Eddy & Jones: A Closer Look

by Woody LaBounty

My grandmother and I would take the 21-Hayes bus downtown to shop at the Emporium in the early 1970s, and she would tell me how she used to go to Mid-Market and the Tenderloin to see movies, listen to music, and dance. This was difficult for me to grasp as a child—and not only because my grandmother did not look the flapper type. The theatres that still operated on Market Street showed adult films, and the once stately buildings in between housed shabby Army surplus outlets and knock-off camera stores.

In her younger days, my grandmother worked as a server for Fosters, a local chain of diners with a location on the northwest corner of Eddy and Jones Streets. Here is an advertisement for the Arcadia Dancing Pavilion on the opposite corner, back in the Tenderloin’s rollicking era of jazz clubs, burlesque shows, and dance halls:

Advertisement card for Arcadia Dancing Pavilion at Eddy and Jones Streets, circa 1920. “The Finest Dancing Pavilion in the United States. Dancing Every Evening and Sunday Afternoon.” (wnp37.04316.jpg; Marilyn Blaisdell Collection, Courtesy of a private collector.)

Before the 1906 earthquake burned the block, this northeast corner was home to the Wigwam and Alhambra Theatres. (No relation to the landmark movie palace on Polk Street near Green, today home to a gym.) Some have speculated that elements of the burned-out theatre structure were preserved in the Arcadia Dancing Pavilion, which had a similar shape when it opened in 1915. Boxing matches, an ice skating rink, and bowling alleys all operated out of the Arcadia building through the twentieth century. Here’s a cable car passing in 1935, when the Arcadia was pushing skating as an attraction:

Jones Street Shuttle Cable Car #60 on O’Farrell, Jones and Hyde Line. View toward northeast corner of Eddy and Jones, circa 1935. (wnp14.1905.jpg; Courtesy of a private collector.)

Before the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission shut it down in 1954, this cable car ran just five blocks on Jones Street, shuttling passengers from O’Farrell Street (where another cable car line operated) to Market Street. Here’s the same Jones Street shuttle car and a 31-Balboa streetcar meeting in 1948 in front of the Arcadia building after a remodel:

Jones Street Shuttle cable car #60, 31-line Balboa streetcar #974 at Eddy and Jones in 1948. Downtown Bowl neon visible over entry. (wnp27.6189.jpg; Courtesy of a private collector.)

From 1942 to 1977, Downtown Bowl occupied the building as “the show place of Bay Area bowling.”1 Our friend Jack Tillmany remembers a beautiful and elaborate neon sign of pins flying out front. Big-name bowlers and a very loyal community of clubs and teams patronized Downtown Bowl until, in the words of San Francisco Examiner columnist Bill Mandel, “It went to terminal seed and was replaced by a bum-proof public park.”2

That would be Father Alfred E. Boeddeker Park, which opened in May 1985 after the city purchased and demolished the old Arcadia building. Named after the Franciscan priest who created and ran the famed St. Anthony’s Dining Room soup kitchen, Boeddeker Park was not considered the Arcadia of city parks over the next thirty years. To “cut down on low-life habitués,” the corner was enclosed with an uninviting high iron fence that made it seem more prison than park.3 While Tenderloin residents deserved and fought for a slice of open space in one of the most urban neighborhoods of the city, Boeddeker was dirty, dangerous, and rated as the worst park in San Francisco. The San Francisco Chronicle’s John King remembered, “Again and again the space was ‘reclaimed.’ Again and again it slid back.”4

Just as the city changed dramatically from my grandmother’s prime to my childhood, San Francisco has again remade itself just in my adulthood. Anyone with a ten-year tenure in the city will agree, as towers loom over South of Market, $30 cocktails are served in the Mission, and private jitney vans weave with Ubers and Lyfts through the Western Addition.

For a long time it felt the Tenderloin would stay the same, surrounded by wealth and upheaval, but more a victim than a beneficiary of the money pouring into town. While an extremely diverse neighborhood, it is still where the intractable and shameful sides of our modern society are most on public display, as those who live on the margins, who suffer from homelessness, drug addiction, mental and physical illness, and poverty, are crowded together, pushed out of gentrified neighborhoods, priced out of the new construction. It is also home to thousands of children.

Positive change has come in the last couple of years. In December 2014, Boeddeker Park was reclaimed yet again, redesigned with a determined and concerted effort by The Trust for Public Land, the city, and neighborhood residents. (Check out this video from the Trust for Public Land about the park’s redesign.)

This time it seems to be working. On the old corner where San Franciscans like my grandmother once came to dance and play, now senior citizens stretch, children run, and a little sunshine slips through the apartment towers.

Boedekker Park. Courtesy of Sherwood Design Engineers.

Courtesy of San Francisco Recreation and Park Department

Notes:

1. “Downtown Bowl Shuts Its Doors,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 12, 1977, pg. 45.

2. Bill Mandel, “Bowling is Spare-time Fun Again in Suburbia,” San Francisco Examiner, May 11, 1986, pg. 20.

3. Marshall Kilduff, “Supervisors Act on Tenderloin Park,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 28, 1983, pg. 2.

4. John King, “Tenderloin Likes its Reborn Park,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 5, 2015, pg. D1.

The San Franciscans: Lucky Baldwin

by Nicole Meldahl

Researching locals found in an OpenSFHistory image.

What I love about historical research is the way it opens up the past and allows us to connect with people, understanding ourselves more in the process. I had one such experience this week in relation to two negatives that caught our attention early on in processing the OpenSFHistory archive, but didn’t get my focus until now. Historical kismet is a very real thing. After some sleuthing, we learned that these negatives showed the aftermath of the Baldwin Hotel fire of 1898.

One of the two negatives that caught our attention showing fire wagons pumping out water after the Baldwin Hotel fire on November 21, 1898. (wnp14.0979, negative courtesy of a private collector).

View southeast across Market Street. Note the intricate stained glass street lamp advertising The Louvre Beer Hall and Restaurant on the far left. (wnp14.0978, negative courtesy of a private collector).

Built by Elias Jackson Baldwin at Powell and Market Streets in 1878, the Baldwin was second in luxury to only the Palace Hotel and in the early morning hours of November 23, 1898, it burned to the ground. As I researched more about this event, I learned more about Baldwin, his life, and its curious intersections with my own—proof that history is always unfolding, becoming more relevant and intimate the closer we care to look.

A Perkins street view of the opulent Baldwin Hotel at Market and Powell Streets, 1885. (wnp37.00277, Marilyn Blaisdell Collection, courtesy of a private collector).

Elias was better known as “Lucky” after striking it rich on a single Comstock silver mine plunge worth over $2 million. He used this profit to purchase thoroughbred horses from Kentucky as well as broad swaths of ranch land in Southern California between 1875 and 1880. At his Santa Anita ranch, he raised livestock, bred horses, stocked a nursery, and made brandy and wine from crops grown onsite. It was also here, a little over a hundred years later, that I would grow up and live most of my young adult life.

As lucky as he was in business, Baldwin was less lucky in love—peppering four marriages with innumerable affairs. He had two daughters (that he knew of), but his daughter Anita was by far his favorite. Born in San Francisco to Lucky and Jane Virginia Dexter, she was the “belle of the Bay Area in her youth,” and, at the age of almost 16, she secretly married George W. Baldwin—a clerk at the Baldwin Hotel who also happened to be her second cousin—on a tugboat just outside the Golden Gate in 1892 on January 5 (my mother’s birthday). The elopement coincided with Lucky’s trip to the Santa Anita ranch, and newspapers rolled out headlines like “Lucky Baldwin’s Daughter Anita Mated Against His Wishes.” Clearly, working and living at the Baldwin Hotel was no longer an option so George took a job in the county clerk’s office, working out of City Hall, and the couple took rooms with a “private family” on McAllister Street after the honeymoon. Soon, however, the young couple moved back into the Baldwin Hotel after father and daughter formally reconciled. The little family limped along.

The evening of November 22, 1898 was a normal one in the hotel. Guests and locals took in a performance of Secret Service in the basement-level Baldwin Theatre. Some perhaps enjoyed a meal at a fashionable café across the street called The Louvre, which was counter-intuitively known for its German fare. Then, at 3:20 a.m., a fire started in the basement and shot upwards towards the roof. The San Francisco Call of November 23 reported, “In a very few minutes the firemen were at the scene…The ladders…placed with inconceivable rapidity against the side of the building. The shadowy figures of men mounted the ladders…while a thousand voices gave vent to tremendous cheers as one life was saved from the building.”1 The word tremendous was used repeatedly in this article, and much of the reporting was more…incendiary than factual.

Fire-fighters hosing down the Baldwin Hotel at Powell and Market after the early morning fire on November 23, 1898. (wnp32.0283, Emiliano Echeverria Collection)

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Call reported, Lucky was “racing around like a madman,” asking for someone to retrieve something from his room. What could Lucky not live without? Insurance papers, perhaps? No…a set of gold mounted harnesses valued over $7,000—appropriate for the man who later founded the Santa Anita Racetrack. Many were injured and lost their lives in the fire, but many more escaped physically unharmed thanks to heroic efforts by the San Francisco Fire Department. Adjacent businesses only suffered severe smoke and water damage, although ground floor businesses reported total losses, citing insufficient insurance, and the hotel was gutted largely due to the fact that the city’s water supply couldn’t handle the work load in an eerie premonition of what was to come in April 1906. The day after the fire the Sacramento Daily Union reported “The Baldwin Hotel, for almost thirty years one of the principle landmarks of San Francisco, is no more.”2

The Baldwin family escaped physically unscathed and left the city for greener pastures in Southern California. George, who had purchased several racehorses (perhaps to get closer to a disapproving father-in-law?), took his stable to the east coast in January of 1899, hoping to earn some quick cash. Sadly, he returned to annulment papers and Anita filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion in October of 1900. More accurately, she filed on the grounds of Hull McClaughry—a Democrat and Harvard law grad who gave her the vapors during George’s time on the Atlantic Coast. Lucky, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, was no more amused by him than he was by cousin George. Asking Anita to do nothing hasty, Lucky left on a trip north looking to recoup his money in the gold fields of Alaska. Anita promptly married Hull in Carson City, Nevada on October 26, 1900; she certainly had a flair for elopement.

Things worked out okay, though…for Anita and her father. When Baldwin founded my hometown of Arcadia, California in 1903, Hull became a valuable resource for Lucky as one of the first men to be elected to the town’s Board of Trustees. Anita and her husband continued to live and flourish in the Bay Area as their family grew, while Lucky finally accomplished a lifelong goal: building the Santa Anita Racetrack in 1907. The San Francisco Call reported, “It matters not to him whether the venture proves to be a financial success or not. That is for others to see. It is sufficient that the track has been established—that after years of planning and repeated disappointments he has achieved the aim of his greatest ambition.”3 I spent most of my youth at this racetrack because my father worked there as a jockey’s agent from the 1980s until he retired due to illness in the early 2000s. This is where I spent hours listening to old-timers tell tall tales, which is probably why I’m now a historian. Who knows what I would have been without Lucky’s obsession with Kentucky thoroughbreds?

When Lucky died in March of 1909, he left Anita nearly $10 million and most of the San Gabriel Valley, including the Santa Anita ranch where the couple increasingly spent much of their time until Hull also got the boot in 1913. Anita alleged cruelty and testified at her divorce hearing that “she and her husband quarreled so often over the cost of living as a result of his economical ideas that her health became impaired.” She paid him $300,000 to get lost, then dropped $225,000 on a pearl necklace at a San Francisco jewelry store and built a 50-room mansion in Arcadia called Anoakia where she would live until her death in 1939. I drove by this mansion more times than I can count and I never knew its history. It’s funny the places you never think to think about. It became a private school for many years and then plans moved forward to demolish it and build luxury homes—a very common story in the San Gabriel Valley. Despite efforts to save it, they tore the whole thing down in 1999. Ironically, my dad’s jockey, Laffit Pincay, Jr., was one of the first residents to live at the comically-named Anoakia Estates.

Anita’s mansion and Lucky’s hotel may be no more, but their stories remind us that Northern California may have more common threads with Southern California than the regional feud would like to admit. History is funny that way. I also see many parallels between the grandiose life of Lucky and his spirited daughter to that of San Francisco mayor and plutocrat Adolph Sutro and his favorite daughter, Emma, and wonder if the two families ever crossed paths. Despite living much of their lives in Arcadia, both Lucky and Anita chose to spend eternity in the Bay Area and both are buried in a family crypt in Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma. In fact, several of the Baldwin heirs preferred living in the Bay Area despite their origins in Pasadena, much like myself. I often say I’m a Californian by birth and trade, and this little research adventure has made that all the clearer to me. After all, who could have guessed that two little negatives could remind me what a lucky lady I am to be born in Baldwin’s shadow and then find purpose on Sutro’s west side? That is the power of History.

Notes:

1. “The Baldwin Hotel Block Entirely Gutted by Fire,” San Francisco Call, November 23, 1898, pg. 1.
2. “The Baldwin Hotel Fire,” Sacramento Daily Union, November 24, 1898, pg. 1.
3. “Lucky Baldwin King at Santa Anita,” San Francisco Call, December 16, 1907, pg. 11.

Razing the Tower: A Closer Look

by Woody LaBounty

In May 1906, San Francisco was still recovering from the great earthquake and fires that had destroyed most of the city a month earlier. In addition to caring for the refugees camping in parks in tents and shanties, the city faced restoring vital services and transportation links to rebuild the city. A massive clean up job was underway.

Researcher Robert Bardell has written a comprehensive analysis of how the remains of thousands of buildings, twisted rails, and buckled streets were cleared away. He notes, “The unsung heroes of this story are men and animals, not machines.” With some limited use of derricks, steam engines, and explosives to demolish large building walls, it was muscle, sinew, picks, and shovels that did most of the work. I recently came across a newspaper article from 112 years ago this week that illustrates Bob’s point.

St. Dominic’s two towers are visible in the distance viewed from Hamilton Square before the 1906 earthquake. (wnp14.0896-1.jpg, David Peyser photograph; Courtesy of a private collector.)

St. Dominic’s Catholic Church in the Western Addition at Bush and Steiner Streets suffered heavy damage from the earthquake; its north tower was shaken away to the spired framework and surmounting cross while the south tower had part of its dome still intact, apparently balanced precariously on a point. Outside of the fire zone, it was a popular subject for photographers, and we have dozens of images in OpenSFHistory, both professional and amateur.

View southeast across Pine to earthquake damage of St. Dominic’s Church. Pacific States Telephone Building at right. (wnp27.3037.jpg; Courtesy of a private collector.)

View east on Bush Street to earthquake damage of St. Dominic’s Church on corner of Steiner Street, April 1906. (wnp15.1218.jpg; Courtesy of a private collector.)

On May 14, 1906, a gang of wreckers was dispatched to pull down the southern tower, using a wire cable pulled by a steam engine set up at Pine and Steiner Streets. The cable snapped. The workers tried repeatedly the same method, but each time the cable broke or yanked free of its attachment to the stubborn tower. Finally, three men—Gus Moore, Paul Abel, and Joseph Lewis—were dispatched to climb the tower and weaken the supports. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the next day “The scene was an impressive one and was viewed by considerably more than 1000 people.”1

Crowd forms to watch the demolition of St Dominic’s south tower, May 14, 1906. (wnp37.00145.jpg, Miles Bros. image #14; Marilyn Blaisdell Collection, Courtesy of a private collector.)

“First these men used saws on the timber supports, cutting through until the merest strip of solid timber remained. Then they descended, and again the strain was put on the cable and again the cable snapped. Abandoning the saw, the men took their axes with them on their later trips and wielded them persistently, until those who stood far below, with necks craned, feared that the supports would collapse, and let the tower down on the fearless men, who smoked their pipes as they stolidly swung their axes.”

After four hours of labor, the men and the machine finally pulled the tower down. It crashed through the center section of the church, covering the front entry steps.

St. Dominic’s south tower dome down, May 14, 1906. (wnp37.00126.jpg, Miles Bros. image #19; Marilyn Blaisdell Collection, Courtesy of a private collector.)

Once the dust had settled the crowd rushed upon the pile of ruins, along with the wreckers and police on duty, “for in its fall the tower had carried away the great, glimmering cross that surmounted the center of the front wall, and the cross was somewhere under the debris.”

The cross was unearthed from the debris intact. “As the crowd had looked at it before the fall it had seemed a small thing, possibly a foot high, but when it was taken out of the ruin it required the united strength of eight sturdy men to carry it to a place of safety.”

Perhaps the cross was incorporated into the rebuilt St. Dominic’s, which, retrofitted with buttresses after the 1989 earthquake, still stands at the corner of Bush and Steiner.

Notes:

1. “St. Dominic’s Tower Razed,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 15, 1906, pg. 10.

Older Woman on Vacation, 1962: A Closer Look

by Woody LaBounty

In the thousands of San Francisco photos in OpenSFHistory there are naturally many taken by tourists visiting the city. So we have lots of Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf, and cable car turnaround views. Some are more interesting than others, with the best including people. While the bridge or a Powell Street cable car look much the same today, people’s clothes, hairstyles, and accessories of the past instantly increase a photo’s interest, at least for me.

Wading through the hundreds of slides, prints, and negatives, we can get caught up in a particular family, imagining the relationships, the backstories, as Mom, Dad, and the kids go stop to stop in the city. Occasionally, but rarely, the technique or skill of an amateur photographer can grab us. One group of images from 1962, found at a flea market, struck us as particularly artistic, something you might see as a gallery installation at SFMOMA. We don’t know who the photographer is, but he or she records an older woman’s visit to the city in a series of haunting views.

We begin at the Bellevue Hotel with this casual shot. Our subject isn’t in the frame, but we have an expectation she might step out past that doorman momentarily:

Bellevue Hotel, 505 Geary (southwest corner of Geary and Taylor) in 1962. Now known as The Marker. (wnp12.0068.jpg, David Gallagher Collection.)

Here is our protagonist, a lady of later years, standing in the strangely empty midway of Playland at the Beach. An unaffiliated group huddles behind her and a single pigeon struts in the foreground:

Midway near Cabrillo Street at Playland. View north in 1962. (wnp12.0074.jpg, David Gallagher Collection.)

She takes in the mighty Pacific Ocean. Is she impressed?:

Looking across Great Highway in front of Playland, 1962. (wnp12.0103.jpg, David Gallagher Collection.)

View South toward Ocean Beach and Lurline Pier. (wnp12.0076.jpg, David Gallagher Collection.)

She walks up the hill to the Cliff House:

View South from Cliff House. Playland behind. Advertising signs for Skytram, California Missions, Doll House, Camera Obscura. (wnp12.0079.jpg, David Gallagher Collection.)

But pauses to view Sutro Heights Park on the hill above, or perhaps a passing sea gull, or really just the Cliff House awning:

View northerly toward entrance of Sutro Baths, Point Lobos Avenue, 1962. (wnp12.0080.jpg, David Gallagher Collection.)

Perhaps too expensive for a meal? She moves onward:

Cliff House entrance awning, view south, 1962. (wnp12.0081.jpg, David Gallagher Collection.)

A repast is found at the long-gone Cliff Chalet Café, which once operated overlooking Sutro Baths between the Cliff House and Louis’. As if to imply that the photographer observes, but is not really part of the woman’s vacation, there are two coffee cups on the table, but only one plate of food.

Older woman sitting at table alone at Cliff Chalet, view of Sutro Baths through window, 1962. (wnp12.0083.jpg, David Gallagher Collection.)

Like most visitors to San Francisco, our hero does make it to a cable car. Her entrance onboard is blocked. She is separated from the young men, but she gamely smiles.

Cable car #506 at Bay and Taylor turntable, 1962. (wnp12.0071.jpg, David Gallagher Collection.)

Later, she is more successful. She poses triumphantly, alone, with the exception of a woman with a cast on her leg hobbling away on the street at left. Is this a Diane Arbus exhibit we’re at?

Cable Car #508 at Bay and Taylor turntable, 1962. (wnp12.0097.jpg, David Gallagher Collection.)

We don’t know this woman, or whether her companion was a husband, sister, or old friend, but we can see that this lady of the chunky double-chain necklace, white feather hat, and cherry brooch on her coat lapel, was the star of this adventure.

For all of the artistic remove, the eerie framing and lighting, there’s a respectful love in these photographs. Anonymous, salvaged, and jumbled with tens of thousands of other images, the woman and her companion make us feel honored to take a walk with them in San Francisco 1962.

See all of the “older woman on vacation” images.