Portals of the Past: Murder, mayhem and squalor on the slopes of Telegraph Hill
Until well into the 20th century, San Francisco’s most unique neighborhood was an isolated, picturesque slum, a byword for poverty and crime.
Telegraph Hill seen from Russian Hill in 1860. Note there is almost no development north of Filbert Street (which runs north of Washington Square, the dark open space at the center-top of the photograph). Courtesy OpenSFHistory, wnp13.199.
This is part two of a continuing series on the history of Varennes Street, an atmospheric little two-block byway on the western slope of Telegraph Hill where I lived for 12 years. The first piece in the series, “A black fighter for civil rights in pre-Civil War North Beach,” described how during the Gold Rush the neighborhood was populated by people of every race, class and ethnicity—including blacks. Most African-American Argonauts ended up living in a small colony around Washington and Powell on the northeastern edge of Nob Hill, but a few settled in North Beach, including a pioneering young journalist and civil rights advocate named Jonas H. Townsend, who in 1858 lived at 12 Lafayette Place, then the name of the first block of Varennes Street. Townsend’s sojourn on Lafayette Place is just one of countless fascinating stories, almost all of them completely unknown, that took place on what is now Varennes Street.
TODAY Telegraph Hill is one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the city, with sky-high rents, spectacular views and beautiful houses worth millions of dollars. But for most of its history, that was emphatically not the case. It’s hard to grasp just how poor, and often squalid, the neighborhood was from the Gold Rush until well into the 20th century.
Telegraph Hill was the most extreme and long-enduring example of what we might call San Francisco’s favela syndrome: Poor people living in the heights. All three of San Francisco’s downtown hills, Nob, Russian and Telegraph, were predominantly working-class or poor during the instant city’s early years, mainly because the difficulty of climbing them discouraged well-to-do people from settling there. Before planked or paved streets were installed, the sand dunes that covered most of the city made walking on even flat terrain tedious, and climbing hills was exhausting. But after cable cars began rolling up Nob Hill in 1873, that promontory quickly supplanted South Park as the city’s tony neighborhood, and Russian Hill followed suit.
But Telegraph Hill, and the valley of North Beach at its feet, remained a picturesque slum for decades. This was not only because of its terrain, but because of who initially settled there— a roll of the demographic dice that determined the future socio-economic status of the neighborhood for close to 80 years. The area just south of North Beach, what is now Jackson Square, started out as two adjoining squalid vice districts, Chile-Town and Sydney-Town, populated respectively by Chileans and Australians. There followed an influx of Irish, Italians, French, Germans, and other national and ethnic groups, including so many immigrants from Mexico, Spain, Peru, and other Spanish-speaking countries that the neighborhood was long known as the Latin Quarter. This heterogeneous mixture of mostly poor Irish and Italians and other ethnic minorities and immigrants discouraged middle-class San Franciscans from moving to North Beach/Telegraph Hill. And when Italian immigration surged in the 1870s, the neighborhood became still poorer and much more crowded. Although were always middle-class and wealthy people in the neighborhood, North Beach/Telegraph Hill became a byword for poverty and squalor—and also, according to novelist and essayist Frank Norris, for its uniquely mixed-race population.
In an 1897 piece titled “Among Cliff Dwellers,” Norris wrote, “They are a queer, extraordinary mingling of peoples, these Cliff Dwellers, for they are isolated enough to have begun already to lose their national characteristics and to develop into a new race. There are children romping about after hens perilously near that tremendous precipice that overhangs the extension of Sansome Street, of an origin so composite that not even the college of heralds could straighten the tangle. Here, for instance, is a child of an Italian woman and a Spanish half-breed. Think of that, now! The descendant of a Campanian peasant, a Pueblo Indian and a water carrier of Andalucia, squattering up and down a San Francisco sidewalk, shrieking after a hysterical chicken. I have seen in a wine shop in this same Ohio Street [now Prescott Court, on the south side of Vallejo between Sansome and Montgomery].
a child who was half Jew, half Chinese, and its hair was red. I have heard of—may I yet live to see him! --a man who washes glasses in a Portuguese wine shop on the other side of the hill, whose father was a Negro and whose mother a Chinese slave girl… Here on this wartlike protuberance bulging above the city’s roof a great milling is going on, and fusing of peoples, and in a few more generations the Celt and the Indian, the Mexican and the Chinaman, the Negro and the Portuguese, and the Levantines and the ‘scatter-mouches’ will be merged into one type. And a curious type it will be.”
Making due allowances for hyperbole, authorial license and white ethnocentrism (all evidenced by the fact that the “great milling and fusing of peoples” did not, in fact, create a “new race” on Telegraph Hill, although Norris would no doubt have found the Japanese-Scottish author of this piece to be an exemplar of that race), there was clearly some truth in Norris’s demographic observations. If from its birth San Francisco had been a “mixed-race babe,” in the words of Gold Rush-era “boy editor” Edward Kemble, Telegraph Hill was the most racially mixed part of it.
Then there was Telegraph Hill’s isolation, dramatically illustrated by a story Norris tells. According to him, one Cliff Dweller, “a very, very old Spanish man,” had not left the hill for eight years. “Old age has trapped him on the top of that sheer hill, and lays siege to him there. Once up here he must stay, or if possibly he should get down, never could he climb those ladderlike sidewalks. No cable cars run over the hill, and the horses of the market carts pause on a corner one third of the way up, blowing till the cart rattles, while their drivers make the delivery on foot. This old man will never come down but feet first. The world rolls by beneath him, under his eyes and in reach of his ears; Kearny Street, like the dried bed of a canon overrun with beetles, hums and lives beneath his back windows, and ships from the Horn and the Cape and the Archipelago shift and slide below the seaward streets, and he sees it all and hears it all and is yet as out of it, as exiled as if marooned on a South Pacific atoll. Perched on that hill of the heart of the city, he is a hermit, a Simeon Stylites on a huge scale.”
Telegraph Hill was cut off from the city by its precipitous streets. Many people who visited the Hill commented on what Norris called its “ladderlike sidewalks.” In a melodramatic 1896 sob-sister piece in the Examiner titled “Child Life as Seen on the Barbary Coast,” which will be quoted at length in the next installment of this series, a reporter named Lillian Ferguson describes ascending Kearny Street above Broadway: “We follow the street until it ends abruptly in a clay bank at the apex of a hill so steep that we never could clamber up were it not that the board sidewalk is strapped at intervals with cross-pieces that catch the heels of our shoes. If we slipped once we would surely roll to the bottom.”
Because Varennes Street links North Beach and Telegraph Hill, its first block was easily accessible and its second relatively isolated. The flat block of Lafayette Place was heavily populated and surrounded by tenements; its second, steep block, Varennes, was much more sparsely settled. The 1886 Sanborn fire insurance map shows that about half of the upper, east side of “Varenne” was still undeveloped, with one vacant lot on the west side as well. Lafayette, by contrast, is completely built up. Both blocks and their immediate surroundings featured numerous small businesses, including a Chinese wash house, a wine cellar, a drying shed, a sausage factory, four bakeries, a large wood and coal yard, a paint shop, a French laundry and another laundry, in addition to four stables.
The first newspaper story I found that mentions Lafayette Place contains two elements that are to crop up again and again in stories about Lafayette and Varennes: ethnic minorities and crime. This time-honored journalistic bias (“if it bleeds, it leads,” the old newspaper saying goes) results in a no doubt distorted and excessively lurid view of the street and the neighborhood. With that caveat, what follows is a history of Lafayette Place and Varennes street between 1869 and 1894, as told in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Call and the Sacramento Union newspapers.
Some of these news stories are mere squibs, but others are like mini-magazine features. I quote some of them at length. They’re fascinating not just because of the often blood-curdling stories they relate in excruciating detail, but because of what they reveal about the standards and practices of 19th century journalism. Reporters at the time were often far better writers than today’s pixel-stained wretches, but they also had a tendency to wander uncomfortably far from the truth, telling what Mark Twain called “stretchers.” (Twain knew whereof he spoke: as a lowly “lokulitems” in San Francisco, he established himself one of the most unreliable reporters of all time.) One of the stories about Varennes Street, based on a virulently anti-Chinese pamphlet published in 1880, contains one of the strangest assertions I’ve ever come across while researching San Francisco history.
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As a San Francisco native, I m thrilled to learn something new about a neighborhood that I thought that I knew so well! Thank you!