Grab Bag #017

I am usually too busy for the guilty pleasure of browsing the Internet. I’m not talking about mindless social media scrolling, where you see what Facebook or Twitter or Instagram decides what’s best—the legs of your friends sunning on vacation, video of a dog upsetting a picnic table, an ad for untucked men’s shirts (which feels insulting somehow). I have plenty of time for all that.

I’m talking about a hobby from the Internet’s early years of following one’s own curiosity from site to site.

But the other day I was whistling the theme to Hawaii Five-O, which got me looking up Jack Lord’s Wikipedia page, where I saw he appeared in a lot of westerns, which got me thinking about the original Kung Fu, which got me reading a lot about Bruce Lee (who everyone thinks should have been the star instead of David Carradine, who we can all agree was not Chinese), which led me to a website Bruce Lee was Here, which documents the places that the martial artist lived and worked. Apparently, he taught Cha Cha lessons at 838 Stockton Street.

(Oh, have you seen the Chinese Historical Society’s We Are Bruce Lee exhibit? It’s great.)

Bruce Lee’s personal history in Chinatown then inspired me to check out the online Jesse Brown Cook Scrapbook Collection to match up some post-1906 earthquake street scenes.

Then I was truly lost.

Scrapbookiana

Jesse Cook was San Francisco police chief after the quake, but he was also a photographer and collector of photographs. UC Berkeley scanned and put a good chunk of his many, many images online 20 years ago, so we local history folks often make use of it in research. Say I’m interested in the history of the Green Street Market in Cow Hollow. Did old Jesse take a photo? Yes, he did, right after the earthquake:

It’s hard to know how Cook decided to organize and curate the photographs he pasted and annotated (relatively accurately) in dozens of scrapbooks. Some are obviously family snaps. Others document crime scenes. He has photos of Police Department employees, the mayor doing ceremonial mayor things, commercial and amateur images of the Panama-Pacific International Fair and the 1906 earthquake and fire, and lots of mug shots with his own short bios of burglars, prostitutes, and con men.

So, if you’re not searching for something specific, just scrolling, and you have a history “problem,” as I do, you can seriously lose a couple of hours. Like all dives into the past, you think you’re searching for how the world is different, but find how the world is the same, like the 1800 block of Green Street. Or, on the bad side, how transgendered people are treated.

We’re living in a time of renewed and intense trans persecution in the USA. Every day the media reports on some state trying to legislate them out of existence or some politician on a rant of fabricated scare-mongering. Well, here’s Geraldine Portier in 1917, a woman whose crime seems to have been being born a boy:

While Cook asserts in his caption that Portier was to be deported, I found articles mentioning her being delivered to Napa Asylum for “being a man who thinks he is a woman.” There “experts made a careful study of [her] mental workings.”

The magic of images is how they can flip the switch of human connection in you. I feel like I know my great-grandmother, who died more than a decade before I was born, just from the smiles she gives in a handful of old snapshots.

Seeing Geraldine, with her hand on her hip, the angle of her mouth giving off a wry vibe of “Well, this is me,” has me rooting for her far more than some dry newspaper account of the injustice done to her. I hope she got out of Napa and lived a good life somewhere.

Prison Chow

In other Jesse Cook Collection randomness, here is a fad that came, went (as fads do), then came and went again. Prison-themed restaurants.

“Dungeon” did business circa 1920 in the basement of the Baird Hotel on Anna Lane (today Cyril Magnin Street) off Ellis Street. They served mostly waffles, which used to be a thing in the city. Poetic justice tidbit: one night a “warden” of the restaurant got pulled into the real city prison on a charge of disturbing the peace when his inmates/patrons over-reveled and disturbed the hotel guests. Not sure if he was given waffles while there.

Prison restaurants weren’t new. There was one in New York City in 1902. I remember reading that the lower levels of the Cliff House tried something like this as well (1910s?) with waiters in stripes serving guests chained to tables.

Bring back waffle restaurants, but let’s skip the prison cosplay, shall we?

To complete a wobbly Grab Bag circle, the location of “Dungeon” was just a couple of blocks from the site of the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria riot, a landmark event in the fight for Transgender civil rights, and part of San Francisco’s Transgender Cultural District.

Search for Atlas Continues

I am still trying to track down the cast iron facade elements salvaged when a unique California Street bank was demolished in 1959.

The Oakland Museum got back to me and confirmed they had the massive window frame until sometime in the mid 2000s. They even sent me a photo from their catalog.

But alas, it was de-accessioned to... somewhere. The museum thought maybe The Crucible, but the folks over at that very cool place said they didn't have it.

Meanwhile, retired park ranger Judy Hitzeman has been trying to help the Maritime Museum uncover where the “Atlas” doorway ended up. Still no luck in searching the records, but Judy remembers “a sketchy paper trail of where the giant thing was stored. The last place recorded was at a city yard; I believe it was the water facility at Bay/North Point and Embarcadero. When I began working at the park in 1990, nobody knew where it had gone from there.”

Could it still be sitting in a corner of the North Point Water Pollution Plant? The search continues!

19th Century California Indigenous Politics

I’ve had fun helping out my friends at California Historical Society by hosting some of their monthly lectures. Here’s a great presentation by Martin Rizzo-Martinez based on his book We Are Not Animals. Terrific research and a great job centering indigenous experience and perspective.

While Professor Rizzo-Martinez’s studies are focused on the Santa Cruz region, the statistics, experiences, and insights are very applicable and relevant to all the California missions, including Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores).

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

Thanks to Adam B. and John A. for their contributions not only to the Woody Beer and Coffee Fund, but to my general knowledge of long-gone establishments. Cookie’s Blue Star Cafe is a new one to me!

Get me out of the house and chatting with real, live people...maybe you! Let me know when you're free and I'll buy you something in a glass.

Sources

“Tender Music Brings to Prison Christmas Peace,” San Francisco Examiner, December 26, 1917, pg. 5.

“Officer Put in Cell for Insane Man,” San Francisco Examiner, January 5, 1918, pg. 1.

“Man Believes Himself a Woman,” The Salina (Kansas) Sun, March 9, 1918, pg. 2.

“Weird New York Restaurants,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 7, 1902, pg. 6.

“Hotel Man Shows Dislike to Noise in Prison Cafe,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 13, 1920, pg. 9.