by Gary Kamiya
For years, a large painting of the corner of Pacific and Jones hung somewhere in the San Francisco Center, the weathered “New Russian Hill Market” sign prominently visible. It was an odd painting because, aside from the puertozuela, which less than a dozen people have ever heard of, there is nothing particularly noteworthy about this intersection. It looks down on the Bay Bridge and Chinatown, but so does every other street on top of Nob Hill—and they’re all a lot prettier than gray, utilitarian Pacific. Maybe someone realized that, because I couldn’t find the painting when I went looking for it the other day. As for the latest version of the New Russian Hill Market, it went out of business a few months ago and was boarded up, but has now reopened. The puertozuela is still there, sparing San Franciscans’ legs and lungs as it has for 5,000 years.
Chapter 22
The Lotus-Eaters
Former strawberry fields near Fort Miley, south of Lands End
When Jack Kerouac barreled into San Francisco after his 110-mile-an-hour cross-country trip in Neal Cassady’s flame-throwing Hudson, he exulted, “Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn’t give a damn.” Kerouac was talking about San Francisco in 1949, but he could have been talking about Yerba Buena in 1846.
In an attempt to explain the less-than-upright nature of Yerba Buena’s citizens, historian Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote, “The presidio maintained the dignity of government and war, and the mission the dignity of religion, so that for the traffickers at the cove little dignity remained or was required.” Leaving aside Bancroft’s peculiar notion that there was only a limited quantum of dignity available in San Francisco, not to mention the fact that neither the mission nor the presidio had possessed any dignity for decades, Bancroft’s assessment of Yerba Buena’s population was right on the money.
One of Yerba Buena’s leading don’t-give-a-damners was a handsome young Brit named Bob Ridley. William Heath Davis describes him as a “regular English cockney … singular and comical, and … considered the funny man of the town … He imagined he was a ladies’ man, and at times stirred up a little excitement among the feminines. He was a great teller of extravagant stories—a regular Munchausen—and withal was considered the life and the fun of the place.”
In addition to these sterling qualities, Ridley was also an outrageous lush. He pops up here and there in the annals of Yerba Buena like an exuberant, slightly tarnished penny. One spring morning between 7 and 8 A.M., Davis—who was known as “Kanaka” Davis because his grandmother was native Hawaiian—was walking down one of Yerba Buena’s dirt paths (it did not yet have streets) when he ran into Ridley. Ridley asked him, “How many London Docks [a grog made with rum and red wine] do you think I have taken before breakfast?” “About a dozen,” Davis answered, “your usual allowance.” “I can discount that,” retorted Ripley. “I have taken 23!”
Excessive consumption of spirits appears to have been a virtual requirement for residency by the cove. In 1838 Nathan Spear, a future leading citizen who was reputed to be “fond of a glass of wine,” placed an old 12-by-18-foot ship’s house dismantled from the bark Kent on the beach on the northwest corner of Clay and Montgomery Streets, naming it “Kent Hall.” This whimsical structure was the first building on the San Francisco waterfront. After Spear moved out of Kent Hall, the poop cabin became famous for housing the liquor case of Captain Grimes, a former privateer and businessman who stayed at Kent Hall when in town. His liquor case was filled with choice bottles, but he kept it locked, and in a kind of alcoholic version of The Arabian Nights, he would open it only if he deemed his company sufficiently entertaining. As a result, his thirsty friends were constantly telling him tall tales, hoping he would unlock the magic case. A worldly and well-read man, Grimes would disparage most of these yarns, but eventually would be taken in by some egregiously ridiculous tale. At that point the old sea dog would produce the key, open the case, and begin pouring the good stuff, to the great joy of all present.
Kent Hall was soon joined by some ramshackle grog shops, which catered to the runaway sailors who had begun to drift into Yerba Buena. A group of these tars were observed hanging around waterfront bars as early as 1840, beginning a tradition that would make the words “San Francisco waterfront” synonymous with “Sodom and Gomorrah.”
But there was at least one resident in Yerba Buena who was not permanently pickled: an indomitable woman named Juana Briones. Briones is the most fascinating, and cryptic, character in Yerba Buena’s early years. Her ancestors came up with Anza and Portola. Born in 1802 at the Villa Branciforte, an ill-fated Spanish rest home for soldiers in Santa Cruz, in 1812 she moved to the Presidio, next to El Polin Spring. The waters of the spring were believed to confer fertility, and they seem to have worked with her: by 1833 she and her husband, a soldier named Apolinario Miranda, had seven children. They moved to another house 1,000 yards east, just outside the Presidio wall: her ghostly presence lives on in the rectangular notch, now occupied by six houses, that dents the Lyon Street wall marking the Presidio’s borders. At some point Briones set up a second home two miles to the east in Yerba Buena, building an adobe farmhouse near the present corner of Filbert and Powell, a few steps west of Washington Square. In those days, the water came up to Francisco Street, just four blocks away—hence the term “North Beach.” A map drawn by Leese describes that waterfront as “La Playa de Juana Briones.”
No one knows when Briones moved to North Beach—and thereby hangs a tale. According to her biographer, Jeanne McDonnell, it is possible that Briones moved to North Beach as early as 1826. If that is true, then she, and not Richardson, deserves the title “Founder of San Francisco.” But in any case, she deserves an honored place in the city’s history as the first—or second, if we count the widow Arballo, who skewered the pompous Font—in a long line of feisty women.
Briones’s husband Apolinario was drunk and abusive, and somewhere along the line she left him. It was not easy for an illiterate woman to make her own way in the patriarchal world of 19th-century California, but Briones proved to be courageous and resourceful. She opened a dairy farm, pasturing her cows near the northeast corner of present-day Washington Square, and began selling milk to the crews of ships. William Thomes, who met her, wrote, “If the men had had some of the energy of that buxom, dark-faced lady, California would have been a prosperous state, even before it was annexed to this country, and we would have had to fight harder than we did to get possession.” She helped runaways. She took the remarkable step of formally adopting an Indian girl, evidence of her egalitarian spirit. She was also a curandero or healer, using herbs and other medicines to heal the sick. Finally, she proved to be a first-rate businesswoman: she maintained title to her land and in 1844 bought a large cattle ranch in the Santa Clara valley (the seller was an Indian, which was highly unusual). The rammed-earth adobe she built there stood until 2011, when its owners prevailed after a long legal struggle and demolished it. A section of the wall was saved: Preservationists hope someday to move it to San Francisco and make it the centerpiece of a historical display about Briones.
Juana Briones died in 1889 at the age of 87, having lived under three flags and seen the village she helped found become a city of 300,000 people, eighth-largest in the United States. Of her, a historian wrote, “No other Spanish or Mexican woman [in 19th-century California] reached her position and maintained it through life.”
Briones lived on the outskirts of town. The village’s living room was the Plaza, a dirt square with bars on three of its four corners. (Until fairly recently, Geary and Leavenworth could beat that: The thirsty intersection had bars on all four corners.) There was a cheap pulpería or tavern, a joint called El Dorado run by a Dane, and the center of village life, a billiard parlor and bar on the southwest corner of Clay and Kearny, whose proprietor was a former Swiss sea captain named Jean-Jacques Vioget.
Like most of the human driftwood that collected on the cove, the popular Vioget could do a little of everything. In addition to b
eing a mariner, he was an artist, a fine violinist, and a surveyor. This latter skill led Alcalde de Haro to choose him to make the first official survey of the village in 1839. Clanking through the sandy wastes on horseback with 100-vara-length chains, Vioget and a helper marked out the hamlet’s 10 or so houses, along with about 40 lots and seven streets that did not yet exist. The map was conveniently stored behind Vioget’s bar. When anyone wanted to purchase a lot, they had to ask Bob Ridley, who was working as Vioget’s bartender, to pull it out. The map soon became so dirty and torn that it was almost unreadable. Ridley didn’t last much longer; he died of alcoholism at the age of 32 out in the sticks at Mission Dolores, where he was running a ramshackle bar he whimsically called the Mansion House.
Running a bar that doubled as a recorder’s office was presumably good for Vioget’s business, but no saloon catering to a population of less than 100 people was ever going to be exactly raking in the doubloons (which were still in use in California). When Thomes visited Vioget’s bar, he found the American proprietor “looking as though it would not take much to get him to commit suicide, as the Mexicans did not play billiards, and there was no vessel in port, except the Admittance.” The bartender asked Thomes and his companions if they had enough money to buy a glass of aguardiente. When they told him they had money but “were not drinking much that morning,” the man groaned, “Just my blanked luck,” went into the saloon, and fell asleep.
Along with his other accomplishments, Vioget was a prodigious trencherman. One day, a Russian by the name of Hoeffener, a regular at Vioget’s saloon who lived in the mostly Hispanic enclave at Mission Dolores and was teaching music to General Vallejo’s daughters, challenged Vioget to an eating contest. Since no one suspected that Hoeffener was also a bottomless pit, Vioget agreed. A day was set and the merchants of the town invited. The chef was another beloved town character, known as Old Jack Fuller, a British cook and butcher who had, of course, married a Californio girl and was known—attentive readers will notice a subtle yet unmistakable pattern beginning to emerge—to “drink and tell tall tales.”
The first course was plate after plate of pancakes. At the end of the round, Hoeffener was a plate ahead. Then came beefsteaks, also rapidly consumed. There followed several plates of guisado (a delicious Spanish meat stew), and many plates of carne asada. A large course of Spanish-style beans appeared, followed by tamales, of which each man ate at least a dozen. An immense pudding and several types of pies were then consumed, followed by black coffee. Vioget gave up during the pie course; Hoeffener, still eating, was declared the winner. The two men then got up and moved around, smoked, drank a little wine, and played billiards, apparently unaffected by the massive quantities of food they had just consumed.
Besides engaging in eating contests, trying to cajole old sea captains into opening their liquor cabinets, and consuming 23 drinks before 8 A.M., the good citizens of Yerba Buena had important business to transact—primarily figuring out ways to avoid paying duties on imported goods. Bribery, and the slothlike deportment of the local authorities, rendered this task manageable.
And so life went on in this “little corner of the world in which we were shut up,” as one Yerba Buena resident called it, the same characters bumping into each other and rolling randomly away, like brightly colored balls on an old pool table. Here are a few of those balls:
Daniel Sill, the town blacksmith, an old mountain man from Kentucky who had crossed the continent and climbed the Sierra in 1830–31 and loved to go hunting on the flatlands between Rincon Hill and Mission Creek …
Francisco Cáceres, a former sergeant of dragoons who lived with his family in an adobe at the corner of Grant and Pacific, near the town’s first brewery …
William M. Smith, a Georgian who had been a circus rider in Mexico and had hitched a shipboard ride to San Francisco in San Blas. Known as “Jim Crow” Smith because of his ability to imitate Southern blacks, he was a crack shot and a dangerous man when drunk …
A man named Finch, who owned a saloon on the northwest corner of Kearny and Washington and who, being illiterate, kept track of his customers by drawing symbols of them in his account books …
William Leidesdorff, an enterprising sea captain of mixed race (his father was Danish and his mother a mulatto from the Virgin Islands) who became the U.S. vice-consul to Mexico. He and his common-law Russian-Alaskan wife entertained at their cottage near the waterline, whose beautiful flower garden, tended by a Scottish gardener, was the pride of the village …
William Rae, the agent for the Hudson’s Bay Company, a high-strung, hard-drinking Brit who boasted that the United States would never get its hands on California. He later shot himself, either because he had backed the wrong horse in one of Alta California’s perennial political feuds or because he had been caught having an affair …
A “half-breed Indian and his wife” who lived at Broadway and Kearny …
John Evans, an oddly named Italian boatman who lived at Dupont (now Grant) and Clay …
John Tinker, a cheerful English castaway and grog-shop owner who always claimed that he was “growing younger every day,” until one morning he was found dead in his shop …
With the exception of the blackberries that ripen in August and are scattered in odd places across the city, there are few wild berries to be found in San Francisco. But vast fields of wild strawberries used to cover the dunes near Lands End, and one of the favorite pastimes of the inhabitants of Yerba Buena and surrounding areas was to make excursions out to the ocean to pick them. People would come from as far as Santa Clara and Sonoma. It was a tradition that went back to the early days of the Spaniards, who had been told about the fields by the Yelamu.
In the spring of 1844, almost the entire village of Yerba Buena, 80 or 90 people, went on a weeklong strawberry picking excursion to the dunes near Lands End.
Across the country in Baltimore, the Democratic convention was beginning. The burning issue facing the party, and the country, was whether to annex Texas, which had declared itself a republic in 1836. Mexico had never recognized Texas’s independence, and had warned the United States that annexation would mean war. The leading Democratic candidate, former president Martin Van Buren, opposed annexation, as did Whig candidate Henry Clay. Abolitionists warned that annexing Texas would create a “Slave Power.” But theirs was a losing position. Fired with expansionist zeal, most Americans wanted the Stars and Stripes to wave not just over Texas but also over the vast, almost unknown Mexican territory called California.
The Democrats saw which way the wind was blowing. They rejected Van Buren and nominated an unknown pro-annexationist, James K. Polk, who defeated Clay and became president in 1845. Polk was determined to extend America’s writ to the end of the continent. A phrase coined by a newspaperman, “Manifest Destiny,” swept America, giving a quasi-divine imprimatur to the lust for territory. Some Democrats argued that the United States should annex all of Mexico.
Their most vociferous opponent was John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina who, ironically, argued against the plan on racial grounds. Calhoun said, “We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.”
Before the excursion broke up, Don Francisco gave a grand merienda, to which he invited all the people who were camping in the area. He provided several bullocks and calves, which were roasted on spits over charcoal. Over Guerrero’s cheerful protests, the prosperous Anglo merchants Davis, Rae, and Spear insisted on providing the wine. Several hundred men, women and children feasted on carne asada and wild strawberries.
As the sun set over the Pacific, songs in English and Spanish and laughter without language rose up from the camp at the end of the continent,
the sound drifting over the strawberry fields in the purple twilight like a wandering soap bubble, until it vanished forever.
Chapter 23
The Last Roll
The Cable Car Barn and Powerhouse,
Mason and Washington Streets
San Francisco has its rituals. When the Giants win, Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” wafts down over the ballpark. Every holiday season, the trees in Nob Hill’s Huntington Park are lit up while members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus sing Christmas carols. Chinese New Year brings not just the big parade but nerve-shattering explosions at unexpected times all over town. And, of course, Halloween leads to a mass public display of behavior so outré it would have made Caligula blush.
But the deepest San Francisco ritual takes place late every night on a shabby street corner in the heart of the city.
The Cable Car Barn and Powerhouse is a big brick building, built in 1907 on the site of the wonderfully named Ferries and Cliff House Railway, whose barn was destroyed in the 1906 fire. The cable cars that used to run out to the Cliff House and all over town are long gone, but three gloriously outmoded lines remain, and the barn is their home. The building houses the guts of the system: the huge winding wheels that pull the inch-thick, wire-wrapped cables under the streets and the 510-horsepower motors that drive the wheels. It’s also the place where the cars are stored and repaired. With its enormous squat brick chimney, the barn is a Victorian anachronism, like a kid’s idea of a 19th-century factory.