San Francisco's Scarlet

THE BARBARY COAST: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld --Herbert Asbury--Knopf ($3).

San Francisco's Pacific Street starts at the waterfront, plods westward through the northern warehouse district, climbs past Chinatown and the Italian quarter to Larkin Street. There it changes its name to Pacific Avenue, straightens its dress and saunters out to the Presidio as a genteel residential lane. The first few blocks of Pacific Street today are a dreary line of warehouses, garages, shabby hotels, lunchrooms. Formerly they were the centre of San Francisco's notorious Barbary Coast, for nearly 70 years the most vicious and depraved spot in the U. S. The amazing scenes and incredible characters of "the Coast" are recorded by Author Asbury, descendant and biographer of the late great Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury, with the same detached amiability which characterized his Gangs of New York (TIME, Oct. 7, 1929).

Lost to history is the name of the genius who, sometime in the 1860's, gave the Barbary Coast its apt title. The district then was already famed since the beginning of the Gold Rush as "Sydney Town"--named for the Australian ruffians, escaped convicts and ticket-of-leave men who clustered there around the earliest tent-dwelling Chileno (Spanish-American) harlots. These "Sydney Ducks" made up the city's first criminal element. Their grog-shops, dancehalls and bawdy houses became spawning grounds for swindlers, burglars, thugs, arsonists and murderers of infamous skill and boldness. In a 40,000 population there was an average of two murders a day. The town was nearly wiped out by incendiary fire six times before the Vigilance Committee drove out the Sydney Ducks and temporarily restored the city's underworld to normal limits in debauchery.

In 1862 "the Coast" was once more the wide-open, hell-roaring district which it had been and which it continued to be until 1913, under the beneficent eyes of city administrations either corrupt or actually proud of San Francisco's reputation as "the Paris of America." No sailor, cattleman or fun-seeking hometowner who set foot in a Pacific Street dive had a chance of getting out with both his money and an intact skull. If he withstood in turn the blandishments of the "pretty waiter girls," aphrodisiac in his drink, tobacco juice in his whisky, a pinch of snuff in his beer, without succumbing to one thing or another, there was always a bouncer in a dark hallway to knock him down, pick his pockets, roll him into the gutter.

Most notorious of the old-time dives were the Billy Goat, named for its foul smell; the Bull Run, where the pretty waiter girls entertained privately for 25-c- to $1 ; the Opera Comique where French and Spanish women performed; the Morgue, where the proprietor maintained a standing offer of five free drinks to any man who could find undergarments on one of his pretty waiter girls. Besides the dancehalls and saloons, Pacific Street and vicinity had its cheap "cow-yards" which were squalid honeycombs of harlots' cubicles and more expensive parlor houses. Pitiful, and far more shameful, were the Chinese cribs, filled with slave girls bought or kidnapped in China by agents of San Francisco dealers.

The Barbary Coast was doomed in 1911 when California's present Governor James ("Sunny Jim") Rolph Jr. began his first of five terms as San Francisco's mayor. The actual knockdown punch was dealt by Hearst's San Francisco Examiner in a typically furious crusade. The conp-de-grace came in 1917 when the State Supreme Court upheld a Red-light Abate ment Act, permitting the city to proceed in civil court against owners of property used for immoral purposes. For a few gloomy years "the Coast" tried to subsist on tourist trade by pretending to be tough and bawdy; but its harlots had been driven out of the district. "Now, of course," says good-humored Author Asbury, ''San Francisco has no prostitutes."

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