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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome back to new books in the American West, a channel on the new books network of podcasts. I am Stephen Houseman, and I have your host for today's interview. And for this episode, I'm speaking with James Mallory. Dr. Mallory is a Los Angeles-based architect whose works specializes in historical buildings. And he's also taught numerous courses on US history and architectural history at several different institutions. And today, we're discussing his new book, City of Vice, Transients and San Francisco's Urban History, 1848 to 1917, which is brand new. Just came out with the University of Nebraska Press earlier this year in 2024. Welcome to the new books network. James, good to have you here. Thank you. It's great to be here. Why don't we start, as we always do on the show, but just read a little bit about who you are. So why don't you tell us a little about your background and what I'm particularly interested in is sort of how you got on the path of history, how you became interested in history. OK. Well, I am a native of California, and so I've really focused on California history. Born in Auburn, up in Gold County, which took me to some of the topics in my book, grew up in Riverside, suburban area, in a very, say, Christian Protestant family. My father was a pastor, actually, which is interesting when you read some of the book. Went to UCLA, studied history, and then Cal Poly to study architecture. And at one point, I moved back to San Francisco for about 12 years and worked as an architect. And that's when I wrote the bulk of the book when I was living up there. Currently, I live in LA. As you said, in a firm that specializes in historic preservation, page and turn goal, we do adaptive reuse, restoration. So I'm kind of straddling history and architecture and do my best to do both. Live with my husband in Burbank, California, southern California. And I've just always loved history, study of gender, like a native of the West, but also architectural history, urban history, just always looking for ways to bring it all together. - You know, we're here to talk about your book, but just reading a sale of that. I have about a million questions about your work in historical architecture, too, that sounds like really fascinating work. I guess I can ask you this at the end, but I'm curious about any sort of buildings or what that work entails. But we'll get to that later. Why don't we talk about the book first for a little bit? - Okay. - You kind of gestured for this a little bit, but I'm curious what brought you to the topic of this book in particular. You said you lived in San Francisco for a bit, but this is also, you know, it's a book about San Francisco, but it's a book about, as we'll be discussing, you know, kind of specific types of activities and people in San Francisco. So what was the path that you took to this particular project? - Oh, well, I think I could answer that a lot of ways. Kind of the big answer is I started, well, I began studying history at UCLA and I focused on migratory laborers, late 19th, early 20th century. So, hobo's. And particularly when they would, when they were not working, they would come into San Francisco and really occupy a district in the city. And so I was very interested in the ways that that district was defined. And, you know, particularly the city, you know, the city government itself and the religious groups and authorities and how they sort of defined the people. And so after that, when I moved to San Francisco, I found opportunities in my architectural work, actually, when I was able to continue that research. For example, when I was at one firm that I was at for the bulk of the time while I was there, I worked on the Tenderloin Museum in San Francisco. And so it was basically turning the Cadillac hotel in the Tenderloin, uptown Tenderloin, into a museum and really center for the community. And during that time, I just, I don't remember how, but I found that there was in 1917, there was a kind of this moral campaign to end prostitution. And I just did a lot of research on newspapers, shared it with the people in the museum who really enjoyed it. I think there's a little corner of the museum that has some of the newspapers that I found. So I was really proud of them. - The Mallory way. - Yeah, well, they might not agree with it or know that. But yeah, that was fantastic. And then there was another project I worked out at the waterfront, which was a adapter for use of a large structure. And while I was doing that, I found out that there used to be a sailor's boarding house there that was, and then there was a dynamite explosion, supposedly union activity, but that wasn't ever proven. And so that that was in one of, I think it was one of the electrical rooms currently of the building I was working on. So just trying to bridge all of these pieces together. And I think what I started on, I was looking at a lot, I'm sure when I started doing research, I was looking in many different directions. And the first time I turned in the book, I got a comment from a reader saying, "This is way too big. "What are you thinking?" And so it was really honing it down and refining it and finding out that what all the different subjects that I was looking at had in common in my real interests were that they had to do with transients. They had to do it with people who came into the city, who lived in a certain portion of the city or district in the city that was defined in a negative way in a certain way. And I was really looking at transient housing, at sort of non-domestic housing, and then also vice, which is how it's, which to me is something that has to be defined by people as someone else's activity. - That all makes sense. And again, the stuff that we'll be talking about in a bit, but you do a really good job in the book of bringing to life people who are often difficult to find in the historical record. I mean, by the very nature of the people that you are talking about, they're hard to pin down, right? That's sort of, that's the category that you are interested in. And yet you do a really good job of making them very present in the historical narrative. So in that regard, yeah, it's a very successful book in that way. But let's take a step back. Let's get into the history element. So the 1848 California goldfish, right? I feel like many books about California, they begin with that. It's one of these kind of rare, truly transformative events in history, right? The historian Elliot West in the book, he recently called it the kind of, the great coincidence, right? The fact that you have this gold rush that happens in discovery gold, right after the United States acquires California in the Treaty of Guadalupe, right? And maybe nothing kind of signals or points to the fact that this is a transformative moment more than San Francisco itself, right? And how the city of San Francisco changes as a result of the gold rush. So, you know, without going into too much depth, this is a topic that people have written, you know, a whole massive books about. But can you explain just a little bit about the gold rush and about how the town looks both before and after this rush? I guess what I'm really asking is, how does the gold rush kind of create the city of vice as you call it on the Pacific? - Yeah, well, as you say, a lot of people have written about the gold rush before. It's such a ripe topic. And so huge in the formation of San Francisco. Gold rush, there was a San Francisco before the gold rush. It had just been renamed a few years before, but it was maybe a thousand people, mainly my traders, basically, who were not from the area, very multicultural area. It was Mexico very recently. There was a little village called Dolores Village by the old mission where there were, you know, other Mexican traders. But basically, yeah, the gold rush transformed everything instantly, the idea of an instant city. And so within five years, you go from 1,000 to something like 60,000 people. And what people talk about is that there's basically on the east coast at this time, sort of middle class, advantaged women are getting more and more involved in the temperance movement and other sort of moral reform movements. And they're finding that they can take some authority from participating in that. But you didn't see that in San Francisco. San Francisco was more certainly during the gold rush, a time when you had a lot of migratory people. There wasn't that sort of surveillance that you would find in other cities, older cities. There wasn't the very vocal moral authorities that it had. And so you found that there were things that we called, well, that they called Vice, that were really able to thrive. And I think when we talk about Vice, we have to be really careful. Because, you know, I don't know what we think of it today. You know, the idea of prostitution, gambling, drinking, blood sports, it's kind of a grab bag of a lot of different things that were sort of defined in opposition to sort of this respectable household. They were things in public that were sort of beyond the domain of influence. But it came to mean different things over time. So, you know, there are things that are completely undefendable. Blood sports, dog fights. And sex trafficking would have been a vice. But then you also have later definitions of vice that is when single people go out dancing. And they go out drinking. And then when women go out unescorted, which just meant that there wasn't a man there that was chaperoning her. You know, so that all these things were vice. And so it was just kind of this grab bag of all different sorts of things. So, basically what I found with the Gold Rush is that there was this period when there were not, when there was not the presence of women with strong moral authority sort of watching over. And in some sense, challenging the vice districts. And that's something that happened a few decades after the Gold Rush. - So, this might be kind of almost like a silly follow-up question to what we're talking about. But why are people engaging in these activities in the first place? Or I guess maybe, maybe kind of a better way to frame this question is like, what is it about San Francisco's specific population? In the kind of middle to later-ish decades of the 19th century that is sort of pushing them or making them want to engage in these activities that other people are calling vice. What is it about this group of people and these activities in this place that creates this kind of like perfect storm of making San Francisco's kind of city of vice? - Well, I think it's the newness of it in a lot of ways. So many different people coming together with the different backgrounds. You know, it's what we call a border land, right? So that there's sort of these murky ties. Nothing is really formed in concrete. There's also around this time people talk about manhood so that men identify themselves. Traditionally, a century ago, they had traditionally defined themselves as economically able to support others, their own financial stability. But around this time on the east coast, you find a lot of men who can't support themselves. They're wage earners, they're away from home. And so they look for different areas to prove that they're men, to find their gendered worth. And those could be in a lot of the things that we call vice or that have been defined as vice, you know. And I think that the same thing happened in the West, you know, with the Mexican-American war. And with the gold rush, you have a lot of single men coming out and they find that they can sort of celebrate this, you know, the Jolly Fellows or the sporting man, you know, do that in a place that doesn't have this entrenched moral respectability, cult of respectability, you could say. - Yeah, and the importance of gender roles and gender norms is a really kind of crucial thread that runs through a lot of this book. And, you know, I think it's really interesting that you have these men that are coming to this place, coming to California and to San Francisco specifically, and they are removed from these family types, right? And that's kind of what you're saying, is that like to be a man in the 1850s in the United States and to not have this family, you know, it made you somewhat more questionable, right? That you don't have this sort of like, you're not participating in this sort of domestic sphere that is held up as the kind of like norm for men and women, right? So they're trying to figure out different ways to enact as what they see or what they feel as what they're being told is they're a manhood in all these different kinds of ways. So it's a really interesting thread that I wasn't expecting to pick up on when I started reading your book, but it's really sort of well-developed here. - Oh, thanks, yeah. No, and yeah, when you get into the decades following the Gold Rush, you'll find, you know, government programs where they're trying to, you know, basically will help you out if you are married and if you are supporting others and we're gonna weed out all the single men, you know? And there's several areas like that where preference is given to men who are supporting others in traditional family roles. - So as we've been talking about, one of the things that really sets San Francisco apart as a city in its kind of earliest decades is the transient nature of much of its population, right? And this is a fact that people with power in San Francisco, right, that the city government or what have you, they're well aware of this at the time, right? And they're not always too thrilled with this kind of fact of life in San Francisco. So how are politicians and other people with power? How are they trying to handle what they see as the problem of transits? And what sort of programs work? What are they trying that doesn't work? How is the city kind of making sense of this population people? - Well, that question goes back to, all the way back to when I wrote my dissertation largely about hobos. So, and this was in the West, just especially California in hundreds of thousands of men would pitch rides on trains and go to California. And then in the off season, they would go into the city, you know, LA or San Francisco. And so the city and the chapter that I write on 1893, 1894 depression is, that was a huge depression around the country, but it really hit, you know, the migrant laborers as it did everyone. And so I look at ways that it was the city government, but it's also kind of elite businessmen were dealing with all these thousands of homeless. The city, San Francisco had a tradition like other American cities of basically allowing unsheltered people to sleep in the jail, in the city jail. They continued that, that was something that was really established, that was sort of a function of police. And that continued during the depression, but the scale was so enormous during the depression that the jail just could not keep up with it. So they looked for other options. At one point, this was in 1893, the city basically funded a tent on Market Street, Market in 8th and worked with a person from the Salvation Army who kind of coordinated it. They called him, or they called it the newspapers, and I was looking at newspapers primarily. You know, they called it the Sandlot or Hotel to Sandlot, that was their kind of their catchy name for it. And that lasted a couple of months. It was just a big tent and it was, you know, it would rain and get really muddy. It didn't sound very attractive, but after a couple of months, the government just kind of gave up on that really because there was kind of like what we've seen in more recent times, this people who were called scientific or efficient charity advocates were saying, no, that's indiscriminate. You're just giving it to these men and you know, and they're not supporting families. They're just coming here to get a free ride. And so that ended very quickly. And then after that, there was still the problem of thousands and thousands of homeless men primarily. And so the city's businessmen got together and they created some work projects in the Golden Gate Park, creating roads and, you know, converting the native sand dunes into flower beds and whatnot. And that, it was actually, it was the businessmen that spent something like $93,000, which was a whole lot of money back then. Same period when you have, you know, this idea that we can't give the money to someone who's single, we have to weed them out. But, I mean, the skeptical part of me just says, that was just the businessmen getting ready for the midwinter fair in 1893, '94 in the Golden Gate Park. So I don't know that that was, the goal was not charity. But that ended. And when that ended, this was the time period when you have the Coxy armies marching to Washington, DC to demand relief, same depression winter. And so the mayor of San Francisco kind of agreed to send the man on. So just sort of shipped them across to Oakland. And then Oakland's mayor was upset at having homeless sent to him. So he sent them on to the next city. And that's really what a lot of cities would do. You know, really their San Francisco's experiments in providing some kind of work programs was unique. But more likely was to ship people on to the next. So I guess in your question about what worked and what didn't work, the idea of having a jail that opens up its doors at night, that is something that had worked for a long time. It just didn't really work then because of the scale of everything. You know, San Francisco also had Laguna Honda Hospital or the alms house, which took care of its own. But that was, and that turned increasingly for elderly. But that worked to a certain extent in terms of who it could serve. But the idea that you're just gonna take people and ship them off to the next, you know, is really just a product of the economy that where you've got, you know, agricultural companies that want really cheap labor. And so they're gonna attract people from all over, all over the country, all over the world. And when they're done, they're done. And the people don't have a way to get home so much. So that didn't, to me, that didn't work. It wasn't until you had some progressive legislation that started to change labor laws. - And that's what I was gonna say is that, you know, this is, we're still talking about the kind of the late 19th century here, 1880s and, you know, 1890s, you know, especially after the economic crash of the early 1890s. You know, this is an era still when the idea that the government on, you know, anything above the most local level, even that kind of questionably, should play a role in providing kind of mass, you know, large-scale welfare or alms is a pretty nascent dare I say, even in some cases, kind of radical idea still, right? That that's starting to change, but in the era of, you know, the depressions of both 1870s and 1890s, that's not really a thing that people are thinking about. And I think that the fact that you're describing San Francisco as, you know, not trying much and also not much that they are trying work in, I think is kind of a kind of, it kind of speaks to that. - Yeah, and this was the era of the worthy and the unworthy. - Exactly, yeah. - And yeah, the unworthy if you were not from San Francisco, if you were not following the gender roles, which was for men, you know, working and supporting someone and for women was not working and really in being dependent on a man, whether it's your father or your father or husband. And then, of course, race played in hugely. And so, yes, it was... - Another big strength of the book is, and I think that this kind of reflects the fact that we lived in this place for quite a few years, is that you do a really good job of kind of describing 19th and early 20th centuries neighborhoods in San Francisco, right? At least I did. I got it good in as much as you can for me in a book. I got a good sense of the city or of the city's neighborhoods in this time period. And one of the most important neighborhoods in the story that you're telling in the book, as the city itself, is San Francisco's Chinatown. So how does Chinatown factor into the history that you're telling here, this history of vice and transience and of people with power and people without power, trying to grapple with ideas of what is vice, what is morality? How does Chinatown play into this story? - A huge question. Thank you. I, you know, when I wrote my dissertation, I had not spent much time in San Francisco. So living there for a long time, I became very familiar with all the districts and all the different places and the different nuances, hopefully. So Chinatown was, yeah, unlike any other of San Francisco's districts. And I really was looking at transient districts or districts that housed people outside of the domestic home, as well as these so-called vice districts or red light districts that were often segregated and defined and clarified. So Chinatown was both. It had a huge population of male laborers who were from China. Generally, what was unique about Chinatown? One thing that was unique about Chinatown was that many of the men were married and they had women at home and they planned on returning. Let's see. The most of the Chinese that went there, men came over, worked on the railroads. After the railroads were complete, essentially, a lot of them moved to San Francisco. So the district really grew. It grew in population, but not in size. It just became more dense over time. And then because the Chinese were excluded from from labor, from white labor unions, they sort of clustered in a few, kind of a few niche manufacturing jobs that they were able to do that when they got to the city. But all of this, well, I guess my overarching conclusion is that unlike all the other districts where you can really talk about gender as being the prime way that people defined them, the people that lived there for Chinatown, it was race. And this idea of a racial habit, which is just a term that I saw in the newspapers that just stuck with me, so that people, how they lived, the presence of disease or the stigma or the idea that there was a great deal of disease in Chinatown was something that had to do with habits, which was just a little bit jarring. I think in terms of the ways that Chinatown was distinct from other, other vice districts, Chinatown, most transient districts had had cheap laborers in them were pretty close to the manufacturing areas. And the capitalists who owned the manufacturing wanted to keep the labor nearby. So there was never a discussion about, well, let's take this district and move it far away, but Chinatown was different. And it was repeatedly in the 1870s, 80s, 90s to the earthquake, not much beyond the earthquake, discussions about completely eliminating Chinatown or moving it, generally to Hunter's Point. And there were just really elaborate plans drawn up of what this new Chinatown was going to look like and how it would be a good thing. But it was after the earthquake, there was a real movement to move, relocate Chinatown, south of San Francisco and the Chinese government got involved. No, we have the right. And lawyers often also got involved. So there was a lot of participation in the legal system. Um, something that I found that was a little bit jarring. You know, I remember that movie from when I was a kid, Chinatown. And I think the only part I remember of it was an elevator that went below ground. And I didn't understand that, but having read so many newspapers from, you know, the 1900s before and after, I understand where that came from, this idea. And I just, you see this repeatedly in descriptions of Chinatown, that there's this sort of a subterranean labyrinth, the idea of the opium dead, something that happened below ground, which is also interesting because the opium den meant Chinatown and the opium joint meant outside of Chinatown. The connection of Chinatown with, with filth, which is what the term that was used. And certainly with disease was especially poignant with Chinatown. And so all of these things made this particular, particularly dangerous idea of Chinatown, as something that had trap doors and, you know, fake, fake doors or things you could fall through. So it's like only the person who lived there would know how to get away and that the police were constantly being, there was a Chinatown squad and the people were just constantly getting thwarted by sort of the pitfalls and the traps of Chinatown. And so all these things created this idea. Oh, and then there were tours. You know, if you were coming from out of town, guidebooks would say, you know, you have to go to Chinatown. And that would be, and you would go and you would go underground. There was one description of a tour where you went underground and, you know, Chinatown is on, you know, slope of a hill. And so people kept going downstairs and stairs and stairs. As if they were going seven stories deep and they were just going down the side of the hill. You know, and then there were people staged to reenact all these different events and stuff and just kind of reinforcing stereotypes. So I found the district itself to be something that was extremely unique. And then sort of that, the ultimate irony of that is that when I talk about Barbra coast, up down Tenderloin Chinatown, the Hobo main stem waterfront and then also the outside lands. But of all of those plays, I think Chinatown, even though it was the one that they talked about relocating and moving and demolishing, it's still there. It's really the one that's there more than any of them. And it was because it really became this touristic attraction. You know, like in the world's fairs where there's a Chinese pavilion, Chinatown became this place where people would go. And so they then there was, of course, this denial that they had ever said all those things about Chinatown to try to get tourists there. So maybe after 1848, no year is more important in the history of San Francisco than 1906. Can you describe what happens in San Francisco in 1906 and how it kind of reshuffles the city's geography of vice? Why is it such an important year both in the history of the city as a whole, but also in the history that you're telling here too? Sure. So any of San Francisco knows, 1906 was the earthquake. San Andreas fault, very large earthquake, maybe an eight on the Richter scale. But the most damage came from the fire. It's four days, 4.7 square miles, basically downtown. So you've got essentially all your downtown vice districts, transient districts, anything thought of as the other side of the tracks was burned to the ground, essentially. So and this and, you know, of course, the 1906 earthquake, something's been described many times before. There were a lot of great histories on it. I was specifically looking at it in terms of how the city and the newspapers and municipal reports reacted in terms of the vice districts, because everyone remembered the gold rush and the reputation that they had during the gold rush is being this vice ridden city. And so they had spent decades and decades trying to reverse that idea. And so 1906 was very frightening. It was really a panic that all of these boundaries that had been established, had just been completely wiped away. And there was there was no more of this boundary maintenance of, you know, we're going to keep you within this area, prevent hobos from wandering out, prevent prostitutes or sex workers from going south of the Barbary coast. And so that was coupled with a fear. There was racial tension, some racial riots occurred during that period. There were fears of looting, massive fears of looting, and the mayor issued a decree to shoot looters on site, which was, and numbers range on how many people were actually shot. But this fear that, you know, the wealth was going to be stolen and redistributed. And that was universal in the city except for Chinatown in the newspapers. There's images of sort of the white women and long gowns going through Chinatown and picking out, you know, little pieces that they want. So that was, that piece was not enforced. Panic over just who was in control. There were many different agencies and vigilantes in control. So that was sort of, sort of the panic. And the panic was we need to re-establish these boundaries as soon as possible. And so that happened in a number of ways. In some ways, vice concentrated. The uptown tenderloin really becomes the uptown tenderloin after the earthquake. Chinatown, of course, as I said, they wanted to move it, but it remained there. Liquor licenses were, it was really a meeting of clergy, wanted to raise liquor license. Terrifically, they ended up raising its sum and focused where you could open saloons, you know, in the waterfront and the main stem, and in these areas, kind of to re-establish them. And then with housing, it was the same type of idea. Particularly if you were well off before the earthquake, Red Cross funds would go to rebuild your house in those same neighborhoods. So it was kind of this effort to rebuild as quickly as possible. But then a year later, you look at magazines and newspapers and a lot of self published manuscripts. They'll say, well, you know, it was, it was a period of earthquake love. No one ever panicked. Everyone worked together. So it's just people. And there wasn't, it wasn't really an earthquake. It was just a fire anyway. So this, again, this huge denial. I also study a natural disaster as part of my own research. And, you know, you just trace basically the exact same story as the story in mind that, you know, 70 years later, it's basically the exact same thing happening where you have all of these kind of fractures and ruptures, you know, in the city's social fabric. And then very soon afterwards, people, especially those with power, are saying, yeah, but it was all fine. We all got together in a small rebuilding. Tell us all the time and allow us. So the earthquake in 1906, it coincides with this period in American history, especially American urban history. When you have urban reformers, people that are thinking about cities and the shape and the structure of cities and who lives in cities and the health and environment of cities, all these things, all across the United States, you got people that are trying to reshape American cities to reflect these kind of growing progressive era value. So in the wake of the earthquake in particular, how is San Francisco, and especially kind of the city's outskirts, right? How are they changed by these kind of urban renewal city beautification movements? Yeah, so as I mentioned, I grew up in the suburbs. And so I've always been curious about, and it seems a little bit funny to talk about vice districts and have the distant suburbs as a chapter, but I really enjoyed that piece of it. In historiography, there's this idea of the rural ideal, that everything that's beyond the city is natural and somehow more moral. But then in San Francisco, in the West, you've got this idea of sort of this vice-ridden wild West. And how do you reconcile these two pieces in San Francisco? I looked at the upside lands, which is basically the sunset and Richmond and the land that's West of Twin Peaks today, though the idea of the term outside lands in San Francisco sort of changed over time. It meant whatever is just beyond development. And I knew that by 1912, 1913, there were housing developments out there, residence parks, very upscale residence parks in an area that was previously defined by roadhouses and race courses. And in the 1860s, '70s, '80s, the outside lands was a place that you went if you wanted to really sort of escape sort of the moral sphere of the city. Maybe you wanted to get away from whatever moral bodies you want. But so yeah, so you had, I mean, and there was a whole kind of a chain, there's a track around the outside lands of roadhouses. So, and they would be defined, you know, you would, I was looking in newspapers and one place I found most of the references to roadhouses were in descriptions of divorces, you know, and it would be so-and-so, you know, that the husband would go out to roadhouses regularly and, or sometimes vice versa. So it was, it was always, and they always used the term orgy in a way I wasn't familiar with. But there would be all these orgies in the outside lands and in roadhouses that was, I think, just drinking and making lots of noise. And then the race courses, which race courses, which I knew that Inkelseye Terraces was in the shape of a race course. And there's another one that was a dog coursing park that's also, you can see the shape today, the footprint of it is still there. But there are actually five race courses in the outside lands that were always, that were originally associated with these kind of elite sporting men that would go out and spend their money on it. But then also gambling became significant. And so when you talk about the progressives, I think of it as two parts. There's the women's groups, churches that are sort of the moral reformers. And they tackled a lot of the, certainly the roadhouses of the drinking and temperance. And we found, we find a lot of evidence of that. And then they also, with the gambling that took place in the roadhouses. And like what was found in other cities is it really began with women's progressive groups, women's clubs targeting pool halls or bucket shops that were downtown. And then by the late 1890s, 1900, it became something that sort of, they started to stretch out into the outside lands. And it, but it wasn't really until the businessmen kind of came on board and adopted it as their cause also, that the government went along with it and passed, finally passed a law just to eliminate gambling in San Francisco. And there's this one event, I think it was 1904, when just this incredible thing to read in the newspapers, how there was a, there was a city police from downtown San Francisco, sort of mobilized and marched out to the outside lands to shut down the gambling, which is just kind of think about San Francisco today. You don't really imagine them as sort of these two pieces of the city, almost at war. So there was that sort of extension of moral authority in the outside lands. And then also the, I guess the other piece of it is city-beautiful, which was this thought that cities need to be beautified, large boulevards and monuments and whatnot. And what I talk about, both in the terms of women's moral groups and city-beautiful, was during this progressive era, you start to see, rather than thinking of the city as something that's evil, the city is something that we can change. And I think both of them were really a piece of that bigger picture. And so the last part of that chapter I look at, I say city-beautiful and a lot of the architects, I mean, there's some very well-known architects for San Francisco that were up there, and designers, development designers. But it was really the development groups, housing developers, that located a number of resident parks in the outside lands and sold them in advertisements as a wonderful moral place, which was so different. And they had to kind of explicitly say, we are no longer that vice-ridden area. We are the moral retreat from the city. And I've got to say that it's just really jarring to read that there will be basically only white people are allowed here. There can be no, and that was some of the very first racist covenants in the nation were in San Francisco, but this idea that nothing of the city, so no transient housing, no businesses, no saloons, none of that would be out in this sort of morally refined land. So it's kind of this pivotal point of redefinition of what's out there just beyond the city. And speaking of redefinition, one of my like absent favorite chapters of the book comes kind of toward the end of the book, when you describe dancing and dance clubs in the context of these city campaigns that you're talking about that were against vice. And you know, it's good that we were talking about it at the outset of our conversation, you know, these changing ideas about what vice is, right? And the fact that vice, it's not like grab, right? It's not a law of nature that this is vice and this is moral, right? That it's kind of in the eye of the beholder, at least in the eyes of those who have the power to kind of define these things and back up their ideas of what vice is or is not with, with, you know, power, with force, with kind of state action. So why dancing? Why is dancing, particularly this kind of ragtime dancing that is growing in popularity, the 19th and the early decades of the 20th century, why is it so controversial? And what are attempts to shut down certain of the seasonite clubs? What do they look like and what do they tell us about where San Francisco stands, kind of on the eve of the first world war in the 19th times? OK, so yeah, I think you're talking about the chapter on Barbra coast. And yeah, that was that was kind of a fun one. So I guess for starters, trying to understand sort of where San Francisco was, it was. It was a shift in how straight middle class kids were dating. So before, you know, in the 19th century, there was, sorry, 19th century, basically dating involved calling. So someone, you know, would basically be, you know, a young suitor male would be invited to the woman's home and the mother would be there. It would be just this very domestic oriented. And then in the early 20th century, you have dating, what we're more familiar with, which is young young people go out into the city to probably some commercial venue and they spend time away from the family. That was a huge shift and it affected vice districts pretty significantly. So as I said, during the gold rush, this vice district was sort of the domain of is very heterosexual. I mean, there were always women there, but it was thought of as heterosexual or heterosexual, I'm going to say, and so it was kind of this basically where you would find these sort of rough men with, I'm sure, with unshaven faces and whatnot, which becomes relevant. And so the only women who were in those districts were held in serious suspect of being in the sex trade or just working outside the home, not being correct in terms of these gender stereotypes. And so what happened when you've got this shift in dating practices, young men and women who want to go out on dates need a place to go. And so that's kind of this idea of hetero social space, which could be an amusement park or a bowling alley, but very often it was what in San Francisco, they called cafes and resorts, and which were very often located in the Barbra coast, a little bit in Chinatown, though, more after my period and the uptown tenderloin. And so it was in these places that these places really challenged just the presence of women there with other men challenged this, what had been for a long time, this had this homo social space for these men to practice their masculinity kind of apart from women. And you were asking about dancing specifically, and I'm not a dance or dress historian, but my take of it is that, well, I came across the word flapper in the 1910s, and I had always thought that it was from the 1920s, but it was a description of the term flapper and the newspaper articles as something like flapper. We used to think of them as these tender girls, and now they're these women who are out dancing and dressing differently. So it actually began, I think that this flapper movement began kind of more in these types of environments early on in 1910s. Women began to dress differently, they wore clothes that were not as feminine, whatever that means, but that were easier to move in, that probably shorter skirts, so that was a break, and then the dancing themselves, people found lots to complain about that. In the past, people who would go to dances were more community events and multi-generational. This was more something where a couple would go who maybe didn't know each other very well, or if not a couple, increasingly women would go just in the company of other women, and there was this term unescorted, which it took me a little while to figure out what that meant, because I thought unescorted meant you're by yourself. It meant that you were not with a man. But the dances themselves generally were ragtime dances were called the turkey trot, or the grizzly bear, or all these references to animals, and that just seemed total break from anything that was civilized, or in some kind of moderation. Ragtime, the music was associated with African-American culture, and so there was that link, and also the Barbie Coast specifically. The San Francisco at that time did not have a large African-American community, but when you look at the actual statistics, the Barbie Coast had something like seven times the average of the rest of the city, so there was much more influence there than elsewhere, and of course it was right next to Chinatown, so there's always this idea of racial mixing, and I would just mention this term slumming that is sort of what we're talking about when we're talking about dating practices, people going out into these districts. This idea of slumming, this is very derogatory idea that you're going to cross a boundary that was created decades before, but be part of that other area, and in some area that's understood by, and to have that perspective, you've got to sort of be in this middle-class or advantaged area and moving into a different district that somehow seems exotic and dangerous, so that was, that was what I saw in happening in the Barbie Coast, was this really redefinition of what vice is? So as we start to wrap up a bit here, there's one more neighborhood that I want to talk about. I feel like if you asked a lot of people around the United States in the 20th century, and I think in many cases even up today, in the early 21st century, when they think about the neighborhood that they associate with vice, however they wanted to find that term San Francisco, they might probably think of the tender. For me, it's someone that's not from San Francisco that's been bringing in more time there, it's a neighborhood that I'm familiar with, but one of the things you argue in the book is that this kind of connection, this kind of story that is told about this neighborhood, that wasn't always there, that this neighborhood wasn't always a part of the city's geography of vice, so how was the history of vice in the tenderloin neighborhood? How is it kind, how does it come to be, and how is it wrapped up in the history of all these different anti-vice campaigns that are happening in the 1910s? What's the story of this place? Okay, so yeah, now tenderloin is up 10 tenderloins in an area I have a lot of connection to, and like I said, I worked on a project there, I know, I know some of the people there, I really appreciate them. So the tenderloin, and I have to say the uptown tenderloin, because tenderloin was a term that was not specific to any particular region, probably the term came from New York, and there's a whole story about that, but when I read the newspapers in San Francisco, that there will be discussions, oh, there's a tenderloin emerging near the Hobo main stem on Third Street, or there's a tenderloin emerging in Mission. So versus the historic tenderloin, which was the Barbary coast in Chinatown, so the term itself uptown tenderloin is really significance. Uptown made it really unusual that that would be a tenderloin, and that was the whole issue with the 1917 campaign in Paul Smith that I think you're referring to. So the area that's today called the tenderloin was called St. Anne's Valley shortly after the gold rush, and it really began as, as uptown, it was a little bit far away, it was houses there were more expensive certainly than they were in the south of market, which was more working houses, and so you start to have some larger houses there, nicer older houses, but over time, as what often happens, is sort of the focus of where these respectable nice houses are is moving towards the west, towards the western edition, and so in the late 19th century, you find that a lot of the larger houses in St. Anne's Valley become rooming houses, some of those rooming houses are used as parlor houses, which is sort of the upscale version, and so there's not this clear distinction over, you know, who's living in this house, is it a wealthy person, is it used as a rooming house, which would be possibly single people who don't have roots in this area, or are they people involved in the sale of sex? And so, and so what I looked at in 1917 was it was this period when newspapers were going back and forth on what the lines were of this new special place, the uptown tenderloin, that was so unique from the other tenderloins because it was uptown, because it was confusing, you know, physically, the houses all looked the same, it wasn't legible, you couldn't tell, and then the people were also very mixed, you have not just parlor houses, apartments and hotels, and today that's what largely what the tenderloin is known for in San Francisco, is that that history and the presence of a lot of the buildings that are still there, and so, and I did look at census manuscripts and what not to try to find who was living there, there were a lot of young single women living there, there were married couples, a higher number of divorced women than there were, you know, standard in California, but they were single women and married couples that basically would work downtown and just go walk to the tenderloin, it's quite close, and then add to that what was called the Mason Street District, which was a lot of cafes, clubs, resorts, so that women who were working downtown could go and spend their own money on escorted, not, you know, without other men, possibly dancing and drinking and doing all these things that are, are clearly understood that point as vice, and so you've got this time when there's incredible lack of understanding sort of where the lines are between respectability and not respectability, you know, there's, there's hotels with women working downtown, but the question mark is always there, are they doing other things that would, you know, so that we put them in a different category, and so it was, it was looking at, so I looked at that and then specifically this episode is anti-vice campaign of a reverend, a Protestant reverend, who wanted to, you know, and it was happening in his neighborhood, but it was more of a question mark over sort of suspicion of this murkiness of what was happening, you know, and this was, I say this was sort of contrasted to this idea of that the city had in the past that there are specifically defined red light districts, and we need to prevent vice from spilling out. Here it was just impossible to distinguish what it was, so it was a totally different type of vice zone. So for one of my last questions, I always like to ask my guests to put themselves in the shoes of one of their readers to kind of take like a big picture approach, and I want you to imagine that you're someone that has read this book, and maybe three or four or five years on, what would you hope a reader would come away remembering or thinking of as they think back to this book? What's kind of one big takeaway you hope that they would get? I hope it makes people think about their own assumptions about people who live, the people that they don't know. You know, I think that kind of how our mind works, we tend to lump groups together and not recognize the motivations of people and how people are actually able to make their own decisions and move forward. So I think that there's so many social expectations that we have, and if we can step back from that and say, okay, how is this affected by assumptions that I grew up with, prejudices that I grew up with, how is this affected by the economy, and people making decisions out of limited options? I think that's really significant. I keep coming back to this idea of the wrong side of the tracks, which is an idea that I grew up with. Don't go out over there, it's not safe. But to really question that and understand that in all of these districts, there was a great variety of people who lived there that chose to live there that wanted to live there. I think, you know, even when you read, when you read histories about this period, there's this idea that there was a sort of mass exodus from cities to suburbs and to other areas, and that there were people that were, quote, left behind. Some of those people chose to live there, you know, and they didn't have every option in the world open to them, but there was a community there. There was, you know, there was resources and it had all the aspects of home without, even if they weren't living in a domestic house. So, you know, taking time to try to understand that and to see that from different perspectives. I know that's what every historian should say. Well, but, but, but, but the, you know, not, not everyone does. And one of my takeaways kind of building off what you just said from this book is that like, you know, the way that we talk about places and the narratives that we, that we even that we create about places, you know, those matter, right? Because they shape how we see the people in those places. If a group of people talks about a neighborhood as, oh, this is a neighborhood of bikes, right, then we're also casting kind of a moral sort of, I don't know what the right word is, we're, we're talking about the people that live in that place as much as we're talking about the place itself. And if we give it kind of a negative spin or we talk about it in a way that says that this place is a moral, what are we else saying about the people that live there? So I like what you're saying, right? You know, trying to recognize these assumptions that we carry around with us when they are happening in our brains to try to think a little bit deeper when when those moments happen. I think that, that that's kind of the power of history. I think your book does that really well. Yeah, no, that's, that's the point I try to make is that just the simple presence of a parlor house or whatever would define the entire area as a vice district when the vast majority of people there were single women working downtown or African American migrants from the south who were working in the clubs nearby and playing, you know, so many different people live there as communities that we don't define everything by sort of the, the one stereotypical piece of it. Right, right. And then James, for my last question, I always have to get a preview from, I guess, what they're working on currently or what they're working on next. So I'd love to hear any projects that you kind of have going on right now. And that can be if you have another book project, I'd love to hear about that. Or, or in addition to, you know, any of your architectural work, I would love to hear about any kind of interesting historical projects that you work about it. All right. Wow. Well, yeah, I was gonna say I have a day job. So let's see, in terms of the architectural projects, I'm working on, I just finished historic bungalow rehabilitation, affordable housing, it was actually in a mortuary, and historic mortuary and converted into affordable housing, working on a library at UCLA, they're doing seismic retrofits. It's a lot of seismic retrofits right now. So I could, I could go on with that. But like I said, I got a day job. But when I, yeah, when I submitted this work originally, it was too big. And so I ended up cutting a lot of stuff out. And I think it is the part of it about city beautiful and kind of architectural design that I, if I come out with another book, that's what it would be about. I wrote, I wrote some on Midwinter Fair in Golden Gate Park and Panama Pacific International exhibit. In terms of design, largely, that might turn into something. I feel like a lot of the, there's a lot of great works on world fairs and parks and whatnot. But I feel like some of them kind of follow the contemporary descriptions of them, that they're these amazing spectacular lands that just last for a few months and then go away. And what I'm, what I'm finding is that there's, you know, when you put them in context, not that they are inevitable, but they make a whole lot more sense than just these giant typewriters and things like that. So yeah, looking at their context in the West and their context and slumming, dating practices, and just how we categorize people, and then also architecture and design context. You know, a lot of the same, same types of themes, but I think that's the area I'm going to be looking at. That all, that all sounds great. And I thought this, this was a, this was a fantastic book. So I'd love to read another. So, yeah, that's, I'll have it back on the show when we finally write that. Well, thank you so much. It's been a great experience talking to you. Dr. James Mallory is a teacher and architect in Los Angeles, whose architectural work specializes in historical buildings. And his new book is City of Bites, Transients in San Francisco's Urban History, 1848 to 1917, which came out just this year in 2024 with the University of Nebraska, Nebraska. Thank you so much for joining me today, James. Thank you very much.
San Francisco began its American life as a city largely made up of transient men, arriving from afar to participate in the gold rush and various attendant enterprises. This large population of men on the move made the new and booming city a hub of what "respectable" easterners considered vice: drinking, gambling, and sex work, among other activities.
In City of Vice: Transience and San Francisco's Urban History, 1848-1917 (U Nebraska Press, 2024), historical architect James Mallery describes how and why San Francisco became the titular "city of vice" by tracking the people and activities that local elites would rather have stayed hidden. In doing so, he paints a remarkable picture of a city undertaking remarkable growth and the limits of elite power to control the habits of a large, mobile, urban population. Through famous San Francisco neighborhoods like Chinatown and the Tenderloin, out to the city's "Outside Lands" outskirts, Mallery shows how neighborhoods are defined by more than just the sum of activities outsiders might see as immoral - they're complex places made up of of complex people, and that even the most run down neighborhood has a brilliant history worth telling.
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