What Makes San Francisco A Great Jazz Age City?

A lot of people moved to cities during the Jazz Age. The city was where it was happening, baby, even though people didn’t talk like that then. But they might have said it was the berries or the cat’s pajamas. The city was beguiling and exotic, and the decade of the 1920s was the first time in U.S. history that more people lived in cities than rural areas. But some cities were more fascinating than others, and San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles were at the top of the list.

When you think about what makes a city shine with Jazz Age brilliance, your mind probably goes first to Art Deco architecture. And San Francisco has plenty of that.

From the cylindrical elegance of Coit Tower to the Golden Gate Bridge to  Downtown to the Marina District, from Timothy Pflueger and George Kelham office buildings to Herman C. Baumann apartments.

Or you might think about music. And San Francisco has had an abundance of jazz clubs over the years. After jazz stormed the City in 1917 to some very bad reviews, it grew in popularity and evolved as it moved from North Beach to the Tenderloin to Fillmore Street, which was eventually known as the “Harlem of the West.” And now, of course, we have the SF Jazz Center, considered the “first free-standing building in America built for jazz performance and education.”

You could also give some credit to art, citing our wonderful social-realist and WPA murals in the Rincon Center, Coit Tower, and Aquatic Park. And then there are those fabulous Diego Riveras.

But first and foremost, a city gets its character from its people, and a Jazz Age city needs a lot of street-wise, wise-cracking, irreverent types who know their way down its mean streets filled with scofflaws and coppers on the take. Enter Dashiell Hammett.

Thank you, Dash, for giving us those characters and putting them into the real places in the San Francisco you knew so well. You gave us the grit under the glamour with the likes of Sam Spade, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and Nick and Nora Charles, but you also turned San Francisco itself into an important character in your ground-breaking novels and the movies adapted from them.

It was The Maltese Falcon, the Continental Op stories, and the Thin Man series that gave the City its enduring Jazz Age luster. Those stories made San Francisco a familiar place to millions of people who would never get a chance to see the place in the flesh, or should I say in the terracotta, aluminum, chrome and black marble that made Jazz Age cities so moderne.

Hammett was so specific and authentic in his descriptions of locations, that he eventually spawned an entire cottage industry of Maltese Falcon tours and tour books. For example, Don Herron gave tours for more than 40 years, and will still give one by appointment. Then there are the books (including one by Don Herron), websites and videos on YouTube devoted to exploring every location mentioned in Hammett’s books.

And the wonderful thing about these locations is that they are mostly unchanged. You can, for example, have dinner at John’s Grill, where Sam Spade dined, and you can order the same meal he ordered: Lamb chops, baked potato and sliced tomatoes.

You can go into the Hunter-Dulin Building (1927) at 111 Sutter Street, where Sam Spade kept an office, or the Flood Building (1904) where Hammett worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Or you can go to the Palace Hotel (1909) and have breakfast or lunch just like Spade. Or to the Geary Theater (1910—now the Toni Rembe) like Joel Cairo. They not only look about the same as they did in Hammett’s time, two of them—the Hunter-Dulin and Flood buildings—have history displays to be savored by fans and Jazz Age Junkies like myself. If you make your way to 891 Post Street, stop and read the plaque that identifies it as the “home of Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade.” He wrote his first three novels there in his apartment on the northwest corner of the fourth floor. And on the corner of Bush and Taylor, where Stookey’s Club Moderne now serves Jazz Age cocktails and hosts music of the era in its Blue Room, there once was an all-night drugstore called Favorman’s. This pharmacy was the real-life inspiration for the drugstore in The Maltese Falcon where Sam Spade went to make a phone call to his secretary, Effie Perine, after learning his partner, Miles Archer, had been murdered. A little farther along Bush, you can go to the parapet where “Bush Street roofs Stockton” and “rest your hands on the damp coping” before you double back to peer into the shadowy depths of Burritt Street above where Miles’ body was discovered. And especially if it’s a foggy night, you will be transported to the Jazz Age and its gritty noir fiction attitude. Just take a moment to look around before you walk west on Bush to Stookey’s for a New York sour or to Sam’s Grill and Seafood Restaurant two blocks away, the 5th oldest restaurant in the U.S., and you’ll be transported to a different time in the same place.

 

Coming Soon To a Device Near You: 

What Makes San Francisco a Great Jazz Age City, Part II: The History of Bars, Bartenders and Cocktails

Here’s mud in your eye!