Prostitution Now and Then
Kevin J. Mullen
Prostitutes are overrunning a large portion of downtown San Francisco, terrorizing residents and destroying property values, while city government looks on.
-- The Examiner (Dec. 9, 1992)
After years of trying everything from citing them and jailing them to simply ignoring them, city officials have vowed to look into a new approach to dealing with prostitutes: legalizing them—possibly in red- light districts, brothels, or even city-owned love barracks
-- The Examiner (Dec. 29, 1993)
In the first six months of the Gold Rush year of 1849, San Francisco’s population increased several times over with the arrival of 10,000 seaborne Argonauts. “The vast majority,” reports the “Annals of San Francisco, “were adult males, in the early prime of manhood.” Two hundred were women. “This circumstance,” observed the “Annals,” “naturally tended to give a peculiar character to the aspect of the place and habits of the people.” Along with gambling and drinking saloon, brothels formed the basis of what passed for social life in boom town San Francisco. “There were also some honest women in San Francisco,” wrote Benard de Russaihl in 1851, “but not very many.”
By mid-decade, however, some of the gold-seekers, who had come first only to “make their pile” and return home, took a look around and noticed the features which still draw immigrants to California. They decided to settle. Some sent for their wives and families; others when back East to claim a bride and return. The gender makeup of the city began to change and, as it did, a collision between “respectable” women and their “fair but frail” sisters was inevitable.
When the trouble came, the issue was not so much whether there would be prostitution but rather where it would be conducted. The collision between the two worlds was aggravated, asserts historian Roger Lotchin, “largely because of the spatial relationships of the city.” In the compact Gold Rush city, respectable wives were thrown into daily contact with the brothels on Dupont Street (Grant Avenue) as they made their way from their residences on Stockton Street to the stores below on Kearny and Montgomery.
The daily irritants were given concrete focus in November 1855, when Belle Ryan, keeper of the city’s most elegant parlor house, in company with Charles Cora, happened to be seated near U.S. Marshal William Richardson and his wife at a popular theater. When the management refused to evict Belle, the Richardsons left in a huff. The two men met in a saloon on Clay Street a few days later, and in the fracas which ensued, Cora killed the marshal.
As one if its first orders of business, the famed the Second Committee of Vigilance, formed a few months later in part because of vice conditions in the city, seized Cora from the County Jail -- where he was awaiting retrial for the Richardson shooting after having a hung jury in his first trial – and summarily hanged him. Nonetheless, prostitution was to figure largely in the social scheme of San Francisco for the remainder of the century and well beyond.
Police Chief Burke gave voice, in his 1860 annual report, to the accepted Victorian attitude about commercial vice. He was against prostitution, he said, in line with the prohibitory laws in force. “It is impossible to suppress it altogether,” he said, “yet it can, and ought to be regulated, so as to limit the injury done to society, as much as possible.” As in other American cities at the time, prostitution in San Francisco was restricted to a “segregated district,” in our case, the Barbary Coast.
Despite the occasional protestations of moral crusaders, the principal efforts of the authorities with regard to prostitution well into the twentieth century, were to keep the house form spreading into residential districts. But the new century brought changed attitudes and by 1915 efforts were under way to extirpate the practice from the city altogether. By the , the “resorts” had spread to the upper Tenderloin where the Reverend Paul Smith headed the central Methodist Church at O’Farrell and Leavenworth streets. For Smith that was altogether too close.
“Young men have told me,” he wrote, “that they have been approached by women while on their way to church from the YMCA. Others have been approached almost before they left the doorsteps of the church after Sunday evening services.” Critics of Smith’s crusade argued that closing down the houses would merely spread the individual prostitutes around the city.
Prodded by Smith and newspaper editorialists, 7,000 concerned citizens met at the Dreamland Rink on Sunday, January 25, 1917, to demand the closing of houses of ill repute. That morning, in an outlandish twist, 300 prostitutes, escorted by uniformed police entered Smith’s church during morning services, and in front of his shocked parishioners, asked him what was to become of them. Smith held his ground, but it is not recorded that he offered any useful advice.
A few years earlier, a red light abatement law had been enacted by the state legislature (with 11 of the 12 San Francisco law makers voting against it). The measure was tied up in a court challenge but in January 1917, the state Supreme Court found it to be constitutional, and on the night of February 14, 1917, San Francisco police blocaded the Barbary Coast. No man was allowed in unless he could show that he had legitimate business, and the prostitutes were ordered out. In all, within a week the Barbary Coast was virtually dead.
Some might suggest a return to the segregated district of an earlier time. Any solution is problematic, as Smith found out. Eventually he left the ministry and became an automobile salesman. Parlor houses were to remain a feature of life in San Francisco for another generation, if less visible in the past. As critics of the anti-vice crusade predicted, brothels were dispersed about the city. Street walkers became a more prominent feature of the industry. San Francisco was not ready to close down the lid completely. There was a blip of interest in the 1930s when an investigation into police graft revealed that prostitution – and payoffs to the police – were widespread in the Central Police District. Edwin Atherton, the chief investigator, suggested that vice be legalized and regulated to put an end to police graft. Again things returned to normal, although at a reduced level.
It wasn’t until World War II, and then only at the insistence of U.S. military authorities that police closed down what amounted to publicly sanctioned houses of prostitution. Following World War II there was an official move to raise the lid a bi, but a young mayoral candidate named George Christopher, who read the public mind correctly, particularly that of the growing power of the woman’s vote, raised a political ruckus. In 1955, Christopher replaced the incumbent mayor, Elmer Robinson, who had displayed a more tolerant stance toward vice. And thereafter, San Francisco was effectively closed to officially sanctioned vice. In recent years, faced by the seemingly insurmountable and unenforceable problem of streetwalkers invading residential neighborhoods, some thinkers are returning to the ideas of our 19th century predecessors. In 1971 the San Francisco Crime Commission recommended that “discreet, off-street” prostitution be permitted so officers could devote time to more serious crimes.
And just a few years later, when just such an official policy was considered, there was hell to pay. In a 1976 Civil Grand Jury report, the jurors noted that :”We witnessed the unhappy spectacle of a considerable influx into San Francisco of ‘ladies of the night and midafternoon,’ ostensibly from warmer clime, when news of the department’s disinclination to arrest for prostitution became known.” Priorities were promptly readjusted.
A task force has been formed to consider a possible return to the practices of an earlier century. The members will find what they will find. But in their deliberations, they would do well to consider the implications – all of them—of a Barbary Coast, no matter how well intentioned or well managed.
San Francisco Examiner December 9, 1992 and December 29, 1993