On Jan. 24, 1848, a New Jersey carpenter working at the Sutter Mill in Coloma, California, discovered chips of gold in the American River. News that glittering flecks had been found in the Sierra Nevadas quickly spread, lighting up eyes across the New World and the Old with glints of gold.
What happened next would become all too familiar in the story of westward expansion. The Gold Rush first brought an influx of men to northern California, then easy and not-so-easy money.
After that, naturally, came the scourge of vice and lawlessness. Sex, violence, inebriation, and gambling flourished and reached no higher pinnacle of debauchery than in the San Francisco neighborhood that became known as the Barbary Coast.
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The first—and only—red-light district in the Golden City, Barbary Coast took shape in 1860 and was known for its opium dens and saloons, brothels and gambling parlors. It was a place that embraced the spirit of “anything goes” for just over half a century.
Even the infamous 1906 San Francisco earthquake couldn’t keep the devil at bay. After being leveled by the natural disaster that smote both sinful and righteous in the city, the district was rebuilt.
But seven years later, the moral element in the increasingly buttoned-up town decided enough was enough. Through an expanding number of resolutions and legal acts, the libertine ways in the land of vice was legislated out of business. San Francisco was going legit and leaving its wicked ways behind… or at least trying to.
The Barbary Coast neighborhood was named in 1860 after the infamous north African coast plied by pirates. The story goes that a sailor, perhaps the one credited with toasting one night, “Here’s to the Barbary Coast, where if the whiskey don't knock you out, the harlots and hoodlums will,” drew the comparison, and so the neighborhood was named.
Before the red-light district was formalized, lawlessness reigned in the area. Gangs like the Sydney Ducks, a group of Australians who escaped their penal colony home to venture to San Francisco, arrived to set up the first unseemly establishments and to murder, steal, and loot whatever and wherever they could. During particularly robust periods of mayhem, the Ducks were known to light the city on fire, something they did no less than six times.
In the early 1850s, vigilantes quickly dealt with the Sydney Ducks through their own legally dubious means: arresting and hanging some of the gang members encouraged the flock to take flight.
But the beginnings of a red-light district that had been started by the Ducks remained and began to flourish. Sydney Town morphed into the Barbary Coast and a less organized, though more sinful spirit filled the streets.
Imagine San Francisco in the 1860s. Over the past decade, prospectors flooded into the town, transforming it from a sleepy village on the edge of the world into a booming city of the west.
Its gold-seeking denizens were finding themselves either flush with their finds or despairing their bad luck, either of which was cause to let loose. With the rise of gold came the rise in port traffic, bringing with it sailors who were interested in seeking their own fortunes, even if just at the card table. They all coalesced in the Barbary Coast.
“The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whore monger, lewd women, cut-throats, murderers, are all found here… Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also,” wrote Benjamin Lloyd in Lights and Shades in San Francisco in 1876.
Anything could happen while you were losing your mind to pleasure and vice in the district, so long as you had a little coin. Interested in dancing and binge drinking the night away? Please make your way to the unsavory Bull Run saloon run by Ned Allen “the wickedest man in San Francisco.”
Want to sit back and enjoy a little entertainment? May we interest you in the negligible talents of the Galloping Cow and the Dancing Heifer, two former washerwomen turned dance-hall performers. If your latest gold finds are burning a hole in your pocket, a seat at the gambling table is in order. Or maybe you want to cop a feel, take a peek through the peephole of a closed door, or enjoy a full roll in the hay? Pay the price and it’s yours.
In The Barbary Coast, Herbert Asbury describes the neighborhood as "a unique criminal district that for almost 70 years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour, than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent.”
And everyone wanted in. Most of the women living in San Francisco at the time were in the business of prostitution, some of whom made their fortunes and many others who suffered severe mistreatment. But there were a few respectable ladies in town who weren’t in the business and didn’t want to be left out of the men’s fun.
Cross-dressing was illegal in the 1800s, but Clare Sears writes in Arresting Dress that some San Franciscan women risked it to gain entry to the dive bars and music halls they weren’t allowed to patronize after dark. “Indeed the phenomenon of young women wearing men’s clothing to ‘do the town’ was so common in the 1860s and 1870s that the weekly California Police Gazette described it as an ‘epidemic’ and warned women to resist,” Sears writes.
While the visitors to the Barbary Coast were enjoying themselves, those who worked the district were busy making their own fortunes. One favored practice among boarding hall and saloon proprietors was that of “shanghaiing.” The ships in port had a serious manpower problem as it was common for sailors on shore-leave to never return. They had fortunes to seek, after all.
But Barbary Coast proprietors like Miss Piggott were happy to help supply this need for sailors. According to Asbury, Miss Piggott’s particular style as a “crimp” was to set her sights on a suitable gentleman, position him on top of a trap door, and then offer him a “Miss Piggott” special, an unholy mix of whisky, brandy, gin, and laudanum.
When her mark was suffering the effects of the drink, she would hit him over the head, pull the trap door, and the poor, passed-out gent would land on a mattress below. When he woke the next day, he would find that he had been “shanghaied,” placed aboard a ship sailing out into the Pacific. None of his fellow-drinkers would have even stirred while watching this happened.
Pickpockets, confidence men, and people of all sort ran the streets. In SFGATE, CW Nevius calls Oofty Goofty, “the consummate Barbary Coast character,” a man who made his money by offering passersby the chance to beat him up. "Hit me with a bat for four bits, gents?” was his calling card.
Dirty Tom McLear was willing to eat or drink anything offered to him for only a few coins. (He later confessed to having been drunk for seven years and unbathed for 15.) During this time, the local press was rife with stories of wealthy out-of-towners who enjoyed a twirl on the dance floor only to later find themselves relieved of their pocketbooks.
"The people of San Francisco are mad, stark mad,” a New York Evening Post reporter wrote in 1849.
There were residents in the growing San Francisco who attempted to impose some law and moral order on the town. But even in the waning days of the 19th century, they weren’t having much luck.
A newspaper report in May 1899 describes the result of a recent raid on crime in the Barbary Coast: “The man who was tried for running a percentage game in the Cafe Royal, has been acquitted by a jury; Little Egypt, the woman who gave lewd dancing exhibitions, acquitted by a jury; the Ingleside turf jobbers, who pick the pocket of the public under the cover of racing, acquitted by a jury; a man who made a barrel of money forging school warrants, acquitted by a jury.”
But as San Francisco became ever wealthier and more gentrified, and as the country began to take sober steps towards Prohibition, things slowly began to change. In 1911, medical standards were adopted requiring regular check-ups and doctor’s certificates before prostitutes could work.
The next year, the new police commissioner set about shutting down many of the Barbary Coast dance halls and limiting the number of new bar licenses issued. Increasing restrictions were passed until 1914, when prostitution was officially outlawed in the Red-Light Abatement Act.
But the city kept its edge: The Beat generation, the hippies of the ’60s, and the LGBTQ community all found a home in San Francisco. Even in a city now awash with tech money, the ghost of hedonistic times past remains.
