Sex, sin and the gangs of San Francisco. "The Barbary Coast," by the little-known author of "Gangs of New York," remains one of the strangest and most indispensable books about the city by the bay. [Salon.com]
This is a great review of a great book. I happen to live in the Barbary Coast right now, and there's a street tour offered - called "Thieves, murderers, pimps and hoes" - which takes you around to all the 'famous locales' and recants stories of debauchery and bedlam.
As the reviewer writes:
" The notion that San Francisco, as the end of the frontier, is a place without limits, a domain of anarchy and disrepute and oversized fun, recurs frequently in American letters. Mark Twain, who hit bottom here while working as a reporter, nonetheless toasted its gaudy excesses. In "On the Road," Jack Kerouac wrote, "It was the end of the continent; nobody gave a damn." Asbury's San Francisco is the sordid fountainhead of those lofty myths. He reveals, or creates, the Ur-San Francisco, the demon seed from which all those Beats and hippies and dot-com fools sprang. His San Francisco was born in riot and madness and greed: it was a kind of Saturnalia City, where the Gold Rush set a cracked tone that governed all subsequent behavior. In this wide-open town -- which initially existed merely as a way station to the hills, where women were virtually unknown, eggs could cost $50 a dozen and miners blew thousands of dollars in a single night -- the rules of ordinary conduct were suspended. "
That's MY city. That's why we moved our company (MacroMind) here in 1988. We were the first software company in the SOMA area (which became multimedia gulch and later - the mecca of dot com.) In those days, we hoped that it would turn into some new kind of Hollywood North - with a cyber twist. My 4 children are born here (and besides my inner hopes of one of them turning into a California born surfer one day) - this will be my home - for the rest of my life.
My grandfather (at age 75) moved here and set up a Communist bookstore - in the Tenderloin (in 1969.)
Needless to say the streets today are so torn up and littered with dot com refuse, that we used to kid that we should have put 'zippers' into the streets - to facilitate all the fiber infrastructure being laid. It's still ground zero for hi-tech throughout the world - and I can literally spit on some of the Barbary Coast locales talked about in this book (let alone stand on the buried ships.)
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