Grab Bag #44
Giants, wall beds, and buttermilk—all with San Francisco connections.
Normally the Grab Bag is just for Friends of Woody, but I’ve made all of them open to everyone through the end of the year. Enjoy!
Over the past few years there have been lots of San Francisco news articles about poor small business owners having their stores burgled, their property vandalized, and their stock shop-lifted.
The buttermilk saleswomen of 1906 could have related:
“The overturning of buttermilk kiosks on East street [the Embarcadero] has become one of the after-midnight amusements of skylarking roisterers who frequent the waterfront part of the city. For this reason it has happened recently that the pretty young women engaged to sell milk-shakes and buttermilk to thirsty stevedores and others arrived at their places in the early morning to find their kiosks toppled to the ground and their stock in trade spilled on the street.”
“The matter was reported to the police authorities and an effort was made to discover the identity of the mischief makers, but without definite result. There has been a hint that some of the proprietors of thirst-quenching emporiums within sight of the ferry building experienced a feeling of envy because of the liberal patronage enjoyed by the young women, and that sympathetic patrons in excess of enthusiasm may have taken this method of minimizing the effects of this commercial competition.”
Yep, those excesses of enthusiasm usually are to blame. Or maybe the ladies weren’t crossing the right palms with a percentage of that sweet buttermilk money?
War of the Wall Beds
I was 19, a college drop-out, working at the Waldenbooks on Geary Street downtown, and sleeping on my grandmother’s couch. I endorsed the first pay check of every month over to her (about $100) to help cover the rent and pay for food. This was in what we called “the building,” 695 35th Avenue, on the corner of Balboa Street in the Outer Richmond District.
Then the family moved out of the apartment across the hall.
Mr. Novik let me rent it for $500 a month. I got a roommate—Marty Molluskhead—and so only paid $250. Yes, more than 60% of my monthly pay went to half of an apartment, but a happier 19-year-old in 1985 San Francisco could not have been found.
I had a very large room overlooking the corner. Being 19, I thought the highest use of this space had to be a pool table. Marty and I bought one at the Sears on Masonic Avenue where the Target is today.
Where would I sleep? My room had a massive closet. So I stuffed a double-bed inside and slept soundly under my hanging coats.
While I felt very inventive, the closet was constructed to hold a bed from the time of the building’s construction, just not how I did it.
One of its double-doors pivoted from a vertical bar to spin 180 degrees. From that bar used to hang a “Murphy bed,” which could flip down. A few seconds work and your living room became instant bedroom.
The bed had been removed long before I occupied the apartment. My friend Rochelle J. (F.O.W.) had one she slept on when she lived on Church Street in Noe Valley. Perhaps there are folks living in the city who still use them and can share a shot or two?
(Yes, I’m asking you to send me photos of your beds—not weird.)
I assumed these hide-a-beds started as innovations in 1920s apartment buildings—because that’s where I came across them—but the idea goes back farther.
In April 1906, the big fires following the big earthquake were stopped at about 20th and Mission Streets. Less than four months later, Captain A. C. Smith had the Mission Apartments under construction on the northeast corner of 19th and Dolores Street, facing the park.
One of its modern amenities? The Marshall & Stearns Company’s Patented Wall Beds.
The next year, Captain Jensen (why was every developer a captain back then?) had a new apartment building going up on the corner of Van Ness Avenue and Green Street and he also went with good old Marshall & Stearns wall beds in the units.
Marshall & Stearns was based in Los Angeles and used the 1902 patent of a guy named W. C. James for their wall bed product. But it was a hot idea in the early 1900s, especially in San Francisco, where a whole lot of rebuilding had to happen after the big earthquake and fire.
The company published big ads in the summer of 1906 warning rivals that it held the patent for wall beds. Apparently even sleeping in a knock-off could get Marshall and Stearns to sic their lawyers on you.
But in San Francisco William L. Murphy came up with his own hidden-bed design—the legend goes he did it to get around morality laws and entertain a female opera singer in his apartment. (Sounds apocryphal, but the opera singer detail is a nice touch.)
Marshall and Stearns filed a lawsuit.
I haven’t studied the patents or the case law but I think Murphy came up the improved idea of mounting the mechanism to the swiveling closet door. He won the case and he won the branding battle as well.
Marshall and Stearns later had an ad for one of their products featuring the “Murphy” mechanism and most of us still call these pop-out-of-walls things Murphy beds.
Giant in the Gardens
Murphy won the wall bed fight in the 1910s. In the 1860s, Robert Woodward won the battle of Mission District pleasure gardens.
His estate between 14th and 15th Street along Mission Street outdid the Willows and City Gardens in refinements (library, museum), animal attractions (both living and stuffed), and landscaping (fountains, bridges, exotic architecture).
A quarter for admission—12 ½ cents for kids under 12—got you all of it.
Woody LaBounty
More about the Mission Road pleasure gardens, including Woodward’s, in this San Francisco Story.
At Woodward’s Gardens in early June 1870 one could meet San Francisco-born “Admiral Dot,” who was touted as being the “smallest human being that ever walked alone.” (Something poignant about that description.)
Discovered by P. T. Barnum while in town for a visit, the admiral, whose real name was Leopold S. Kahn, had an engagement at Woodward’s before heading east to Barnum’s New York City museum.
Kahn was advertised as one quarter the size of the famous General Tom Thumb, and “a perfect man in miniature, symmetrically formed, graceful and pleasing in his manners, and is pronounced by all the ladies as a PERFECT LOVE OF A MAN.”
(That’s more interesting advertising language to unpack. Poets and psychologists, are you taking note?)
Admiral Dot was just getting his career going. But the big attraction came to Woodward’s a couple of weeks later:
Zhan Shichai may not have been his billed 8 feet tall, but he towered high enough that people couldn’t reach to take a measurement. By 1870, he had already traveled the world from Fuijian Province in China to London, Paris, New York, and Chicago.
His stage name was Chang Woo Gow, but he was often billed as the “Chinese Giant,” or the “Heathen Giant.” (At the time, “heathen” was racist shorthand for people of Asian descent.)
The nine-day gig at Woodward’s was pretty good. Chang and his billed wife, Kin Foo, (advertised as “The Golden Lily, most beautiful of Chinese Women”) were contracted to hold a reception between noon and 3pm each day. That was about it: let people gawk at you.
Kin Foo died while the couple were on tour in Australia. The world’s tallest man married a woman named Catherine Santley the next year and had two children with her, one in Shanghai and one in Paris. (What a life those kids must have had.)
After another decade of being on the road, the couple retired and opened a tea shop in Bournemouth, England.
Leopold S. Kahn did something similar by operating Admiral Dot’s Hotel and Restaurant in White Plains, New York.
Yet another San Franciscan that made good.
Once I work out the kinks in the Woody time machine I plan to visit both the hotel and the England tea shop. Look out for my Yelp reviews...
Woody Beer and Coffee Fund
I have had some questions on the rules and regulations of the Woody Beer and Coffee Fund, so let me here clarify some of the arcane legalese and elucidate the time-honored traditions in Socratic fashion:
This is some kind of scam, right?
Surprisingly, no. Just a way to guilt-trip myself into being more social. People donate money to get me out of the house, and I spend it on meeting up with people for delightful conversation.
Do I have to make a donation to have Woody meet me for a drink?
No! Take advantage of the largesse of others. It is a communal pool. We have to do the much harder thing of deciding on time and place. No payment necessary or required. It is expressly recorded in the bylaws that Woody purchase the beverages.
Can I make a donation without having to have a drink with Woody?
Yes! I know I can be difficult to bear at times.
Will my donation fund any non-beverage purchases such as a smash burger or macha crepe?
Occasionally, but rarely.
Do we have to talk about history? I hate that stuff.
Nope. All polite topics, anecdotes, interrogatives, yarns, and conversational tangents are welcome.
How do I make this unique opportunity a reality?
Let me know when you are free to meet and through a beautiful interplay of emails we will decide on a time and place!
Sources
Woodward’s Gardens ads, San Francisco Chronicle, June 1, 1870, pg. 4, and June 18, 1870. pg. 2.
“Fair Buttermilk Vendors’ Kiosks Toppled to Ground, San Francisco Examiner, August 13, 1906, pg. 3.
Kurt Kohlstedt, The Making of Murphy’s Bed, (99% Invisible site)
A Parkway, a Station, and a Hotel. White Plans: Part 2, (I Ride the Harlem Line website)