I have a still tiny collection of San Francisco-related pulp fiction paperbacks, and Rooming House (Beacon Books, 1951) is one of the more notable. It features particularly unsavory cover art, showing the bitter protagonist threatening his frowzy, voluptuous mate. But it's notable for several other reasons. To begin with, it is reasonably well-written and descriptive, in a vintage hard boiled sort of way--at least compared to the wooden and clunky prose of other examples I've dipped into. Additionally, the author is very specific about the locations where the nasty protagonist skulks about, street by street, including his forays to speakeasies. And finally, it revolves around a fascinating aspect of early life in San Francisco and other American and European cities: the urban rented room.
A rooming house was distinct from a boarding house, in that it was a building purpose-built for multiple renters. A boarding or lodging house was generally a private home where boarders were accommodated in extra rooms and dined with the family--the lines of privacy being more blurred. But aspects of each overlapped, with renters who paid for board at rooming houses dining with the family and fellow inmates at a common table. In Rooming House, the motley group of lodgers sit down to eat with the landlord as his daughter serves.
Based on just a cursory inquiry, Fred Malloy seems to be a pen name for Holland E. Nickerson. Or, both are pen names for Jack Woodford and/or another writer at The Jack Woodford Press (the answer is perhaps to be found in the pulp specialist Stephen Spender's The Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers). In any case, whoever the author or authors were, they clearly spent time in San Francisco.
Though the cover art mostly evokes the time of publication, the story is set sometime during Prohibition. The pitiful and eventually violent main character, Harry, is a ragtime saxophone player from Chicago who lands in San Francisco to make it big in the club circuit. But a weakness for the bottle and tawdry dames, coupled with his unwillingness to play the newer jazz sounds, eventually separates him from his band mates and lands him in a decrepit rooming house South of Market on Hampshire Street. It's run by an unpleasant Sicilian named Guido, along with Emma, his broken-down, room-crawling daughter. Harry is seduced by the blowzy vixen in his threadbare bedroom, and his life becomes entangled with the rooming house and the vicious, seedy characters that inhabit the place. It does not end well for any of them.
Harry is described as taking the "green surface car, rattling and swaying down Bryant..." to and from the rooming house. He walks across Franklin Park (where he later has a racy tryst on a park bench), which is now a sports field, turns on Hampshire Street and heads a block to the building which is described as having a shingled porch. This close to the field, the street is currently lined with new condos and large commercial buildings. But further down (take a Google Street View stroll...) there are many blocks that include numerous wonderful Victorian and turn-of-the-century buildings. On Hampshire between 20th and 21st, there is a two story building (currently painted blue and white) with a double-level porch and entrances, which has the look of a 19th century purpose-built rooming house. It's easy to imagine this structure, or one like it, as the book's cauldron of hard boiled drama.
The specificity of the character's movements are a pleasure for the San Franciscophile. For example, the author tracks Harry heading up Bryant to 11th Street, and then to Market Street where he gets off the street car and crosses Civic Center to Polk Street. He heads up Polk until he gets to O'Farrell (the Tenderloin; ever and still a destination for lost nights), where he takes a turn and heads for a rough and nasty speakeasy in a little cul-de-sac:
"Papers and cans littered the area, a kind of meaty slime seemed to cling to the brick walls of the narrow alley.... he shuffled through the muck that covered the paved surface toward the dim stairs leading down into deeper shadow. The street lamp struggled valiantly and managed to send just a somber gleam into these dank corners."
Also interesting, from the perspective of Prohibition in San Francisco, Harry frequents a speakeasy held in a private home ("everyone was trying to scratch out a living these days") on Division near 11th, where now there are only commercial buildings. The place is described as "...more like a family gathering, though some nights they drew quite a crowd. The man and his wife tended bar, which was a small buffet table set in the basement."
Other locations throughout the City feature in Harry's increasingly degenerate and degenerating wanderings, which could be plotted precisely on a map. Early on, after skirting a gig at a society maven's home on Knob Hill, he heads for a speakeasy on Montgomery Street. He regularly frequents another "speak" on California Street called Al's. At the ferry building he boards a boat for Oakland (at which point the first of several murders is committed). He visits various banks on Market Street to initiate a doomed plan. And the child of his cursed union is born at San Francisco General on Potrero. The details of people and places belie the front and back cover titillations ("Emma made the beds in that cheap San Francisco rooming house. She was young, pretty in a tawdry way, and jail-bait hungry.") A little bit of Pulp with a lot of vintage local San Francisco color.
Side Notes: The volume is out of print and pricey, but for a great social history study that touches on American lodging/rooming houses and focuses on residential hotels, see "Living Downtown" by Paul Groth. On the subject of shared meals: the most vivid and stomach churning description of boarding house dining imaginable can be found in the early chapters of George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, in which his perpetually grimy-handed landlord leaves an oily black thumbprint on every slice of bread he insists upon cutting.
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