Up to the time of the closing of Barbary Coast molestation of women on the streets of San Francisco was almost unheard of. Since its closing it is becoming more and more hazardous for women to walk alone at night in the only large city in the world that always had the reputation of guarding its womankind.
The City That Was Passes
Times change and we change with them is well evidenced by the restaurant life of the present day San Francisco. Now, as before the fire, we have the greatest restaurant city of the world—a city where home life is subordinated to the convenience of apartment dwelling and restaurant meals-but the old-time Bohemian finds neither the same atmosphere nor the same restaurants.
True, many of the old names have been retained or revived, but there is not felt the old spirit of camaraderie. Old personalities have passed away and old customs have degenerated. Those who await The Call feel that with the passing of the old city there passed much that made life worth living, and as they prepare to cross to the Great Beyond, they live in their memories of the Past.
With reverence we think of the men and women of the early San Francisco—those who made the city the Home of Bohemia—and it is with this feeling that we now come to discuss the Bohemian restaurants of the New San Francisco.
Sang the Swan Song
In the latter part of April, 1906, when the fire-swept streets presented their most forbidding aspect, and when the only moving figures to be seen after nightfall were armed soldiers guarding the little remaining of value from depredations of skulking vagabonds, a number of the old Bohemian spirits gathered at the corner of Montgomery and Commercial streets, and gazed through the shattered windows into the old dining room where they had held many a royal feast. On the blackened walls might still be seen scarred pictures, fringed by a row of black cats along the ceiling. They turned their steps out toward the Presidio, hunted among the Italian refugees and there found Coppa—he of the wonderful black cats, and it took little persuasion to induce him to go back to his ruined restaurant and prepare a dinner, such as had made his place famous among artists, writers, and other Bohemians, in the days when San Francisco was care-free and held her arms wide open in welcome to all the world.
It was such a dinner as has been accorded to few. Few there are who have the heart to make merry amid crumbling ruins of all they held dear in the material world. The favored ones who assembled there will always hold that dinner in most affectionate memory, and to this day not one thinks of it without the choking that comes from over-full emotion. It was more than a tribute to the days of old—it marked the passing of the old San Francisco and the inauguration of the new.
It was Bohemia's Swan Song, sung by those to whom San Francisco held more than pleasure—more than sentimentality. It held for them close-knit ties that nothing less than a worldshaking cataclysm could sever—and the cataclysm had arrived.
The old Coppa restaurant in Montgomery street became a memory and on its ashes came the new one, located in Pine street between Montgomery and Kearny streets, and for a number of years this remained the idol of Bohemia until changed conditions drove the tide of patronage far up toward Powell, Ellis, Eddy and O'Farrell streets. At that time there grew up a mushroom crop of so-called restaurants in Columbus avenue close to Barbary Coast such as Caesar's, the Follies Cabaret, Jupiter and El Paradiso, where space was reserved in the middle of the floor for dancing. Coppa emulated the new idea by fitting out a gorgeous basement room at the corner of Kearny and Jackson, which he called the Neptune Palace. It represented a great grotto under the ocean, and here throngs gathered nightly to dance and eat until the police commissioners closed all of these resorts, as well as Barbary Coast.