history. He has spent hundreds of hours poring over city directories and Sanborn insurance maps, the sources that allow sleuths to follow the convoluted trails of people and businesses through the vanished urban landscape. I came upon some pieces he’d written about the TL online and called him up. He gives a walking tour of the neighborhood twice a year through City Guides, a nonprofit organization whose volunteer guides lead tours all over town. I had just missed his tour, but he offered to take me around. His normal tour lasts about two and a half hours. We spent six and a half hours walking about six blocks.

  I met Field at the dead center of San Francisco, the Powell Street cable car turnaround at Eddy Street. It was a hot June Sunday, and thousands of tourists and locals were swarming the streets. But they soon faded into the background as Field drew me into a lost world—of lonely merchant sailors in sad rooms, old people eating in white-tablecloth cafeterias, thousands of excited men on Ellis waiting for a boxer to emerge from a weigh-in, evil pimps drugging girls, French restaurants with discreet upstairs rooms, Miles Davis riffing with Wynton Kelly at the Black Hawk, military shore patrols and San Francisco’s finest scouring the streets together looking for AWOL sailors, homeless kids selling their bodies on the corner of Geary and Polk, hoboes returning to the same shabby hotels for decades. By the end of the six and a half hours, it felt as if I had just watched a time-lapse film of the neighborhood’s entire long, rich life.

  Like most of old San Francisco, the Tenderloin was once a wasteland of sand dunes and scrub brush. Its first white inhabitant was a viticulturist named Henry Gerke, who in 1847 built a two-story building at Eddy and Mason (the streets did not yet exist), near a large spring-fed pond that stood where the Flood Building is today. The isolated area was known as St. Ann’s Valley. It was only three-fourths of a mile to the center of town, the old Spanish plaza, which had been renamed Portsmouth Square after the American conquest of California in 1846, but the dunes were so high and deep that it was a long hike to get there. A saloon called St. Ann’s Rest opened in the 1850s, catering to travelers on their way to old Mission Dolores. But there were few inhabitants until 1860, when the Market Street Railway opened, its path cleared by “steam paddies”—steam-powered excavating machines that were so named because they could supposedly do the work of 20 Irishmen. By 1866, the former wasteland was completely developed. It was a typical San Francisco neighborhood of homes and small businesses, with a few mansions scattered here and there.

  The event most responsible for turning the Tenderloin into what Field called “San Francisco’s premier entertainment and vice district” took place in 1878, when an entrepreneur named Lucky Baldwin built the opulent Baldwin Hotel at Powell and Market. The first-class hostelry, which competed with the famous Palace Hotel a few blocks east, included a theater. Other theaters and music halls followed, along with office buildings. “This brought new customers into the neighborhood,” Field said. “Rich rancher Johnnies, rich town Johnnies, office workers.” Following the law of supply and demand, in 1884 the neighborhood’s first “parlor house”—a genteel brothel—opened at 223 Ellis, presided over by a Miss Ines Leonard of Virginia City. Others soon followed. By the 1890s, the Tenderloin had been transformed from a stolid middle-class neighborhood into a jumping district of theaters, hotels, parlor houses, restaurants (many of which doubled as brothels or places of assignation), and gambling joints.

  As we spoke, a young guy with a scar on his face lurched up and demanded to know what we were talking about. When we wouldn’t tell him, he punished us by releasing a toxic cloud of Royal Gate vodka fumes in our faces. “The court said I was not allowed to own a pencil or anything to write with. Do you know why?” he asked. Receiving no answer, he stumbled off.

  Sex was a prime Tenderloin draw, just as it was for San Francisco’s more famous red-light district, the Barbary Coast near the waterfront on Pacific. But the two fleshpots were completely different. “The Tenderloin was more refined than the Barbary Coast,” Field said. “The Barbary Coast attracted sailors and some upper-class men going slumming. But the Tenderloin attracted all classes. You could go out to dinner, go to the theater, and then maybe stop in at a parlor house.” The semi-respectable nature of the neighborhood was solidified when it became the center of San Francisco’s fraternal societies—t
he Odd Fellows, Masons, Elks, and so on. “These societies would have their monthly or yearly meetings here, and the men would want to have a good time,” Field said. “They’d wander around the neighborhood, go to the bars and parlor houses. The newspapers of the time are filled with stories about men who lost their fraternal diamond stickpins in the neighborhood.”

  We walked up to the corner of Ellis and Powell. East on Ellis, where a parking lot now stands, was a saloon and betting parlor owned by Harry Corbett, the brother of “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, the former heavyweight champion of the world. “This was the center of betting parlors in San Francisco,” Field said. “Corbett became a boxing promoter and had his own set of scales on a Turkish rug. When you made it as a boxer, you weighed in on his scales. Ellis Street would be crowded with men waiting to get a look at their heroes. Men like Bob Fitzsimmons and Sailor Sharkey.” The joint was raided repeatedly by the police. After 1906, it was rebuilt as a “French restaurant” with private rooms upstairs—a San Francisco tradition. The purpose of these rooms was made clear by the discreet behavior of the waiters, who were trained not to enter the rooms unless summoned.

  The great earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed the Tenderloin, along with all of downtown San Francisco. The postquake reconstruction was responsible for the Tenderloin’s unique architectural character. Its buildings had mostly been one- or two-story wooden houses and small hotels. The new buildings were higher, three to seven stories, made of brick or masonry, and they had many more units, mostly studios. Into this densely built-up, compact area, close to offices and factories and restaurants and bars, poured the 1920s and 1930s equivalent of the young people who today work as baristas or retail clerks and live in the Mission District (or maybe, mutatis mutandis, those who work at the Home Depot and live in San Leandro)—clerks and salesmen and barbers and firemen. Starting in the 1920s, as Paul Groth notes, women began to move to the rooming houses in large numbers. (Until salaries for stenographers rose in the 1920s, women did not make enough money to be able to live alone.) For the sheltered young American men and women who found themselves bumping into each other in the hall on the way to the bathroom, the Tenderloin and similar cheap downtown neighborhoods offered the chance to break free of Victorian small-town sexual codes.