Barbary Coast Sex: Satisfaction Guaranteed

It’s not very often when a madam guarantees you’ll have the best sex of your life. Or at least so satisfying you’ll walk out of there thinking your twenty-five cents was very well spent. Such was the case in Barbary Coast-era San Francisco. Having walked from the Old Mint, the beginnings of the Barbary Coast trail, across wide Market Street (the city’s answer to the Champs Elysées), past the tourists queuing for a cable car on Powell Street, and, finally, across Union Square, I found myself standing on Maiden Lane. In the 1870s this narrow street, stretching from Union Square to Kearney Street, was the home of 1,000 prostitutes. Their houses of ill repute were called cribs.

I stood there trying to imagine the topless women hanging out of first-floor windows, yelling “Touch one breast for ten cents, two breasts for fifteen cents, or come on in for twenty-five cents.”

The men were encouraged to hang up their clothes in a closet. And once the they were, uh, preoccupied with their lady, a colleague from another room would remove the back panel of the closet and take the rest of the John’s cash.

I joined up with a walking tour on Maiden Lane. Sponsored in part by the San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco City Guides gives free tours throughout the city. This particular one, called “Bawdy & Naughty” focused on Barbary Coast-era prostitutes. Specifically, though, on Maiden Lane, today a posh pedestrianized street flanked by Chanel, Prada, Paul Smith, and Hermes shops.

The guide, John Ferriera, walked the group (of which there was a guy who bore a striking resemblance to everyone’s favorite news pontificator and Mexican immigration lover, Lou Dobbs) down the two-block street, regaling us with salacious stories of 19th-century San Francisco. As we stood in front of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building at #140, Ferriera told us about Bertha Kahn, a famous Maiden Lane madam who coined the term “Satisfaction guaranteed.” If you weren’t satisfied with your amorous encounter, she’d give you a token to come back and try again.


Today, randy San Franciscans can go to the Tenderloin to pretend they’re in Barbary Coast-era Maiden Lane. It’s highly doubtful, however, that anyone there is putting a guarantee on satisfaction. And it certainly will cost you more than twenty-five cents.

Barbary Coast Food: The Search for Chop Suey

The Chinaman. For as long as I can remember, the only Chinese restaurant in the suburban southern California town where I grew up was named for this racial slur. No one, including the Chinese owner, seemed to mind. I can’t remember if chop suey was ever on the menu, but standing at the gate to Chinatown in San Francisco, on Grant and Bush Streets still following the Barbary Coast trail, I couldn’t help but link the two. Kitschy and part of the old school food culture many of us have long abandoned.

A few nights earlier I was eating at Incanto, a stellar restaurant in the city’s Noe Valley and ended up standing in the doorway to the kitchen chatting with Chris Cosentino, the restaurant’s talented chef. That’s when he told me that chop suey was invented in San Francisco. “Some time during the Barbary Coast era,” he said.

Or was it? It would make sense that San Francisco would have birthed this kitschy dish. Chinatown boasts the first Asian temple in the United States (on Waverly Place). San Francisco was the first place Chinese immigrants flocked to, hoping to strike it rich in the rush for gold. It had to have been invented here. So, on a whim, I decided to find out.

I went into the first restaurant I encountered. The young female servers in the Utopia Café had dystopian looks on their faces when I asked if they had chop suey on the menu. “Chop suey?” a woman repeated in a tone of such befuddlement, as if I had suggested we defecate on the floor together and then invent a dish out of it and call it “Chinese food.”

Which is one story how chop suey was supposedly invented. Well, sort of, minus the excrement. In author Herbert Asbury’s “The Barbary Coast,” which I happened to have in my bag, he claims chop suey was invented in New York City, created at a banquet for Chinese and non-Chinese. The chef, he wrote, threw together some meat and vegetables and doused it liberally with soy and fish sauce and created something he thought seemed vaguely Chinese but would suit the American palate as well. Chop Suey was, apparently, born.


In New Asia restaurant no one would talk to me. Or they didn’t speak English (or were pretending not to). It didn’t help that I was holding a journalists notepad and a pen. When I asked about chop suey I only received blank stares in return.

Finally, at Yee’s on Grant St., a lead. A young waiter new exactly what I was talking about. “Yes, it may have been invented here,” he said. “I’ve heard this story. But we don’t make it anymore. No one wants this dish.”

“It’s cheap stuff,” barked an old man sitting at a cash register. “Cheap stuff.”

He was right. Chop suey reeked of a dish that consists of leftover ingredients. It’s a combination of indistinguishable products – vegetables and meat and sauces – that somehow contains hints of Chinese cuisine for the naive palate.

Everyone at Yee’s shrugged when I asked where I might find it and, more importantly, if they know where it was invented.

I was ready to give up. I put my notepad back in my pocket and started walking back toward the Chinatown gate, ready to resume my Barbary Coast trail journey.

And then I spotted it: above the door of New Woey Loy Goey on Jackson and Grant Streets, two words: chop suey. I descended the stairs and accosted the first waiter I saw. Chop suey! I said. The waiter motioned for me to sit down. But I had a question: where was it invented? Sadly, he didn’t speak English. Neither did anyone at the restaurant. Instead, he just kept showing me the words “chop suey” on the menu. The fact is, I didn’t want to eat it. I just wanted to find out its origins, to find out if it was a product of the Barbary Coast.

Later that night at home, an internet search revealed new information: one source claims it really was invented in Barbary Coast-era San Francisco; a poor chef would take scraps and throw it all together for his own meals. Another story corroborated Asbury’s New York theory. And yet another said that it really came from China.

We may never know the answer to the origins of chop suey. Especially because it, like restaurants named “The Chinaman” have long faded from the American culinary landscape. For better or worse (probably the former).

San Francisco to Finally Get a City History Museum

San Francisco is one of the only major cities in the United States without a museum dedicated to its history. All that will change next year when the old U.S. Mint on Fifth and Mission Streets will be converted into a state-of-the-art museum showcasing the city’s rich history. It’s an appropriate building for such a place-its construction was the result of the Gold Rush, which, of course, has a strong Barbary Coast connection. It’s also where the Barbary Coast trail-the series of self-guided, sidewalk-implanted medallions-begins. Which is fitting because the mint is essentially a money factory. And that’s what brought the world here in the first place, one giant plea for a better, more comfortable life.

Prior to the Gold Rush, San Francisco was a small town that mostly used barter as well as Mexican reals, Dutch gilders and even Indian rupees, as a form of currency.


So the government built a mint in 1852 to start producing US currency. But the supply of gold and silver that was coming in from the hills was too much. That’s when this majestic mint was constructed. Built between 1869-1873, the new mint produced 59 percent of America’s gold and silver coinage in its first year of operation. It’s also worth mentioning, it is one of the few buildings to withstand the 1906 earthquake and fire.

The mint also happens to be my first physical stop on my search to find the remnants of the Barbary Coast. This is one of the more obvious markers. But there are others-more subtle indicators-along the trail that I’ll be following this month. I take my last look at the mint, as MUNI busses roar past me and morning commuters whisk by on their way to work, and take a step toward Market Street, knowing the next time I’m back the building will be transformed into a gleaming new history museum of San Francisco.

The Hoodlums of San Francisco

How many miscreants does it take to coin a new word? Apparently, many. Dig, if you will, the picture: Gamblers, saloon keepers, thieves, pickpockets, conmen, murderers, pimps and prostitutes, shyster politicians and lawyers. These were the people who made up the Barbary Coast in San Francisco, people who didn’t mine for gold, but who set up shop to strip the newly rich or the desperate-to-be-rich of their money. And because many of the people who rushed into California for gold were not used to having money, it was easy to get them to part with it.

Which is how the Barbary Coast gave birth to another word: hoodlum. Scholars have said the word comes an old German word “huddellump” which means “ruffian.” Others say it evolved from the dictum “huddle ’em,” a call for gangs to attack Chinese immigrants. It could have even been the name of a particular gang, as the local newspaper “Golden Era” reported on February 16, 1868: “The police have recently been investigating the proceedings of a gang of thieving boys who denominate themselves and are known to the world as the Hoodlum Gang.”


In fact, the word was always used as a proper noun (that is, with a capital H), thus referring to a gang of young thugs and brawlers. The first time it appeared with a lower case h, though, was in a Sacramento newspaper. Five years after that, “hoodlum” was in use all over the United States.

Shanghai Surprise: the Language of San Francisco and the Barbary Coast

• 200: the population of San Francisco in 1846.
• 25,000: the population of San Francisco in 1849.
• 300: the number of women living in San Francisco in 1849.
• 200: the number of those women who were prostitutes.
• 1,400: the number of murders in San Francisco from 1850-1856
• 3: the number of murderers hanged during the same period.

One number that we’ll never know are the amount of people who were abducted, taken out to sea during this time period, and forced to, among other things, use words like “ahoy.” It happened so much that a particular word was invented for the practice and it has since entered the American lexicon: to shanghai someone.

The Barbary Coast was the physical hangover-a living, breathing collective gasp of desperation-of the Gold Rush. It created a lawless atmosphere that not even Moscow could compete with today.

As Simon Winchester wrote in A Crack in the Edge of the World: “During the 1850s, San Francisco’s notoriety was fully and widely established; it was a den of iniquity, a lawless town where men in unrestricted mobs drank, gambled, and whored their way from street to street, unchecked by family, by conscience, or by law.”

And the practice of shanghaiing went largely unchecked. Here’s how it would go:

A miner would go out for a night of drinking and carousing and when he couldn’t cough up enough money (or gold), he was given over to a crimp, a sort of loan shark, who would eventually knock the miner out and sell him to a sea captain. Eventually the minor would wake up, head aching from too much drink, and find himself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, his fate to working off his debt on the ship sealed, as the boat made what was called a “shanghai journey,” slang for a very long voyage.

It was a shanghai surprise: the language of San Francisco and the Barbary Coast.