Sunday, May 20, 2012

Bacchanalia by the Bay


Well, it’s that time again, when my neighborhood is flooded (in all senses) with the beer-soaked Rites of Spring. My post about the Bay to Breakers event several years back continues to get a huge amount of casual search hits because of certain word combinations that pepper the text—and while there’s nothing at all wrong with that, today I’m simply feeling a tad… contrary. So let me see how well I can circumvent!
This year’s event sponsor banned all “floats” and large props, which definitely put a damper on the overall theatricals and creativity. It just wasn’t the same without the rolling disco pirate ships and Tiki bars on wheels. In addition, there was increased emphasis on there being no alcohol. But as one fetching blond in little other than a green tutu wryly observed as she walked past me, kicking her way through beer cans at the curb as she sipped her own beverage: “yeah, right, no alcohol.” Still, there seemed to be an effort of increased enforcement. Where in previous years I’ve seen the cops standing in clusters ignoring the kegs being pulled in red wagons and the legions of well-stocked rolling ice chests, today I watched an aggrieved looking officer pluck five cans of beer in succession out of the hands of a gaggle of guys, and dump the contents in the gutter. As hoards of other drinkers swarmed by, it did seem a bit futile, but an older lady with two wire carts for collecting cans looked grateful as the cop handed them over. It’s always a good day for intrepid recyclers.



Still, the disciples of Bacchus found the means to pay proper homage. Many people made good use of those backpacks fitted with a reservoir and spigot for water-on-the-go, which functioned today as a version of the wine-filled sheep bladder. I watched a group of day-glo damsels form a languid sidewalk tableaux around a reclining banana-suited boy and a dapper hat-wearing Pan with one of these handy backpacks. The girls took turns kneeling and receiving their refreshment, beginning with a maiden in a puff-sleeved Alice in Wonderland dress. Soon afterwards I saw a fellow carrying a large container of orange juice and dolling out servings. I assume there was vodka in the mix, as people don’t generally look so very excited to be receiving a cup of orange juice. But the god of the revel was most aptly honored, I thought, by three guys in boxes of wine. What better gift for spring fever?! Wrap it up. I’ll take it. And it’s easy to imagine a fleshy present-day Bacchus, bare belly rolling over waistband, ensconced in a recliner armchair while serving himself conveniently from the spout of a box of wine beside him. 

This year there seemed to be far less social commentary in costuming, and far more generic neon colored spandex, tulle, and wigs. And the inevitable head-to-toe “morph suits” made a frequent appearance, which (due to being over a certain age, I suppose) I just don’t get. No one looks good in them—even the young and fit . And, “breathable” or not, god they look sweaty under the bright sun. Anyway, I shall push my reading glasses up my nose, button my cardigan, fiddle with my dentures and get on with it.
Other than the neon rave-wear and ready-made Burning Man get ups that proliferated, the roll-call of identities this year included the usual Vikings, super heroes, Trojans, grass skirts and coconut bras (on both genders), fairies, cave men, cows, cowboys, angels, devils, and the simply skimpily clad.  There was a Ben Franklin and a George Washington wending their way through the crowds, and a group of girls admirably done up as the band Kiss. Strangely, there was a notable trend for chickens and turkeys. For this, I have no explanation. At one point, three turkeys marched by by in neat formation, one with a Bud Lite carton in hand. I noticed less food items than in past years, but one couple was impressive as a hamburger (she) and a bottle of mustard (he). It’s very possible that I came too late and missed the more interesting topical costumes at the front of the crowds (people had already been flowing by for over two hours when I arrived). However, I did see a man charmingly done up as the recently, sadly deceased Donna Summer, and two young women in black waistcoats and top hats (in the mode of 19th century fat-cat business tycoons) carrying signs that said “we are the 1%” and shouting about rich people problems. But that was it, unless the notable upsurge of Robin Hoods means anything.


It must be said, there was an inordinate amount of men in banana costumes this year. Along with the turkeys, it’s an odd zeitgeist. But it gladdened me, as it fit into the general spring and fertility fruit salad visual theme of the day.  And, as always, there were many, many bees of both genders flitting amidst the colorful tan-limbed girls in blooming ballerina skirts. One couple nicely illustrated the conceit by switching roles, the girl as pollinator and the tall boyfriend with a giant flower on his head. And ah yes, the gents of a certain age and disposition… they were out and about as usual, unhindered by clothing, satyrs among the sylphs. One group of these shy men included a slightly less grizzled member, who wore nothing other than a gold lame pharaoh’s headdress. It seemed clear that he had fortified himself for the day, as I saw him on various occasions over more than an hour, weaving in and out of the procession, impressively maintaining his salute to Priapus. He was repeatedly and happily stopping for photos with both fully clothed tourists and costumed participants posing with him, and he was untroubled by those with zoom lenses. I hate to disappoint any readers, but I left this soldier of the day’s cause to the other documentarians. And so instead I leave you with a cheeky turkey, a guy in a pink tutu, a cowboy with a tail(?!), and a fellow ready for a rumble.


Sunday, April 22, 2012

Walking Off the Blues



Back of photo marked: Dec 28 46 Frisco

Sometimes the only cure for a case of the blues is to simply propel one’s self out the door… and if you manage to do so in white gloves and a fabulous hat, even better!
I see the woman in this street photographer image as being on a restorative outing, though from her downcast look it appears she hasn’t yet conquered what ails her. Maybe it is holiday blues, or war malaise... three days after this date, Truman declared the official end of World War II. However, she is well girded against the gloomy forces of the universe in her High-Joan-Crawford-style, the crazily massive shoulder pads of her coat giving her the silhouette of an Amazon armored for ominous but ever so stylish battle. The man is a bit more sunny in his light-colored suit, dropped shoulders, and relaxed tailoring, yet he seems to be in tune with his lady’s mood.
I drove myself a little nuts trying to figure out where exactly they were walking. I was sure I recognized the shape of the building just behind him as a bank building at one of the various three-way Market Street intersections. But as I went madly clicking around on Google Street View, I was reminded there are numerous points like this downtown, where a northwest-southeast street and a northeast-southwest street meet in a “V” and flow onto Market at the point. And several are still anchored with pillared American Renaissance Beaux-Arts buildings. These include the 1892 Hibernia Bank building at Jones & McAllister; the Crocker Bank building at Sutter and Sansome; the Savings Union Bank (now an Emporio Armani) at O’Farrell and Grant; and across the street, the Union Trust building, now Wells Fargo (all 1910). And of course it was the Wells Fargo building! You can just see the dark iron-framed, fan-shaped windows over his shoulder.
So I popped downtown to view that particular spot and think about this unknown couple strolling past in 1946, perhaps walking up Market after disembarking at the Ferry Building and heading for lunch and shopping. The corner is overall unchanged, with the surrounding buildings mostly as they were, including the ornate 1912/1918 Bankers Investment Building at the east side. And the same lamp post that is in the photo helped me to establish my site line. As I stood there, one of the historic streetcars acquired by the city went by, and I snapped my picture. Turns out it was one of the cars built in 1946 for the Philadelphia transportation system (now painted in the colors of the Louisville Railroad Company)—it was a small flicker from the past, from that particular year, sliding through the same afternoon wind that rustled the old photo I held in my hand.

Reference:
Charles Hall Page & Associates, Inc. Splendid Survivors: San Francisco’s Downtown Architectural Heritage. California Living Books. San Francisco: 1979.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Frisco Fibs 2


Back of photo marked: San Francisco Oct 1937.

Imagined History:
The Food Lovers
(Or, Peacocks on 3rd Street)


            Over lunch at Solari’s, Corpy told Millie about the fabulously rich and accessorized railroad supply salesman “Diamond Jim” Brady and the voluptuous stage performer Lillian Russell, infamous food friends of 1890s New York. Millie listened intently while Corpy regaled her with tales of the duo’s indulgences. He told her that, though it was generally believed their forty-year relationship was an affair, what the two seemed mostly to do together was eat—huge, heaping, saucy, extravagant, mind-boggling amounts of food. Contemporary account gave witness to the two of them downing fifty fried oysters each at Brady’s dependable haunt, Rector’s Restaurant, before moving on to multiple courses. These two prodigious stomachs were very serious about food. And certainly, Corpy said between mouthfuls of Solari’s famous sweetbreads dish, it was a relationship to rival the most passionate affair. Millie’s soup spoon paused midway to her lips at this comment, and she felt her cheeks get momentarily warm.
Corpy was actually Conrad P. Favrille, a well-traveled textile importer with offices in the venerable Flood Building on Market Street. He earned is nickname from a mention by a San Francisco newspaper social columnist one April day:
“…it must be spring, because corpulent businessman C.R. Favrille has popped up from his dietary winter warren and appears unalarmed by his own monumental shadow. He was spotted at the counter of Hange’s Restaurant, at Chinatown Gate, for the third time this week. The fantastically corpy Fav tucked into three orders of abalone eaten with a mountain of hot French rolls and tartar sauce, and finished off with two orders of the orange soufflĂ©!”
Thereafter friends and acquaintances alike called him Corpy, including the typist in his office, Millie. She was a straightforward twenty-six-year-old from Sacramento with a wide scrubbed face, a toothy smile, a big appetite, and a little taste for adventure. Millie was enjoying her city life, and was grateful to have a job at a time when many of her old school friends were casting about for work or struggling with numerous children. Still, her plan was to eventually go home and help her father and brother with the family produce business.

            “There’s no hanky-panky,” Millie told her roommate, Leona, impatiently. “We just started taking lunches together, talking about our shared love of food and cooking. It’s just pleasant.” She explained that Corpy’s wife was a meticulous woman with a very delicate stomach who couldn’t bear cooking smells of any sort. She had met the much younger Millie at the office, observed to her husband that she seemed to be a genuine good girl, and was eventually grateful that he had someone nice to take regular meals with outside of the home. The fact that tongues wagged didn’t seem to bother his wife at all, for it was her usual desire to be left alone for a meal of Saltine crackers and cold boiled chicken, a preference which she was now more at liberty to enjoy. When he was home, the insatiable Corpy would goad their cook into frenzies with his food demands. As she tried to satisfy his culinary needs the house would be redolent with aromas and disrupted for days. Mrs. Favrille would be beside herself. Millie helped bring about the relief that the fragile woman craved.
            Corpy and Millie hit the finest established restaurants to the simplest lunch counters. One evening after work found them luxuriously ensconced at the Palace Hotel restaurant nibbling crab legs and strawberries a la Ritz. Another evening, after Corpy took her along to a business meeting on Van Ness Avenue, he hired a cab to drive them out to Chutes-at-the-Beach amusement park. They had a huge feast of fried spring chicken and corn pones with honey at the rowdy Topsy’s Roost restaurant, then took a digestive stroll in the ocean air. Millie marveled at Corpy while he stopped and stood beneath the striped awning of a Hires Root Beer stand. As his large, heavy arm lifted the little mug, his fleshy pinky finger was daintily held aloft from the glass. Afterwards he insisted that she have her picture taken in a photo booth. He had an arcade attendant immediately snip off his favorite shot, and into his billfold went the image of her with Peter Pan collar and stylish white hat.

California Girl, 1930s


    One afternoon, as the eating pair sat through what turned out to be an uninspiring meal at the Nugget Grill, an old lunch standby, one of their regular waiters tipped them off to an unusual eatery. Though he usually enjoyed the Grill’s honeycomb tripe and rice Creole, on this day it left Corpy gassy and unsatisfied. The waiter caught his regular customer’s grumbling, and knowing of his penchant for new places, told the two of an unmarked establishment worth visiting near to the rooming house where he himself lived on 3rd Street, South of Market. It was in the basement of a building which housed a used radio parts supplier in the storefront, and the cafĂ©’s chef and his family in the second floor flat. It was not an area that the dining duo would have thought to go, populated as it mostly was with rundown hotels, workingmen’s employment agencies, garages, laundries, and pawn shops. But here resided The Peacock, a lunch and dinner room run by Hamzi Burlettini, the son of an Italian cook and a Turkish-Italian waitress. According to the Nugget Grill waiter, the house specialty was a large square of peacock egg frittata for 25¢. A rumor had circulated amongst the neighborhood men that this item was a magic hangover cure as well as a boost to virility. He started doing so well at lunchtime that he never bothered to put up the signboard his wife had painstakingly painted.
To Millie and Corpy this sounded like an enticing destination. They procured directions from the waiter and a plan was laid for a dinner rendezvous that night. They would meet at 3rd Street and Market later in the evening after Corpy had gone home, had a sherry with his wife, and patted the children. They would then venture down the street together.

3rd Street, San Francisco, 1930s/40s


            The vaporous evening cooled and the two strolled down 3rd along with a flow of men pushing their ways both up and down the street, returning from work in the downtown establishments or South of Market factories, headed to their rooms and corner bars. The street was a jumble of small warehouse buildings, multistory brick buildings, and wooden Victorian storefronts with groceries and shops. They came to the radio parts store, dark and closed for the night. As directed, they turned at the alley and came to a side door with a peacock plume nailed to it, reached by six descending cement steps. As they hesitated, a mournful, human sounding screech come from behind the building. Startled, the two walked past the basement door to the high wooden fence that surrounded the area behind the building. Corpy was able to look over, and Millie peered through a knothole in the wood.
In the glow of light from the overlooking windows they could see it was a long, narrow yard strewn with rusted cans, machine parts, broken crates, and an old cast-iron laundry wringer. And tiptoeing around the garbage was a glorious peacock with his feathers spread and fanning the air. He was following a fat peahen around the weedy junkyard. The famous frittata egg source revealed.

            The door with the feather was locked, and it took a few moments before their knocks were answered. They stepped down into the low-ceilinged room, led in by a disgruntled looking dark-eyed woman. The dining room was small and cluttered with mismatched chairs around tables covered with the routine red-checked tablecloths and candles in wine bottles. Scattered between the tables were threadbare geometric patterned mats and rugs, and on the rough walls were painted crude murals of crenellated castles and oversized peacocks. The overall affect was odd and Millie and Corpy exchanged curious looks with each other.
“I’m sorry Sir, Madame, but we’ve ended our dinner service early this evening.”
The thin, mustachioed owner had come from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a rag, imploring the two apologetically. “Perhaps an espresso and biscotti before you go, or a little of my special honey almond pastry?”
            Conrad P. Favrille was none too pleased with this, as his stomach was growling and his expectations whetted. He made an outraged fuss, much to Millie’s embarrassment, and soon the two were seated, their candle lit, and a bottle of red wine brought out. Only a curtain hung over the door to the kitchen, and immediately they heard husband and wife begin to argue.
            “You promised on this night I wouldn’t have to cook, clean, and serve! The children are sleeping, and I’m ready to be taken to a proper restaurant like you promised!”
            “Rosina, my love,” the husband soothed. “We can still go. There are many hours left to our anniversary. Let me cook for our new customers, and then I will take you anywhere in the city you like."
            Millie stood up and whispered to Corpy that they should go, but he was determined at this point and only continued to drink his wine and look amused.
            “No! It’s either right now or I’m going up to bed!” At this the wife broke down and began to sob.
            They heard the low murmur of comforting words. Suddenly, the curtain was pulled aside, and Hamzi reappeared.
            “My new friends—please join us in the kitchen. I’ve struck a deal with my dear wife, and we’d be grateful to have you help us begin our anniversary celebration!”

            They stepped into the spare but clean basement kitchen, and sat down with Rosina at a round oak table in the center of the room. The wine and candle were quickly brought, a dish of olives and a large Mason jar of pickled eggs were set down, and Hamzi pulled items from shelves and icebox and began to assemble them on the counter.
            “He has offered something I don’t believe he can do,” the sniffling Rosina explained. “From the usual old things we keep in this kitchen, which I am sick to death of—both cooking and eating—he is going to make a dish which is like nothing I’ve ever had, which he claims will make him seem a prince to me. Ha! What a joke! I ask for a small thing, to escape this place for just a few hours, and he can’t even do that for me!”
            The two guests continued to drink their wine, and Rosina appeared increasingly more relaxed as she talked on, and the chef continued with his task.
            “This crazy man thinks he's a scholar! When we’re at church or when he is supposed to be returning from the market in the morning—off he is at that library!”
            “I like old and medieval things,” Hamzi offered a little shyly. “I like to read about the herbs that were used, the grand meals, the castles and harems. My mother read to me both King Arthur stories and the Thousand and One Nights tales when I was young. And my father, who was also a cook, recited fantastic imagined menus to me as he smoked his cigar on Sundays—so these interests combined for me.”
            Rosina rolled her eyes at this, but she sipped her wine and her mood was clearly improving.
            “When my poultry man mentioned that he had peacocks for sale out on his farm in Petaluma," the chef continued, "I described to him one of my fathers imagined feasts which included a roasted peacock. He brought me two peacock chicks on his next delivery, which I knew right away I would never cook! I call the male Pete after Petrarca, you know, the Italian poet—and the female is his Laura.”
            “One of these nights, when they start squawking I’m going to wring their necks, and we will cook them up!” Rosina said.
            “Ah, she only says she doesn’t like them. But look at the beautiful pictures she painted of them for me on the restaurant walls! My wife only pretends not to indulge me.”
            At this Rosina snorted into her glass, but looked pleased. At the others’ urging, she went up the wooden stairs to the flat above, and returned with several canvas boards she had painted of more castles, peacocks, and a few halcyon landscapes. Corpy and Millie each bought a painting from Rosina, to her blushing delight.
            As the husband and wife talked, with Corpy interjecting jolly comments here and there, Millie kept her eye on what Hamzi was doing. When she couldn’t identify something he was chopping, cooking, or stirring, she popped up and peered over his shoulder, sweetly and flatteringly asking him questions.
            What she was able to observe was this:

            He poured a green liquid and a bit of water into a small bowl from a bottle labeled Absenta, which he had located in the back of the pantry closet with much shifting and rattling of glass. It was a Spanish absinthe, the source of which he would not reveal to Millie, other then to say a “friend” had supplied it. In the absinthe he soaked two large handfuls of dried cherries. A half dozen or so sweet potatoes were then skinned, steamed, and mashed up in a bowl. He produced a large goose liver from the icebox, which he had intended to make into pâtĂ©. Instead he chopped it into very small pieces, and sautĂ©ed it in olive oil with a clove of garlic, and chopped wild onions which he pulled from a small herb garden in the peacock yard, nicely planted in half of an empty wine barrel. From a jar he then poured a small amount of dark seeds into his palm and sprinkled them into the skillet to be toasted together with slivered almonds.
            “What are those black seeds?” Millie asked.
            “They’re peony seeds. I’ve kept them to give to Rosina with wine, now and again—a medieval cure for women’s ills and to help in childbirth!”
            In a separated skillet, he sautĂ©ed small cubes of rabbit meat, stirring in the absinthe-soaked cherries a few seconds before he removed the mixture from the pan. Next from the icebox came Hamzi’s layers of paper thin dough, which he used as his dessert pastry. Each layer was brushed with melted butter, and he cut the stacks into hand-sized teardrop shapes, like the eye of a peacock feather. As far as Millie had been able to tell, both the rabbit and goose liver mixtures were then combined in the bowl of mashed sweet potato, together with several beaten peacock egg yokes, the peony and almond seeds, a few pinches of nutmeg, then salt.
            Hamzi then spooned a generous dollop of the mixture on to each teardrop of dough, covered it with another cutout of dough, and pressed the sides together like a turnover. Peacock egg white was brushed over the domes, with a pinch of cinnamon on each. And into the oven the tray went.
           
           Two more bottles of red were opened as the four sat and laughed around the table and the baking smells began to snake enticingly, exotically around the room. Corpy told stories of dining in Paris and New York, and Hamzi related his early days of shadowing his father in a string of San Francisco restaurant kitchens.  
            For Millie it had been a few hours of drinking wine with only olives and nibbles of an egg in her stomach. Memories of the evening from that point on seemed to be filtered through a sort of warm fog. She and Rosina talked and laughed at one side of the table, but later she had no idea what it had all been about.
            Finally, the puffs came out of the oven, and powdered sugar was lightly sprinkled over the tops. They were put in a large low-sided pasta bowl, a steaming mountain of golden pastry. The conversation stopped and Hamzi pulled his chair close to his wife’s and laid a cloth napkin over her knees. He picked up a roll and held it in front of her lips, watching her intently as she bit down into a flurry of steam and pastry flakes. The three of them sat motionless as Rosina slowly chewed with her eyes closed. She opened her eyes and peered at her husband, then leaned in for another bite from his hand. The second bite brought on a soft moan of appreciation, and she took her husband’s cheeks between her hands and gave him a long kiss, the sugary flakes all over each of their lips. When she released him with a smile on his face, their guests began to clap and cheer. There was no more talk of the husband and wife going out to a restaurant, though Hamzi had succeeded in the bet and produced something delectable from his pantry like nothing Rosina had ever tasted. At this, the others reached to the bowl and were soon lost in their own savoring and marveling at the creation. There were plenty to gorge them all, and they ate until there was nothing left.
            The transition was hazy to Millie, but at a certain juncture Rosina was sitting straddled on her husband’s lap, kissing him wildly and scrabbling her pastry-flake-covered fingers through his dark hair.
            Corpy stood up and took Millie’s elbow, their two small paintings under his arm. The room seemed to pitch a little as she got out of her chair. He left a generous roll of money under the rim of the empty bowl, and they crept through the darkened dining room and up onto the street.
            Before they headed to the street to find a taxi, they went back to the fence to see the peacocks. Laura the peahen was hidden somewhere in the shadows of the yard, but Pete was perched majestically on the top finial of the old clothes mangle, which looked almost like a Victorian printing press with its large spoked side wheel and flattening rollers. His blue body feathers shimmered in the faint, filtered light, and his long train of feathers draped folded and resting on the ground below him.

            As they walked towards Market Street, a black cab emerged fortuitously out of the fog. Settled in the back, her white felt-gloved hands clasped together against the chill, Millie waited for Corpy to first give her apartment building on Ellis Street, where her roommate was no doubt wondering where she was, and then his own Pacific Heights address. He stayed silent after the cabbie’s “where to?” and then a large hand came slowly and delicately to rest on a silk-stocking-covered knee.


Notes:
The peacock puffs in this short fiction are a purely imagined dish. Don’t try this at home… unless you have the skill to make it a palatable reality (maybe substituting the rabbit?!)! In which case, please send me a full report and a detailed recipe!

Menu items for Solari’s Restaurant, The Palace Hotel, The Gold Nugget, Hange’s Restaurant, and Topsy’s Roost all taken from Eating Around San Francisco, Thompson, Ruth and Chef Louis Hanges, Sutton House LTD., San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York: 1937.

The large, bling-bedecked James Buchannan“Diamond Jim” Brady and buxom performer Lillian Russell were Gilded Age New York food buddies. Theirs was a very modern platonic-gastronomic relationship. Or at least, the reported gargantuan extent of their gorging makes me believe that it was probably the only shared intimacy they regularly had the energy to indulge in!




Saturday, April 7, 2012

Far Away Near the City

Santa Teresa Hills, Santa Clara County

Together with its food-mecca status, tech and science industries, and the creative community, the diversity of the landscape is often cited as the irresistible draw and anchor for people who land in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within half hour to five hour drives you can reach the Sierra Nevada and Coastal Mountain Ranges, lakes, rivers, delta valleys, extensive forests, high and low dessert landscapes, vast rolling foothills, and beaches ranging from wide and open to rocky and dramatic. You can easily be in the thick of extreme urban density, or feel completely remote, or both. Recently, hiking in the Santa Teresa Hills (about an hour drive from San Francisco), I had the slightly surreal experience of being shoulder-high in sagebrush, alternately startled by numerous deer and darting brush rabbits, while being aware that a sprawling population of nearly a million people lay a short distance below me in San Jose, and edging towards another million in the rest of Silicon Valley. Over a few days we saw many groups of wild turkeys, four rattlesnakes, two coyotes, a possible fresh mountain lion print in the mud, and one morning the eery dark silhouette of a band of wild boars moving hurriedly across a nearby ridgeline. White owls flew over us, and we surprised a large brown owl from his oak tree bower. Lizards, hummingbirds, and fat little quails made cameo appearances, and the shadows of roving hawks regularly passed by.  Groups of black buzzards presumptuously circled us as a matter of course. There was one moment when, feeling very remote from the city, I stood frozen on the steep, rocky hillside I was ascending, after the heel of my boot sunk into what I let myself imagine was the entrance to a pit of rattlesnakes—and the wind suddenly shifted. I could just hear the faint wail of a police siren briefly carried up from the valley. Then the wind shifted again and the only sound was my own breathing.
California Poppies in lichen-covered serpentine outcrops,
surrounding sagebrush and oak trees, Santa Teresa Hills

Sunday, March 18, 2012

The Doomed Dentist of Polk Street

1890s dental scene, stereograph photo

On Friday I had a wisdom tooth extraction, and my plan for the weekend was to lay low and recover, and get my taxes done. The idea being that the weekend was essentially a wash anyway, so might as well add insult to injury. But instead, because the procedure itself went by in a downright pleasant “twilight sedation” haze, I got to thinking about early dentistry, which reminded me of Frank Norris’ 1899 novel McTeague, A Story of San Francisco. I then managed to very successfully procrastinate doing my taxes by re-reading this naturalistic novel about a miner-turned-dentist in San Francisco.
McTeague is a hulking, dull-witted man who, as a boy in a Placer County mining camp is apprenticed to a traveling charlatan dentist. At the start of the novel Norris has McTeague established in his business and home at his own “dental parlors” in one street-facing corner room of a tenement boarding house over a branch post office on Polk Street. There he pulls the teeth of shop girls, drug clerks, and car conductors, often dispensing with forceps and extracting “a refractory tooth with his thumb and forefinger” (6). He administers crude fillings, “enlarging the cavity with hard-bits and hoe-excavators, and burring in afterward with half-cone burrs,” as his patient winced and moaned (25), until he finally relents and uses ether, which he is hesitant to do. He dreams of one day having hanging from his window, “a huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something gorgeous and attractive” (7). This giant gold tooth becomes emblematic of the story’s theme of greed and degeneration, as the giant eyeglasses sign of Doctor Ekleburg later would in The Great Gatsby. But where the eyeglasses signify a similar defeated greed and optimism, dispassionately overseeing the wasteland below—McTeague’s giant gold tooth also tumbles like a poison pill of avarice directly into the lives of the dentist and his increasingly miserly wife, eventually ending up in the back alley hovel they fall into, where it is used as a sort of table to stack fetid dirty dishes.

The story ends in a murder, and it is known that Norris likely based the details and motivations of this crime on one committed and reported on in the San Francisco Examiner at the time (xvi). The San Francisco Chronicle also reported on the crime on October 10, 1893 (and an 1899 Chronicle book reviewer mentions it as well), describing the grisly scene at a kindergarten where the victim worked (as Mrs. McTeague similarly does) at Second and Folsom Street, under the headline: “SLASHED TO DEATH. The Brutal Murder of Sarah Collins. Her Husband Accused of the Crime.” The contemporary review also mentions that McTeague goes on the lam carrying his pet canary in a cage, always taking it with him, and that this was also based on a reported fugitive in California at the time. On an initial search, I wasn’t able to find a news reference to this canary-toting criminal. However, in the process I did come upon a small news item that seems to be another possible source for the author and it is dated October 3, 1893, just days before the Collins crime took place. Having yet to read further criticism, I don’t know if this has already been pointed out, but it is definitely intriguing as a potential contemporary inspiration for Norris to have used for his character of a dentist tempted by the vulnerability of his patient—and it is just as likely that he would have happened upon this article as that of the Collins murder.  The small item is titled: “ALLEGED CRIME OF A DENTIST. A Father Claims He Wronged Fourteen-Year-Old-Daughter.” The dentist, Dr. S. R. Rhodes of Napa, California, has fled from town, as he is accused of being “in the habit of making quite free with his girl and young lady patients.”
But before the McTeagues reach their dire ends, when the future wife is still a small,  pale woman in his dental chair, igniting in him the “sudden panther leap of the animal” (26) as she lays inert from anesthesia under his gargantuan hands, Polk Street is alive beneath the bay window of his room. Despite the 1899 review of the novel, which accuses Norris of not including enough San Francisco “local color, " and which the introduction to the Oxford edition describes as a condescending cataloging of a “human warehouse” (xviii)—and regardless of what Norris' class references may have been, I disagree with this appraisal, and read the section as a fascinating primary source snapshot of the life of a San Francisco neighborhood. This area is described in the novel as an “accommodation street” (6) for the domestic and mercantile needs of wealthier neighborhoods around it, from which Norris himself came from, but still he traversed and viewed this scene himself and offers it up vividly in sounds, sights, and smells:

“On week days the street was very lively. It woke to its work about seven o’clock, at the time when the newsboys made their appearance together with the day laborers. The laborers went trudging past in a straggling file—plumber’s apprentices, their pockets stuffed with sections of lead pipe, tweezers, and pliers… gangs of street workers, their overalls soiled with yellow clay… plasterers, spotted with lime from head to foot. This little army of workers mingled with other toilers of a different description—conductors and ‘swing men’ of the cable company going on duty; heavy eyed night clerks from the drug stores… roundsmen returning from the precinct police station… Chinese market gardeners teetering past under their heavy baskets. The cable cars began to fill up; all along the street could be seen the shop keepers taking down their shutters.
“Between seven and eight the street breakfasted. Now and then a waiter from one of the cheap restaurants crossed from one sidewalk to the other, balancing on one palm a tray covered with a napkin. Everywhere was the smell of coffee and frying steaks. A little later, following in the path of the day laborers, came the clerks and shop girls, dressed with a certain cheap smartness, always in a hurry. Their employers followed an hour or so later—on the cable cars for the most part—whiskered gentlemen with huge stomachs, reading the morning papers with great gravity; bank cashiers and insurance clerks with flowers in their buttonholes.” (8-9)

The scene carries on through the following hours, when the ladies from the wealthy grand avenue (Van Ness) begin to promenade and do their marketing, attended to by the “subservient provision-men at their elbows scribbling hastily in the order books”; at noon when the street becomes busiest with the “mingled shuffling of feet, the rattle of wheels, the heavy trundling of cars,” the migration of school children and the “great homeward march” commences, the newsboys chanting the evening papers, before the street suddenly falls quiet and deserted during the supper hour. Then the evening begins as “one by one a multitude of lights, from the demoniac glare of the druggists’ windows to the dazzling blue whiteness of the electric globes, grew thick from street corner to street corner. Once more the street was crowded. Now there was no thought but for amusement.” Theatergoers, couples, dressmakers, harness makers, “little families that lived on the second stories over their shops,” all come out on the street “strolling idly from shop window to shop window, taking the air after the day’s work,” patronizing the tamale sellers and listening to the “band of Salvationists” sing in front of a saloon.  Each day, McTeague watches this “same panorama unroll” from the bay windows of his rooms. (9-11)
The boarding house where McTeague lives is given as being at the corner of Polk and California Street. Unfortunately, that corner is now completely changed by modern buildings, but moving up Polk towards Sacramento Street, or down towards Geary Street, there are still Victorian and Edwardian store-fronted apartment buildings to be found—survivors of Norris’ street scenes.  Over the recent decades, Polk Street has gone through various shifts in flavor. At least up to the early 1980s lower Polk was very much a vibrant concentration of gay bars and clubs, and an overall nexus for the gay and transgender community, before that vibrancy shifted more towards the Castro neighborhood. There are still such clubs and bars to be found near the Geary Street end of Polk, along with a smattering of adult shops and the various characters that travel in their orbits; and there is also a long-established incursion of trendy “gentrified” bars and pubs and the regular weekend parading of their respective followers. Though there are the usual large banks, chain pharmacies, and over-scaled new construction, what has remained constant on Polk Street is a solid occupation of small businesses spread the length of the street, including salons, hardware stores, cafes, bakeries, boutiques, specialty businesses, second-hand clothing shops, florists, dry-cleaners, corner markets, and an extensive number of restaurants ranging from Italian and pizza joints to Southeast Asian and Mediterranean. While the daily and evening pedestrian traffic is now nothing like what Norris described, this city corridor has retained a presence in the life of the city. As to seeking one’s dental care on this particular street, however… I might hesitate!


Norris, Frank. McTeague. Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 1995.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: San Francisco Chronicle (1869-1922); October 3, 1893, p. 3; October 10, 1983, p. 5; March 12, 1899, p. 4.

Vintage Postcard: "Teeth Pulled While You Wait"

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Strolling Street Photographers


1935

It used to be that a shopping day in the City meant putting on gloves and hat and looking your best! And it was a good thing, too, because very likely a candid moment in your day would be captured by a strolling street photographer, often in front of one of the large department stores. Some of the photographers may have been associated with the stores, but more likely they were independent or connected to a photography studio. Having people go to studios to pick up their street shot prints would be a way to advertise. Anyone with old family photos, especially from the 1940s, has no doubt seen these wonderful and dynamic captured moments. The subjects know they are being photographed, but they are moving and engaged with the city around them.

The above photo and next two photos below are from a family that came out from Texas and Oklahoma to settle in a small town just south of San Francisco. It was the 1930s, and they were part of the huge Depression-era migration from the West South Central States.

The lady I acquired these photos from shared with me that the beguiling girl above was her aunt who arrived in the Bay Area in 1934 on a Greyhound Bus with two heavy suitcases in hand and a plan to live with her sister who had already arrived and settled. This gal lived up until last year when she was 101 years old. Despite resource limitations at the time, she got herself up with fashion-forward style in a chic tilted hat and tiered skirt. Best of all, she appears to be wearing what looks like a tasseled curtain cord tied daringly around her patterned shirt, like a Depression Scarlet O'Hara. She is most certainly walking on Market Street, as you can just see one of the distinctive lampposts behind her. She is in front of a theater, as the awning behind her reads “Charles Laughton,” and above that the 1935 movie “Ruggles of Red Gap.” The movie is about an English butler who is lost by his lordly master in a poker game to a couple of Western hicks on vacation. They bring him home and he finds himself having to adjust to small town life in the West. So perhaps she’s just emerged from an afternoon of comic relief entertainment!
Another aunt from the same family appears in the two photos below. In the first, fashions have become more tailored, collars more elaborate. The two ladies are on a girls’ day out and appear to be pretending that they have no idea that a photo is being snapped! I can’t identify the location, but it is most likely Market Street. The next, later photo is clearly Market Street, and I believe they are just in front of one of the large arching entrances to the old Emporium Department Store. It’s definitely the 1940s, and it looks like a fruitful day of shopping was had!


                              Late 1930s                                                                                            1940s

The image below is a found photo showing a mother and two daughters on a shopping day in the 50s. The shadowed light makes this woman appear to be run-ragged by her teenagers. The sign on the building behind reads “Gray’s Suits.” It is probably Market Street, based on the wide sidewalk, but possibly Powell Street…?


1951

Across the Bay:  Below are my own stylish grandparents in 1940. They are east of San Francisco, strolling down Broadway in downtown Oakland, in front of the old Capwell's Department Store. My mother is in her push-chair, and appears to have caught site of something fascinating off to the side. Because they are moving and smiling and reacting to the surrounding people and city, this moment more than 70 years ago feels present and alive to me.  Because these street photos capture a flash of life that the people in them don’t necessarily expect will be preserved, it is all the more wonderful that it is.


1940

Tuesday, February 14, 2012