ATDTDA (17): Barbary Coast (470.17)

[Tim Strzechowski]

"[...] troops of fancy ladies and poker colleagues, invoked to explain his absences over the years, were all fiction, and had best pack up their bright bengalines and taffetas and satchels of cash and pile on the next train out to the Barbary Coast or beyond, for all it mattered" (p. 470).


Barbary Coast was a neighborhood in San Francisco, California. The neighborhood began as a popular hangout for the rich during the California Gold Rush (1848 - 1858). It was known for gambling, prostitution and crime. It is now overlapped by Chinatown, North Beach, and the Financial District.

[...]

Sailors in particular had cause to dread the area because the art of shanghaiing was perfected. Many a sailor woke up after a night's leave to find himself unexpectedly on another ship bound for some faraway port. When there was a shortage of sailors for departing ships any able-bodied man who wandered into the wrong saloon, or drank with the wrong companion, could wake up with a mysterious hangover onboard a ship. Crime in the streets and corruption in the government offices plagued San Francisco in the 1850s.

Nearly all drinking and dancing establishments in the area were destroyed in the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake, but within months a dozen or so were rebuilt and back in business. Upon the ouster of Eugene Schmitz from the mayor's office and folowing the P. H. McCarthy administration, the election of James Rolph jr, the demise the the Barbay coast as a vice zone picked up steam. Between the 1913 anti-vice campaigns led by the San Francisco Examiner and the passage of the 1917 Red-light abatement act, the Barbary Coast was effectively diminished and vice activities hidden from view. In 1917 the San Francisco Police blockaded the neighborhood and evicted the prostitutes. [...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Coast%2C_San_Francisco%2C_California

http://www.sfgenealogy.com/sf/history/hbtbcidx.htm


And scroll about halfway down the page here:

http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/index0.html


ben·ga·line (bngg-ln)
n.

A fabric having a crosswise ribbed effect made of silk, wool, or synthetic fibers.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bengaline

http://www.germes-online.com/direct/dbimage/50103602/Bengaline_Fabric.jpg