Grab Bag #023

We just got back from a terrific vacation in Mexico taken in celebration of Nancy’s 60th birthday. We saw stunning pyramids, walked around Aztec temples, and ate some terrific food. A lot of frijoles and queso was consumed in various forms and it was one of the few times I’ve traveled where I didn’t return craving my weekly San Francisco burrito. (Those three months I spent in Japan in 1993 were particularly rough…)

One cab driver we chatted with seemed surprised Northern California didn’t have any pyramids, just a very beautiful and comparatively new bridge always imperiled in blockbuster movies.

Touring the unearthed Templo Mayor smack in the middle of modern-day Mexico City did make me think of one prominent San Francisco landmark, popular with tourists and wedding photographers:

Why? I guess because one can walk the quiet residential streets of the Marina District, turn a corner, and—boom—you’re surprised by an Indiana Jones set.

Architect Bernard Maybeck designed the Palace of Fine Arts as an instant antiquity, sort of like pre-faded, pre-ripped blue jeans, or that “distressed” coffee table you regret buying from Restoration Hardware.

Anchoring the west side of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), the palace, its attached colonnades, and the fern-fringed lagoon presented as a mythical tomb complex and a monument of sorrow. Women who hide their faces in grief ring each column, their tears meant to water hanging vines.

Recognized for its ineffable beauty, the palace and lagoon were preserved when the fair ended. Unlike Mesoamerica’s temples of stone, Maybeck’s creation was made of plaster and staff—a quick-build combination which might as well have been spun sugar. Within a year the instant antiquity was instant ruin.

Repairs, patchwork, and painting were done periodically, but by the early 1960s, the palace was severely deteriorated.

After some failed bond measures, private donors and the city pulled together enough money to save the Palace of Fine Arts in the early 1960s. Rather than restoration, they reconstructed. Most of Maybeck’s original creation was completely demolished in 1963.

The rotunda and colonnades were rebuilt in precast masonry with steel frames. Budget constraints eliminated much of the original exterior detailing, especially of the exhibition hall, which is far more utilitarian in appearance now.

In the early 2000s, forty years after its construction, the new Palace of Fine Arts needed its own restoration. Lagoon edges were crumbling. The rotunda dome was flaking off. The Maybeck Foundation and the City of San Francisco needed to raise $21 million for the work.

As in the 1960s, finding money was a challenge, but this time the idea of protecting and preserving what is one of San Francisco’s most iconic sites was never in doubt. Restoration was completed in 2009.

Making Way for the Fair

Speaking of the PPIE…

I suspect many of the tourists who pose for photos on Baker Street beside the palace’s lagoon are unaware how large a footprint the fair covered. I know that even native San Franciscans are clueless that the exposition cleared away a sizeable, if somewhat scruffy, neighborhood of residences and businesses.

The San Francisco Public Library has a collection of photos of properties purchased by the directors of the PPIE for demolition or relocation. They give a late glimpse of the architecturally diverse district that existed before the fair, a neighborhood called Harbor View by most San Franciscans.

Some of the structures had already been relocated from other parts of town and others were left-over refugee cottages from the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Some of these buildings are pretty nice and I wonder if any are possibly still standing in adjacent Cow Hollow.

Crabville-by-the Sea

Speaking of the Marina…

Inspired by cutesy naming conventions for fashionable seaside resorts such as Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, reporters in the 1890s enjoyed coining similar names for humble, junky, or ad hoc settlements.

Carville-by-the-Sea, the streetcar settlement at Ocean Beach, is the best (because I wrote a book about it), and there was also a beachside squatter-town of bars and waffle stands organized by Con Mooney nicknamed Mooneysville-by-the-Sea.

Well, here’s a new addition to my ever-eroding mental database: Crabville-by-the-Sea.

In 1896, the San Francisco Call did a couple of stories on the small domiciles occupied by Danish and Italian crabbers on the future Marina’s mucky shore: “Some are made of odd pieces of old lumber; some are rough and unpainted; a few are whitewashed. […] two of them are fishing smacks beached and converted into homes, [another] used to be a pilot house.”

Crabville-by-the-Sea residents worked by the tides and mostly at night. For a dozen crabs, the men received 50 cents from Leon Ackerman, the manager of the Harbor View baths, which was about where the Palace of Fine Arts stands today. Ackerman resold the crabs at a small mark-up, receiving a dime profit per dozen.

A crabber’s life was simple, sometimes dangerous. His diet was monotonous: crab cakes, boiled crab, fried crab in batter. Minimalist decorators and décor merchants of today’s Marina District might be interested in Crabville’s design aesthetics:

“[T]he interiors are all similar; one smoke-stained room that is used for all living purposes. There is always the same kind of a low, rusty stove, and always a hacked table and a couple of crippled chairs, and in one corner an aged pot or a ramshackle bedstead, covered with assorted bed-clothing into which the occupant burrows at nightfall. Once in a while there is some newspaper cut tacked to the wall, but usually the householder eschews cuts and is content to use the bare board walls for knives, needles and fishing gear.”

Hoodlum City

Speaking of fashion…

Some kerfuffle last week about U.S. Senate dress codes scratched the edge of my consciousness and made me think about how hooded sweatshirts, “hoodies,” became a mainstream style for business, at least in the tech industry. This made me remember that I had heard that the term “hoodlum” originated, or at least was popularized, in San Francisco in the 1860s.

Then, in serendipity, a gentleman named Anthony Oertel emailed me out of the blue with research he has done on the subject:

“The word hoodlum originated in San Francisco in 1866. On December 13, 1866, William Sullivan, William Frattiger, Christopher J. Conley, John Hamilton, and John Hudson were arrested by the Harbor Police in San Francisco, California. These boys ranged in age from 10 to 16, and identified themselves as the Hoodlum Band. The gang testified against its fence, Lazarus Moses, a German Jew, (aka Fagin). Mr. Moses was convicted and paid his $300 fine.

“The first reported reference to the Hoodlum Band was in the December 14, 1866 Daily Evening Bulletin. The Hoodlum Bands’ numerous petty thefts and Lazarus Moses’ ability to sell stolen goods popularized the word hoodlum. Fun fact: Lazarus Moses and the King of the Hoodlum both described their profession as tailor.”

Mr. Oertel notes that “Hudelum is a German dialect word which means disorderly” and has gathered his ongoing research on this website, if you’d like to follow the story in detail.

Comparison to characters in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (published in the 1830s) was made immediately, with Lazarus Moses called “Fagan” [sic] in the first Bulletin story.

I did a quick search for the term “hoodlum” on different digitized newspaper databases and found it used in a story in Honolulu’s Pacific Commercial Advertiser on June 30, 1859, but nothing before that, and nothing after, until San Francisco’s Hoodlum Band. Newspapers in the city began arguing over the origins of the word as early as 1877.

Old Photo Find of the Week

The history of San Francisco roadhouses is kind of my thing, so I got pretty hepped up when my friend David Gallagher (F.O.W.) sent me this very awesome photo of the Oceanside House.

Paul Barbagelata, Mr. West Portal realty, had this great shot in his collection and shared it with David. The Oceanside House stood on a sandy knoll along today’s Lower Great Highway between Ulloa and Vicente Streets. Constructed in the 1860s, it catered to sporting men out on weekend benders and went through multiple owners and operators before becoming a private residence and then the popular 1920s restaurant, Tait’s-at-the-Beach. (Another “at-the-something”!)

Not sure yet who the operator “B.A.B.” is, with their big old initials painted on the facade. Land attorney Benjamin Brooks is credited with building the Oceanside House, but his middle initial was S.

More research needed!

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

Great thanks to Wendy H. and Nik D. (F.O.W.) for spotting these handsome O.G.s above pints at the Plough and Stars last week. It was hard to get a Guinness in Mexico City.

Who is next? I am relaxed, rested and ready to buy you a drink. You can tell me your San Francisco story and I will parlay some of my crackerjack Español on you.