San Francisco History Podcast – Sparkletack

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: May 19, 1922 Flappers Right off the bat I have to admit the fact that -- to paraphrase Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck -- what I don't know about San Francisco in the 1920s is a lot. I did know that all sorts of great Prohibition and gangster stuff must have gone on, though, so I started leafing through a couple of 1922 editions of the Chronicle looking for stories. And was immediately distracted by the flappers. You know, flappers. Louise Brooks, Josephine Baker, Zelda Fitzgerald ... read on ...

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: Sometime in 1879: The house on Rincon Hill Last week I read to you from In the Footprints of the Padres, Charles Warren Stoddard's 1902 reminiscences about the early days of San Francisco. That piece recounted a boyhood adventure, but this book is full of California stories from the latter years of the 19th century; some deservedly obscure, but some that ring pretty loud bells. Todays' short text is a great example of the latter, one that dovetails beautifully with two other San Francisco stories, both of which I've talked about at Sparkletack: the story of the Second Street Cut and the visit of Robert Louis Stevenson. The now all-grown-up Stoddard had returned to San Francisco after the Polynesian peregrinations that would inspire his best-known work, and Stevenson had just arrived from Scotland in hot pursuit of the woman he loved. The two authors hit it off, and -- as you'll hear at the end of today's Timecapsule -- it's to Stoddard and the house on Rincon Hill that we owe Stevenson's eventual fascination with the South Seas. South Park and Rincon Hill! Do the native sons of the golden West ever recall those names and think what dignity they once conferred upon the favored few who basked in the sunshine of their prosperity? South Park, with its line of omnibuses running across the city to North Beach; its long, narrow oval, filled with dusty foliage and offering a very weak apology for a park; its two rows of houses with, a formal air, all looking very much alike, and all evidently feeling their importance. There were young people's "parties" in those days, and the height of felicity was to be invited to them. As a height o'ertops a hollow, so Rincon Hill looked down upon South Park. There was more elbow-room on the breezy height; not that the height was so high or so broad, but it was breezy; and there was room for the breeze to blow over gardens that spread about the detached houses their wealth of color and perfume. How are the mighty fallen! The Hill, of course, had the farthest to fall. South Parkites merely moved out: they went to another and a better place. There was a decline in respectability and the rent-roll, and no one thinks of South Park now, -- at least no one speaks of it above a whisper. read on ...

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: Spring 1854 Charles Warren Stoddard In 1854, the down-on-their-luck Stoddard family set off from New York City to try their luck in that brand new metropolis of the West: San Francisco. Charles Warren Stoddard was just 11 years old, and San Francisco -- still in the throes of the Gold Rush, a vital, chaotic, cosmopolitan stew pot -- was the most exciting place a little boy could dream of. Charles would grow up to play a crucial part in San Francisco's burgeoning literary scene. He was just a teenager when his first poems were published in the Golden Era, and his talent and sweet personality were such that he developed long-lasting friendships with the other usual-suspect San Francisco bohemians, Ambrose Bierce, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, and Samuel Clemens. Stoddard is probably best remembered for the mildly homo-erotic short stories inspired by his extensive travels in the South Seas, but in 1902 he published a kind of memoir entitled In the Footprints of the Padres. As the old song goes, it recalls "the days of old, the days of gold, the days of '49" from a very personal point of view. The reviewers of the New York Times praised the work for Stoddard's "vivid and poetic charm", but I have to admit that I'm mainly in it for his memories. In this piece, Charles and his little gang of pals are about to embark on a day-long ramble along the north-eastern edge of the city. Let's roll the clock back to 1854, and with Charles' help, put ourselves into the shoes of an 11-year-old boy anticipating the freedom of a sunny spring Saturday. read on ...

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: April 20th, 1906 The deliverance of Hotaling's Whiskey As of Friday the 20th, San Francisco was still on fire. The Great Earthquake had happened two days earlier, but the Fire (or fires) that devastated the city were still well underway. The eastern quarter of the city -- nearly five square miles -- would be almost completely destroyed. But after the smoke cleared, a few precious blocks would emerged unscathed. Among these survivors would be the two blocks bounded by Montgomery, Jackson, Battery and Washington Streets. Oceans of ink have been spilled in documenting the incredible individual heroism and unfathomable professional incompetence displayed in fighting those fires. One of the best books on the subject is "The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906" by Philip Fradkin, from which I've swiped much of today's timecapsule. This is the story of a single building, but one of vital importance to the delicate Western palette: AP Hotaling & Co.’s warehouse at 451 Jackson Street -- the largest depository of whiskey on the West Coast. Day One: the first escape Hotaling's warehouse was threatened on the very first day of the fires, Wednesday, April 18th. This particular blaze was one of the many inspired by rampant and ill-advised dynamiting, in this case by an allegedly drunken John Bermingham, not coincidentally the president of the California Powder Works. Encouraged by the blast, the fire roared towards the whiskey-packed warehouse. Its cornices began to smoulder, but a quick-acting fireman bravely clambered to the top and hacked them off. This was Hotaling's first escape.

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: April 15, 1958 Major League Baseball in San Francisco! Exactly fifty-one years ago today, two New York City transplants faced each other for the first time on the fertile soil of the West Coast. Decades of storied rivalry already under their respective belts, these two legendary New York baseball clubs -- the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers -- were trapped in aging, unsuitable parks. Giants owner Horace Stoneham had been considering a move to Minnesota until Dodger owner Walter O'Malley -- whose plans for a new Brooklyn park were being blocked -- set his sights on the demographic paradise of Los Angeles. The National League wouldn't allow just one team to make such a drastic geographic move, so O'Malley talked Stoneham into taking a look at San Francisco. To the eternal regret and dismay of their New York fans, following the 1957 season, both teams pulled up stakes and headed for the welcoming arms of California. read on ...

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: April 9, 1871: A hoodlum king's power is broken, and all because he hated the sound of music. Apparently. This isn't going to come as a surprise, but one of my favourite histories of this fair city is Herbert Asbury's Barbary Coast, first published in 1933. That's where I ran into the little story of Billy Smith, one of the most notorious hoodlums that San Francisco ever produced. In the early 1870s, Billy Smith was the leader of a gang known as the Rising Star Club. This was a group of Barbary Coast thugs about 200 men strong, and Billy ruled them -- and the Coast -- with an iron fist. Literally. Billy was a monster of a man, and scoffed at the notion of using a knife, club or gun. No, Billy's weapon of choice was a gigantic pair of corrugated iron knuckles, which he used to tear his antagonists into shreds. Bullies This low-tech weaponry was actually not unusual for San Francisco hoodlums. They rarely used guns, since -- bullies that they were -- they tended to enter battle only when massively outnumbering their opponent ... a lone Chinese laundryman, for example, or a recalcitrant shopkeeper. I've written about the derivation of the term "hoodlum" in a previous blog post, but what's just as interesting is how proud the Barbary Coast hoodlums were of that appellation. According to Asbury, "Sometimes when they sallied forth on their nefarious errands, they heralded their progress through the streets of San Francisco by cries of "The Hoodlums are coming!" and "Look out for the Hoodlums"! Many of them had the curious idea that the very sound of the word "hoodlum" terrified the police, and that by so identifying themselves they automatically became immune to arrest."

THIS WEEK’S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:The San Francisco “Cocktail Route” 1890-something The Cocktail Route — “Champagne Days of San Francisco” Spring is most definitely in the air right now, which has brought my thoughts back to one of the great phenomena of San Francisco’s pre-earthquake era, the “Cocktail Route”. I know I’ve mentioned the “Cocktail Route” in […]

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: 1871 "A Barbary Cruise" I've been thinking about the fact that -- just like our out-of-town guests inevitably insist that we take 'em to Chinatown or Fisherman's Wharf -- in the 1870s, visitors from back in "the States" just had to go slumming in the infamous Barbary Coast. The piece I'm about to read to you was written by Mr. Albert Evans, a reporter from the good ol' Alta California. The Barbary Coast was part of his beat, and this gave him connections with the hardnosed cops whose duty it was to maintain some kind of order in that "colorful" part of town. As romanticized as it has become in popular memory, the Coast was a "hell" of a place -- filthy, violent and extremely dangerous for greenhorns. When some visitors came to town in about 1871, Albert asked one of his policeman buddies to join them on the tour. His account of this "Barbary Cruise" is a remarkable firsthand snapshot of the territory bounded by Montgomery, Stockton, Washington and Broadway. But what's almost more interesting is the way he reports it; the purple prose, the pursed-lip moralizing, and -- though I've skipped the Chinatown part of the tour -- the absolutely matter-of-fact racism on display. This is the Barbary Coast seen through the eyes of white, bourgeois, and extremely Victorian San Francisco -- prepare to be both educated and annoyed. read on ...

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: March 15, 1915: "The Man Who Owns the Sky" It was the year of the legendary Panama-Pacific International Exposition. San Francisco had once again earned that phoenix on her flag by rising from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake and fire -- and just nine years later, the city celebrated its rebirth by winning the right to host the World's Fair. Visitors from every point on the compass swarmed towards California to visit the resurgent city. You probably know that the site of the Fair was the neighborhood now called the Marina, that acres of shoreline mudflats were filled in to create space for a grand and temporary city, and that the mournfully elegant Palace of Fine Arts is its lone survivor. The exhibits and attractions on offer were endless and famously enchanting, but one of the most spectacular events took place in the air above the Fair. On March 15, a quarter of a million people gathered in the fairgrounds and on the hills above them to see a man in an ultra-modern experimental airplane perform unparalleled feats of aeronautical acrobatics. That man was Lincoln Beachey, and in 1915 he was the most famous aviator in the country -- known from coast to coast as "The Man Who Owns the Sky". read on ...

THIS WEEK’S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: 1956: Gold medals or Gold records? An athletic crooner makes a life-changing choice 1956: “Send blank contracts” Of course you know Johnny Mathis. The velvet-voiced crooner is a fixture of the softer side of American pop culture, providing reliably romantic background music for cuddling couples for over sixty years. He’s sold […]

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: 1852: A Gold Rush shaving-saloon I love personal accounts of the goings-on in our little town more than just about anything. The sights, the smells, the daily routine ... I want the nuts and bolts of what it was like to live here THEN! It's even better when the eyeballs taking it all in belong to an outsider, a visiting alien to whom everything's an oddity. For my birthday a couple of years ago my Lady Friend gave me a book that's packed to the gills with this kind of first-person account. It's called -- aptly enough -- San Francisco Memories. And because I'm kind of a dope, it's only just occurred to me that this stuff is the absolute epitome of what a timecapsule should be -- and that I really ought to be sharing some of this early San Francisco gold with you. Ahem. So share it I will. Our correspondent: Frank Marryat Frank Marryat was the son of Captain Frederick Marryat, famous English adventurer and author of popular seafaring tales. A chip off the old block, young Frank had himself already written a book of traveler's tales from Borneo and the Indian archipelago. Looking for a new writing subject, he set his sights on an even more exotic locale -- Gold Rush California. In 1850, with manservant and three hunting dogs in tow, Frank left the civilized shores of England behind, crossed the Atlantic and the Isthmus of Panama, and made his way towards the Golden Gate. The book that resulted, California Mountains and Molehills, would be published in 1855 -- ironically the year of Marryat's own demise from yellow fever. He covers a phenomenal amount of oddball San Francisco and early California history, all neatly collected to satisfy the curiousity of his English reading public -- the Chinese question, the Committee of Vigilance, squatter wars, bears, rats, oysters, gold, even the pickled head of Joaquin Murieta -- and to top it off, Marryat sailed into the Bay just as San Francisco was being destroyed (again) by fire, this one the Great June Fire of 1850! Don't worry. They'll have the city rebuilt in a couple of weeks, in plenty of time for Frank to spend some quality months slumming in the Gold Country, and then, like the rest of the Argonauts, ride down into the big city for supplies -- and a shave. That's right -- put your feet up and relax -- in today's Timecapsule, we're going to visit a Gold Rush barber shop. read on ...

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: February 19, 1921 Ghosts of Lands End On this date the cornerstone for San Francisco's spectacular Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum was levered into place. The Museum was to be a vehicle for the cultural pretensions of the notorious Alma Spreckels. This social-climbing dynamo envisioned her Museum as a far western outpost of French art and culture. Drawing on the vast fortune of her husband -- sugar baron Adolph Spreckels -- she constructed a replica of the Palace of Versailles out at Lands End. Alma would stock the place with art treasures from her own vast collection -- including one of the finest assemblages of Rodin sculpture on the planet. I've already talked myself hoarse on the subject of Alma Spreckels' rags-to-riches clamber up the social slopes of Pacific Heights, but what's really interesting me today is not what's inside her museum, but what lay underneath that cornerstone in 1921. read on ...

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: February, 1869 The battle for Rincon Hill is over There aren't too many people living who remember this now, but Rincon Hill was once the fanciest neighborhood in San Francisco. You know the place, right? It's south of Market Street, an asphalt-covered lump of rock with the Bay Bridge sticking out of the north-east side and Second Street running by, out to the Giants' ballpark. That's Rincon Hill. What's left of it, anyway. Exactly 140 years ago this month, the California Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to a scheme which would destroy it. San Francisco's first fashionable address As San Francisco's Gold Rush-era population explosion of tents and rickety clapboard started to settle down, the bank accounts of merchants and lucky miners started to fill up. Men were becoming civilized, acquiring culture, and the sort of women known as "wives" were moving into town. This led to a demand for a neighborhood that was distinctly separate from the barbarous Barbary Coast, and with its sunny weather, gentle elevation, and spectacular views of the Bay, Rincon Hill filled the bill. According to the Annals of San Francisco, by 1853 Rincon Hill was dotted with "numerous elegant structures" -- including the little gated community of South Park. By the 1860s, the Hill was covered with mansions in a riot of architectural styles, and had become the social epicenter of the young city. And then in 1968 (cue evil-real-estate-developer music here) a San Franciscan named John Middleton got himself elected to the California State Legislature. According to some sources, his elevation was part of a conspiracy to push through a specific radical civic "improvement". The Second Street "Cut" Here's the situation that required "improving": at the time, there was a high volume of heavy commercial horse cart traffic to the busy South Beach wharves from Market Street. Second Street provided a direct route, but -- since it went up and over the highest part of Rincon Hill -- horse carts were obliged to take the long way around via Third Street. Middleton's plan was simplicity itself: carve a deep channel through the heart of the hill, right along Second Street. He just happened to own a big chunk of property at Second and Bryant Streets, and couldn't wait to see his property values go through the roof. "But wait," you're saying, "what about the owners of those lovely homes up on fashionable Rincon Hill? Won't they object to having their front doors open up to a 100-foot canyon instead of a sidewalk? Do they even have the technology to pull this off? And what about the horrific mess the construction is going to make? We are talking high society here, right?" read on ...

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: February 1, 1849 The eye of the Gold Rush hurricane The spring of 1849 -- dawn of a year forever branded into the national consciousness as the era of the California Gold Rush. And so it was -- but that was back East, in the "States". In San Francisco, the Gold Rush had actually begun an entire year earlier. I'd better set the scene. The United States were at war with Mexico -- it's President Polk and "Manifest Destiny" time. San Francisco (then Yerba Buena) was conquered without a shot in July of 1847. In the first month of 1848, gold was quietly discovered in the foothills east of Sutter's Fort. Days later, the Mexican war came to an end, and Alta California became sole property of the United States. Sam Brannan kick-starts things in '48 San Francisco was skeptical about the gold strike, but in May of '48, Sam Brannan made his famous appearance on Market Street brandishing a bottle of gold dust. His shouts of "Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River" triggered the first wave of the Gold Rush. The village of about 500 souls was emptied almost overnight as its inhabitants hotfooted it for the hills. Among the many businesses left completely in the lurch was Sam Brannan's own newspaper, the California Star. While the entrepreneurial Brannan was busy becoming a millionaire selling shovels to gold miners, by June his entire staff had abandoned the paper and set off to make their own fortunes. Edward Kemble publishes the Alta California >Brannan sold what was left of his newspaper to a more civic-minded businessman, Mr. Edward Cleveland Kemble. Kemble resuscitated the Star (along with San Francisco's other gold rush-crippled paper, the Californian) as a brand spanking new paper he called the Alta California. The first issue appeared at the tail end of 1848. That brings us right up to today's timecapsule. The editorial on the front page of issue #5 of the new paper is a treasure trove of contemporary San Francisco perspectives. As editor Kemble was composing this piece -- a retrospective of the previous year, and a peek into the uncertain future -- it was the dead of winter, and the first wave of the Rush had crested and broken back towards the city. Kemble was first and foremost a businessman, and he was concerned with the civic and financial future of San Francisco. He points out that the city is poorly governed, a little short on law and order, already swelling with gold-seekers from Mexico and Oregon, and -- to sum it up -- is woefully unprepared for the onslaught of humanity, the avalanche of "49ers" already looming on the horizon. But though he's aware that the next wave is going to be a doozy, with 20-20 historical hindsight we know that he doesn't really have a clue. What Kemble doesn't know ... yet. By the end of 1849, the village of San Francisco will have burst at every seam, with a population exploding from 2000 to 25,000. Tens of thousands of gold seekers will flow through the port and even more will stagger in overland from the East, all in all 100,000 strong. The beautiful harbour will be choked with hundreds of deserted, rotting ships, and the local government will prove to be ineffectual and almost totally corrupt. By the end of '49 San Francisco will have become a wild, sprawling, lawless shanty boomtown, and the soul and future of our City by the Bay will be permanently transformed. Kemble's observations give us ground-level insight into the concerns of the village of San Francisco in the winter of 1848 -- a priceless peek into the eye of the gold rush hurricane. read on ...

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: January 30, 1847: Yerba Buena becomes San Francisco Yerba Buena That was the name given to the tiny bayside settlement back in 1835, a name taken from the wild mint growing on the sand dunes that surrounded it. And if it hadn't been for the lucky first name of an elegant Spanish noblewoman, that's what the city of San Francisco would still be called today. Our magnificent bay had already worn the name of San Francisco since 1769 -- but though some in Yerba Buena apparently used it as a nickname, it never occurred to its motley population to make "San Francisco" official. In July of 1846 Yerba Buena was just 11 years old, a sleepy hamlet in Mexican territory with just about 200 residents. The place woke up some when Captain John B. Montgomery sailed into the harbour, marched into the center of town and raised the Stars and Stripes. The Mexican alcalde and other officials split town before Montgomery's marines arrived, so -- at least as far as Yerba Buena was concerned -- the annexation of California in the Mexican-American war took place without a fight. Don Mariano Vallejo, Dr. Robert Semple and the Bear Flag connection A couple of weeks earlier up in Sonoma, the rancho of Comandante General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo had been invaded by a ragtag collection of American frontiersman. They were attempting to strike a blow for California's independence from Mexico. Don Vallejo, one of the most powerful and wealthy men in the Mexican territory of Alta California, was arrested -- kidnapped, perhaps -- and transported to Sutter's Fort on the Sacramento River. You'll undoubtedly recognize this as a scene from the infamous "Bear Flag Revolt" -- a terrific story, but I'm in grave danger of digressing here. In fact, I mention it only because the route taken by Vallejo's captors led them across some of the General's considerable Mexican land-grant holdings, specifically those around the convergence of the Sacramento River and San Francisco Bay. read on ...

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: January 20, 1890 Miss Nellie Bly whizzes past San Francisco I got a hot tip that this was the anniversary of the day Miss Nellie Bly stopped by on the home stretch of her dash around the world. But as it turns out, well ... some background first, I guess. For starters, who the heck was Nellie Bly? Sixteen years old in 1880, Miss Elizabeth Jane Cochrane of Pittsburgh was a budding feminist. When a blatantly sexist column appeared in the local paper, the teenager fired off a scathing rebuttal. The editor was so struck by her spunk and intellect that he (wisely) hired her, assigning a nom de plume taken from the popular song: "Nellie Bly". Her early investigative reportage focused on the travails of working women, but the straitjacket of Victorian expectations soon squeezed her into the ghetto of the women's section -- fashion, gardening, and society tea-parties. Nellie despised this, and tore off to Mexico for a year to write her own kind of stories. Back in the States, she talked her way into a job at Joseph Pulitzer's legendary New York World. Her first assignment was a doozy -- going undercover as a patient into New York's infamous Women's Lunatic Asylum. Her passionate reporting of the brutality and neglect uncovered there shook the world, and Nellie Bly became a household name. More exposés followed -- sweatshops, baby-selling -- but then, in 1888, Nellie was struck by a different idea. read on ...

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: January 17, 1861 Countess Lola Montez -- in Memorium As was undoubtedly marked on your calendar, San Francisco's patron saint Emperor Norton died last week, January 7, 1880. But his was not the only January passing worthy of note. Ten days later (and nineteen years earlier), we lost perhaps the most notorious personage ever to grace the streets of our fair city. I speak, of course, of Countess Lola Montez . Yes, that's the one -- "whatever Lola wants, Lola gets". You already know Lola's story, of course. You don't? The breathtakingly gorgeous Irish peasant girl with the soul of a grifter and the heart of a despot? How she -- with a few sexy dance steps, a fraudulent back story involving Spanish noble blood and the claim of Lord Byron as her father -- turned Europe upside down and provoked a revolution in Bavaria? Still doesn't ring a bell, hmm? Well, Lola's whole story is a little too large for this space. She'd already lived about three lifetimes' worth of adventure -- and burned through romances with personalities from King Ludwig the First to Sam Brannan -- before conquering Gold Rush-era San Francisco with her scandalous "Spider Dance". If you missed the Sparkletack podcast about this amazing character, you might want to rectify that little omission. After her European escapades, Lola found that freewheeling San Francisco suited her tempestuous eccentricity to a T. Brandishing the title of "Countess" -- a Bavarian souvenir -- she drank and caroused and became the absolute center of the young city's attention. It's said that men would come pouring out of Barbary Coast saloons to gawk at the raven-haired vision sashaying through the mud with a pair of greyhounds at her heels, a white cockatoo perched on one shoulder, and a cigar cocked jauntily from her lips ... and do I even need to mention her pet grizzly bears? read on ...

THIS WEEK: January 7, 1898: The execution of Gilded Age San Francisco's most notorious criminal Sure, Jack the Ripper had set a certain tone for serial killing just a few years earlier, but the crimes of Theodore Durrant were even more shocking. See, Jack's victims had been prostitutes, but San Francisco's "Demon of the Belfry" had murdered a pair of girls who were respectable churchgoers. In his very own church. On the day before Easter Sunday, 1896, a group of women held a meeting at the Emmanual Baptist Church in the Mission District. As they bustled about the small kitchen preparing tea, one woman reached towards a cupboard, looking for teacups. As the door swung open, she shrieked in horror and fainted. Crammed inside was the butchered and violated body of Miss Minnie Williams. Minnie had been a devoted church-goer, and the police quickly connected her death with the case of another young woman who'd gone missing two weeks earlier. The vivacious Blanche Lamont had also been a member of the church, so the grounds were searched from bottom to top. The body was found in the dusty, disused bell tower -- two weeks dead, arranged like a medical cadaver, and brutalized in an equally horrifying way. Suspicion fell upon a young medical student and assistant Sunday School superintendent who had been close to both women -- Theo Durrant. News of the police's interest in Durrant spread through the Mission and then infected all of San Francisco. By the time he was actually picked up, only a massive police presence prevented the angry mob from stringing him up on the spot. San Francisco's "Crime of the Century" Bankers, judges, hack drivers and bootblacks gossiped about little else, and people lined up for blocks to view the victims' identical white coffins at a local funeral parlor. The City's many newspapers were absolutely thrilled with the story, of course -- during the next couple of years, well over 400 articles about it would appear in the San Francisco Chronicle alone. It wasn't just that the two young women were such "upstanding citizens" -- the angle that made it horrifying and captivating to San Francisco was the fact that Theo Durrant was such a nice, normal guy. He was a handsome young man, friendly and open in demeanour, well-liked, of excellent reputation, and (again) the assistant superintendent of a Sunday School. Our modern cliché of the serial killer as the "guy next door who wouldn't hurt a fly" was still a long way off. It seemed absolutely incredible to San Francisco that such a -- well, such a 'gentleman' could be capable of such bestial and savage acts. read on ...

THIS WEEK: December 25, 1894: First San Francisco Cliff House burns On Christmas Day, 1894, the first San Francisco Cliff House burned to the ground. As the Chronicle poetically reported the next morning, Ah, yes. We discussed this first incarnation of the Cliff House a few weeks ago -- its novel location at the edge of the world, its singular popularity with San Francisco's beautiful people, and its subsequent decline into a house of ill-repute. Well, before it could rise from that undignified state to the status of a beloved landmark, San Francisco's original "destination resort" needed a white knight to ride to the rescue. That knight would be Mr. Adolph Sutro, who -- in 1881 -- purchased not only the faded Cliff House, but acres of land surrounding it. Mining engineer millionaire and future San Francisco mayor, the larger-than-life Sutro had already established a fabulous estate on the heights above the Cliff House, and by the mid-1880s could count 10% of San Francisco as his personal property. Unlike the robber barons atop Nob Hill, though, Adolph believed in sharing his good fortune -- you can hear more about his eccentric philanthropy in the "Adolph Sutro" podcast right here at Sparkletack.com. Sutro's first order of business upon making acquiring the property was to instruct his architect to turn the Cliff House into a "respectable resort with no bolts on the doors or beds in the house." This was just a small part of Sutro's grand entertain-the-heck-out-of-San-Francisco scheme. The elaborate gardens of his estate were already open to the public, and the soon-to-be-famous Sutro Baths were on the drawing board. His goal was to create a lavish and family safe environment out at Land's End, and that's just how things worked out. With streetcar lines beginning to move into the brand new Golden Gate Park, and the City's acquisition of the Point Lobos Toll Road (now Geary Boulevard), the western edge of the City was becoming more attractive and accessible, and over the next decade, families did indeed flock to Adolph's resuscitated resort. And then in 1894, it happened. About 8 o'clock on Christmas evening, after most of the holiday visitors had gone home for the day, a small fire broke out in a kitchen chimney. As the flames shot up inside the walls, the horrified staff quickly learned that none of the fire-extinguishers around the place actually worked. Within minutes, the entire building was engulfed in flames. The resort burned so quickly, in fact, that its famous guest book, inscribed by such notables as Mark Twain, Ulysses S Grant, and Rutherford B. Hayes, was lost along with the building itself. As the Chronicle went on to report, the Cliff House Sutro hadn't taken out insurance on the place, but he was so determined to rebuild -- and so damned rich -- that it just really didn't matter. And in fact, the burning of Cliff House number one was a sort of blessing in disguise. That fire cleared the decks -- so to speak -- for Cliff House number two, which would rise from the ashes like a magnificent 8-story Victorian phoenix. Cliff House mark 2 would become everybody's favourite, an opulent monstrosity as beloved by San Franciscans in the Gilded Age as it still is today, frankly -- but guess what happened to that one? The fate of Sutro's Gingerbread Palace coming up in a future Sparkletack Timecapsule. read on ...

THIS WEEK: December 15, 1849: The London Times looks west As I perused the pages of an 1849-era copy of the Alta California this week, I ran across a little item reprinted from the venerable London Times. I'd been on the hunt for, you know, colorful "Gold Rush-y" stuff, but sandwiched between reports on the progress of the new Mormon Settlement at the Great Salt Lake and a cholera epidemic in Marseilles, was a piece nicely showcasing British condescension towards their American cousins, particularly the slightly barbarous variety found out West. I assume it was reprinted here because the Alta California took it as a compliment, but the author responsible is probably best pictured wearing a frock coat, a monocle, and a supercilious expression. The London Times has received a copy of the Alta California of June last and ruminates thereon as follows: "Before us lies a real California newspaper, with all its politics, paragraphs, and advertisements, printed and published at San Francisco in the 14th of last June. In a literary or professional point of view, there is nothing very remarkable in this production. Journalism is a science so intuitively comprehended by American citizens, that their most rudimentary efforts in this line are sure to be tolerably successful. Newspapers are to them what theatres and cafés are to Frenchmen. In the Mexican war, the occupation of each successive town by the invading (American) army was signalized by the immediate establishment of a weekly journal, and of a "bar" for retailing those spirituous compounds known by the generic denomination of "American drinks". The same fashions have been adopted in California, and the opinions of the American portion of that strange population are already represented by journals of more than average ability and intelligence." read on ...