Barbary Coast: SAN FRANCISCO'S BAWDY PARADISE, The

THE BEGINNING OF NOB HILL

One of the odd manifestations of San Francisco's booming red light district was that the city's legitimate social life actually began in some of the tonier parlor houses because at first no other adequate facilities for comfortable socializing existed. Politicians and businessmen eager to network socially found several of the smarter brothel madames only too willing to loan their facilities to charitable and worthwhile causes. These parties, conducted in an atmosphere of total respectability with no harlots in evidence, not only spawned San Francisco's soon to burgeon cultural life but allowed many of the madames to later achieve some elite social status within the community. In a similar manner, many a bar or dance hall owner and performer - male and female - used his accumulated profits as springboards for more legitimate business ventures which later drew them to the upper strata of San Francisco's social elite.

CRIMPS, HOODLUMS AND SHANGHAI MEN

Though prostitution was the core attraction gambling, alcohol and every other form of human vice festered in an uninhibited atmosphere that was both lawless and temporal. Out of the bawdy lust of recently "paid off" seamen or miners looking for a good time sprang the greed of the whores and the leech-like pimps who frequently grew rich from the girl's earnings. (There was no limit to the types of evil-doers competing for the chance to seduce, rob, bludgeon, murder or otherwise take advantage of an inebriated seamen or miner). Attracting like a magnet, the Gold Rush of 1849 quickly drew all manner of dregs from the worst levels of society. Ex-convicts, defrocked priests, runaway sailors, army deserters, mutineers, psychos, perverts, drunkards, rapists, wife-beaters and murderers all found safe haven in the anonymous shadows of the Barbary Coast's underworld.

Fun-seekers were also prime targets for dishonest gamblers, loan sharks, thieving tailors and outfitters, drug sellers, con men and crimps. Deadly "crimps" were the most dangerous of all. They roved the streets in brutal gangs looking for hapless victims to kidnap and sell to ship captains desperate for crews to man their ships. All too soon crimping became a major criminal industry which eventually saw rival gangs brawling with each other over the turf they controlled. Crimps were exceptionally devious in their method of operation. Some pretended to be the charitable benefactors of foreign sailors. Other crimps operated supposedly legitimate seamen's boarding houses which virtually insured a continuous supply to be of shanghaied seamen. Working in conjunction with bar, dance hall and bordello owners, a crimp's easiest "recruit" was a guileless sailor rendered unconscious by a dance hall girl's tot of rum well-laced with heroin.

That crimps would stoop to any level to earn their $80 per head commission was proven when the father of a crimp known as Shanghai Brown suddenly died of a heart attack. Sticking a pipe in the dead man's mouth, his son pretended the corpse was merely dead drunk, loaded him in a skiff and sent him along to a waiting clipper bound for China with a batch of other unconscious seamen. The ruse worked. The enterprising crimp not only earned his usual fee but was saved the expense of burying his father.