56 Mason St. |
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Opening: Early 1909 as the second location using the name. Thanks to Glenn Koch for sharing this postcard from his collection. It's unknown how much film they ran or if there was any vaudeville other than singers or music to dance to. The site
Card Cow has another version of this card with a different photo appearing in the frame.
Tenderloin historian Peter M. Field notes:
"This second Breakers was owned and operated by Sandy McNaughton, a local sportsman, race horse owner, and frequent bettor on horse races and boxing matches.
Regarding the original Breakers Cafe location, Peter notes:
"McNaughton's original Breakers was out along Ocean Beach. That joint was listed first between 1906 and 1910 at 1534 Ocean Blvd., then later at the same number on 49th Ave., after the street's name change. It was between Kirkham and Lawton, just south of Carville, the famously Bohemian village of weekend cottages and permanent homes that were cobbled together out of cable cars that had been dumped along the beach by a streetcar company. That Breakers was taken over by someone else from 1911 on, after McNaughton left the city."
This second Breakers Cafe was in the basement of the building housing what is now called the Bristol
Hotel, on the southeast corner of Mason and Eddy. It had been built as a lodging house called The Athens and was later called the Hotel Belmont. Peter Field notes that the Athens was a project of Alex W. Wilson, the property owner, and was still
under construction as late as August 8, 1908.
Across the street, on the
southwest corner, is the Ambassador Hotel, a project that, when it was
conceived in 1911, was to have a legit theatre in it called the
Ferris Hartman Theatre. Before the 1906 quake that corner, where the Ambassador now is, was the site of the
Tivoli Opera House. The replacement
Tivoli Theatre, just around the corner at 70 Eddy St., opened in 1913.
A February 7, 1909 ad for the Breakers that appeared in the San Francisco Examiner. Thanks to William David French, Jr. for locating it.
Peter Field notes that there was also coffee parlor operating in
one of the hotel's storefronts by March 27, 1909 and adds that this location of the Breakers was mentioned in "San Francisco
Woman's Fourth Marital Venture," an article in the June 4, 1909 issue of
the San Francisco Call. He notes:
"The second Breakers, a branch of the original one opened by McNaughton,
was first listed in the San Francisco city directory issue published in September 1909. It was under McNaughton's
name, not as a separate listing under its own name, even though the
original Breakers was listed under that name. The previous directory, published in October
1908, had only the Breakers on Ocean Blvd."
The 1910 directory has the same listings as in 1909. The building is listed as "The Athens, lodgings" in the alphabetical section. In the classified section it's under "Lodging Houses" and not "Hotels." McNaughton's listing was "McNaughton, Sandy, liquors, SE cor Eddy & Mason, 1534 Ocean Blvd." As Peter notes for the 1909 directory, in 1910 the only listing for "The Breakers" was the one on Ocean Blvd.
According to "
Boisterous Dive's Saga..,"
a 2014 SF Gate story by Gary Kamiya, the Breakers was the first tenant
in the basement space. The second tenant, the Black Cat, was the main focus of the story. Kamiya notes:
"According to Tenderloin historian Peter Field,
the Black Cat, the Breakers, the Mirror, and half a dozen other cafes
and saloons in the neighborhood were sketchy places, frequented by
gamblers, pimps, prostitutes, petty criminals and other Uptown
Tenderloin regulars. 'They used them to socialize and do business,' Field said. They were
also good venues 'in which to trim slummers and the occasional "good
thing" or wandering sucker.' Local merchants, along with religious and women’s groups,
sought to get rid of places like the Black Cat.
"To understand this
long-running conflict, it’s necessary to understand something about the
history of the neighborhood.
Field notes that after the 1906 earthquake and fire
destroyed the Tenderloin, its businesses relocated west to lower
Fillmore Street, which at that time became known as the Uptown
Tenderloin. When the saloons, cafes, brothels and gambling dens were
driven out of the Fillmore and returned to their original neighborhood,
the name 'Uptown Tenderloin' relocated with them. But neighborhood
improvement groups representing what was known as 'Down-town' were
determined to get rid of the old vice district and and replace it with a cleaned-up shopping area.
"There was also a political dimension to the battle. Reform-minded Republican politicians sided with the improvement organizations against the corrupt GOP machine that had controlled City Hall for decades. Many Republican businessmen opposed the reformers because they owned Tenderloin cafes. This fight would continue until the Great Depression. Dance-license fights: Unable to revoke the cafes’ liquor licenses, the downtown boosters went after their dance licenses, which were handed out at the discretion of the Police Commission. Groups like the West of Powell Street Improvement Club and the YMCA pressured the panel and succeeded in driving the Breakers out of business. Soon after, the Black Cat opened in the same space, and the reformers went after it..."
Thanks Gary and Peter!
"Rigo every night..." It's a card with a November 1910 postmark from
Card Cow. Peter Field comments:
"Janczi Rigo, the Hungarian Rom violinist and his (reportedly) Rom band, were written about as having just arrived in the city in "Gypsy Rigo Is Here With Latest Wife," a story in the June 11, 1909 issue of the San Francisco Examiner. The heavily retouched image of Rigo on the postcard shows a much thinner and less heavily mustached man than the Rigo in the picture in the Examiner article."
Closing: 1910. Peter comments:
"The Tenderloin Breakers was shut down by the Police Commission because he refused to obey their edict to forbid dancing after 1 a. m. He even published a small ad saying he'd be good from now on, but closed down in 1910, just over a year after he opened."
The Black Cat was the next tenant for the space. Peter comments:
"The original (San Francisco) Black Cat opened in the Breakers space shortly after, and had a run of about 12 years, finally driven out of business by Prohibition.
"The North Beach Black Cat was an entirely different and unrelated animal, an Italian coffee shop opened over a decade later (1933) that morphed into what may have been SF's first gay espresso joint, managed by a lesbian named Mona, a hangout for impecunious local writers, artists, and other cultural types, long before Alan Ginsberg, a former advertising agency writer, made North Beach and the Beats famous.
"By the same token, the current Black Cat restaurant and music club in the Tenderloin on Leavenworth Street is unrelated to the earlier places of that name."
Later Breakers Cafes: The January 1916 issue of the publication "
Our Navy,"
on Google Books, had an ad for a later Breakers Cafe with an address of 199
Ellis, at the corner of Mason. The proprietors listed at that time were
Carl Marlin and Pete Winandy.
The 1920 city directory listed a Breakers Cafe at 419 O' Farrell St.
A mural painted in 2012-13 by a group of Academy of Art University students at Eddy and Mason. It's on the Mason St. side of the Bristol, the same building where the Breakers was once located. It's based on a 1910 postcard in Glenn Koch's collection. The image appears on a page about the project on the site SF Mural Arts. The page also has three detail photos of the work. The sign in the mural says "Rigo every night at the Breakers Cafe Eddy and Mason. S. McNaughton, Mgr. San Francisco 1910."
The card the mural is based on is one that appears in Glenn's 2001 book "San Francisco Golden Age Postcards." See "San Francisco Like You've Never Seen It," a 2009 Beyond Chron story about the book. The book is available on Amazon. Other stories and images related to the mural project: Alamy Stock Photos | Beyond Chron | Getty Images | NBC Bay Area |
A post a few years ago on the Facebook page of the Mikkeller Bar, 24 Mason St., noted this area was "the block that was once the 'Paris of America.'" Peter Field comments:
"I've not come across anything that speaks of that block being singled out as the 'Paris of America.' But the phrase brings to mind two associations.
"The first is when Patrick 'P. H.' McCarthy, also known as Pinhead McCarthy, managed to win the SF mayoralty on the labor ticket for the 1910-1911 term. He got elected largely by opposing the previous political reform administration of Mayor Edward Robeson Taylor. One of his most publicized planks was to turn San Francisco into 'the Paris of America.' By this he meant, among other things, to allow 'legitimate' saloons, theaters, and other Tenderloin businesses to be allowed to operate without interference from goo-goo reformers.
"Tenderloin vice and entertainment businesses heavily endorsed his campaign, thinking he meant all of them, which was why so many were angry when McCarthy, once he was elected, tried to steer a middle course. This meant allowing 'legitimate' entertainment and vice businesses to operate, such as gambling in fraternal society buildings, operating parlor houses, and assignations at French restaurants, while suppressing the demi monde, that is, gambling clubs, lower-class prostitution, petty crime, and any other vices that might discourage tourists with money from visiting the city. But it didn't work, and became one of the reasons he lost the next election to James 'Sunny Jim' Rolph, who was supported by the reformers.
"The second association that comes to mind was when the building that housed the Hotel Bristol and the basement space was operated as the Streets of Paris night club from around 1939 to around 1944 and again from about 1959 to about 1969. Both were thinly disguised girlie joints. (It was the Spanish Village from about 1951 to 1958, same sort of girlie joint, but different theme.)
Looking south on Mason St. toward Market. On the left it's the Bristol Hotel, with the mural on the side and the hotel entrance down in the middle of the building. On the right is the Ambassador Hotel, dating from 1911. Photo: Google Maps - 2019
A 1920 version of the view. The Ambassador is sitting unfinished, after years of legal troubles. It's a photo from the Jesse Brown Cook scrapbooks appearing on Calisphere from the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library. Gary Parks comments that the building we see on the right down on Market is the St. Francis Theatre.
More information: For a fine history of the neighborhood see Peter M. Field's 2018 Arcadia Publishing book "The Tenderloin District of San Francisco Through Time." It's available through Amazon.
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