True Crime
Articles about true crime in San Francisco.
The 1906 Great Fire is one of the most cataclysmic moments in the history of San Francisco. In many respects it’s the big “before and after” event for the city. Some buildings survived – Union Square’s St Francis Hotel, the Flood Mansion and the Fairmont Hotel, both on Nob Hill, and the Ferry Building were…
On January 17, 1920, the United States officially went dry as the 18th Amendment came into effect, followed by the Volstead Act. Across the country breweries shuttered, saloons closed their doors and federal agents prepared to enforce what was supposed to be a new moral order. In many American cities, Prohibition arrived with raids, arrests…
San Francisco has the oldest Chinatown in the U.S. and one of the oldest in the West. Chinese emigrants first began moving to the city in 1849, as news of “Gam Saan” (Gold Mountain) spread around the world and reached China, firing the imaginations of thousands of young men who were struggling after years of…
On May 12, 1848, Mormon pioneer and businessman Samuel Brannan walked onto Portsmouth Square, shouting “Gold! Gold from the American River!”, while holding aloft a phial full of gold flakes. He hadn’t discovered the gold and he never attempted mining it, but it fired the starting gun for the great California Gold Rush. He owned…
Location: St Francis Hotel Long before anyone had ever heard of the Fatty Arbuckle Affair (or there was any such thing as a “celebrity sex scandal”) the St Francis Hotel opened in 1904 on Union Square. At that time the film industry was only just blowing up, from being seen as little more than a…
Originally named after the Pelicans that used to be inhabit the island, Alcatraz, has since become a symbol of San Francisco, as much as the Golden Gate Bridge and our cable cars. Most first-time visitors to the city by the bay will have it on their list of things to see and do here, along…
Today Maiden Lane is an upscale, boutique-lined, pedestrian street running east off Union Square, notable chiefly for its gates and for being the home of San Francisco’s only Frank Lloyd Wright designed building. However, the narrow, quiet, street has a scandalous past as one of old San Francisco’s main red-light districts, in the late nineteenth…
Barbary Coast was the name given to a neighborhood of San Francisco, more or less encompassing Pacific Avenue (then known as Pacific Street) between Montgomery and Stockton Streets, from the 1860’s to the 1900’s. Roughly bound by today’s Chinatown, North Beach and the Embarcadero, the area was infamous for the easy availability of almost every…