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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
"The Barbary Coast," by the little-known author of "Gangs of New York," remains one of the strangest and most indispensable books about the city by the bay.
Dec 20, 2002 | I first came upon Herbert Asbury's "The Barbary Coast" about 25 years ago, a few years before I began driving a taxi in San Francisco and was privileged to witness for myself some contemporary versions of the long-lost scenes of debauchery, violence and lust that Asbury so lovingly chronicled. For a young man in love with this windblown gray city and eager to discover a past worthy of its inexplicable hills and shadowy byways, finding Asbury's book was like going out for a smoke and bumping into Humphrey Bogart climbing out of "Dark Passage" and onto the Filbert Steps.
I knew San Francisco had a vice-filled past, but in Asbury's telling, that vice acquired an almost metaphysical status. Asbury provided San Francisco with a history so lurid and romantic it seemed to come from a different epoch -- a ruthless time, a time without prudence, when pleasure and fate were the only stars men steered by. Casting a strange, sulphurous light on streets and buildings, Asbury's history gave the whole town an uncanny second life.
That Chinatown alley was no longer just the garbage-reeking route I traversed on my way home: Its dim recesses held the shadows of ferocious Chinese highbinders clutching their gory hatchets. The neon-lit burger joint on Columbus and Pacific faded out, to be replaced by a parlor house, its red light glowing behind dirty curtains, its female inhabitants waiting upstairs for the call of "Company, girls!" The snooty antique shop near the foot of Telegraph Hill was a mere placeholder: All you had to do was loop the years once or twice around a street lamp and a cavernous dance hall roared to life in its place, mugs of cheap beer disappearing down a hundred rapacious male gullets while a host of "pretty waiter girls" worked the room. The blandest of buildings, the most Chamber of Commerce-approved vistas, suddenly had monstrous and enticing stories to tell.
San Francisco had the damnedest fine ghosts, and Asbury brought them back to life.
Asbury, long a forgotten figure, is enjoying an unexpected moment in the sun with the release of Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York," based on Asbury's eponymous 1928 book, and Adam Gopnik's penetrating essay on him in the Nov. 11 New Yorker. Gopnik argues that Asbury, a freethinker who turned against the moralistic Methodism of his upbringing, wasn't a romantic chronicler of a glamorous underworld at all, but a clear-eyed rationalist, exposing the unpleasant truth about the underbelly of American life. For this reason, Gopnik finds it ironic that Asbury's books have become prized by connoisseurs of urban surreality -- no less a figure than the supreme literary mythmaker himself, Jorge Luis Borges, contributes a foreword to "Gangs of New York."
Nonetheless, you don't write book after book that lovingly examines the urban underbelly (Asbury also wrote books delving into the seamy sides of Chicago and New Orleans, as well as a history of gambling in America) unless you have a peculiar affinity for that subject. Asbury may have seen himself as a scientific archaeologist sifting through evidence, but he strikes me as just a little more in love with the outré and the out-of-control, a little more happy in his work of excavating bizarre layers of human sin, than a mere hard-boiled cynic would be.
The notion that San Francisco, as the end of the frontier, is a place without limits, a domain of anarchy and disrepute and oversized fun, recurs frequently in American letters. Mark Twain, who hit bottom here while working as a reporter, nonetheless toasted its gaudy excesses. In "On the Road," Jack Kerouac wrote, "It was the end of the continent; nobody gave a damn." Asbury's San Francisco is the sordid fountainhead of those lofty myths. He reveals, or creates, the Ur-San Francisco, the demon seed from which all those Beats and hippies and dot-com fools sprang. His San Francisco was born in riot and madness and greed: it was a kind of Saturnalia City, where the Gold Rush set a cracked tone that governed all subsequent behavior. In this wide-open town -- which initially existed merely as a way station to the hills, where women were virtually unknown, eggs could cost $50 a dozen and miners blew thousands of dollars in a single night -- the rules of ordinary conduct were suspended.
Asbury begins his tale with the event that triggered it all: James Marshall's discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill on the American River. When hordes began to flood into the city in 1849 -- ships were often abandoned in the Bay as everyone on board, including the crew, headed for the gold-filled foothills -- chaos descended. Prices rose astronomically and parasites, hookers and corrupt camp-followers moved in at a rate not seen until the dot-com mania of 1998. In the rainy season of 1849 to '50, San Francisco's unpaved streets were trampled into so deep a quagmire that numerous mules, horses and carts were sucked down and the animals drowned. Asbury writes, "The mud at Clay and Kearny streets, in the heart of town, at length became so deep and thick that a wag posted this sign: THIS STREET IS IMPASSABLE; NOT EVEN JACKASSABLE." A notice that would have been equally useful a few years ago, when certain of the city's thoroughfares became impossibly clogged with the BMWs and Mercedes of hee-hawing 22-year-old Multimedia Gulch grandees.
