Those Frisky Friscotheques: The New Barbary Coast

Once upon a time, runs the personal legend of every defrocked bohemian, there was my Greenwich Village, my Montmartre or St.-Germaindes-Prés, my Barbary Coast and North Beach in San Francisco. In those days art was liberated, the girls were also, food tasted good, the wine was cheap, and we whiled away the hours between borning and dying with eternal truth, beauty and rolls in the hay. What is your Charles Street today, your Latin Quarter, your Westminster Place, your Near North Side?

Mere commerce.

All gone.

The nymphs have flown, the artists love money, the tourists have moved in, and I eat Tums.

So goes one sad tale for every generation. The richer and more exciting the bohemian encampment, the richer and riper grieve the survivors as they shuffle back and forth before the fire. Those who mourn are indeed attuned to reality--their youth is fled, and Tums for the tummy. In San Francisco's North Beach and Barbary Coast--these two places are interpenetrated areas, overlapping states of mind--one sees, almost every day, the fading of some fine old beacon of bohemian culture. An Italian grocery store becomes a night club specializing in topless dancing; the Black Cat, one of the oldest fag bars in the Western Hemisphere, sweeps up its sawdust, its free lunch and its squeaking pants, and locks its swinging door forever (O where have all the flowers gone? Answer: Just down the street.); The Movie, showing art films, closes and then opens as The Movie, specializing in the new international cinema; Madame Pucci's Travatore, a traditional Italian neighborhood bar, becomes the Admiral Duncan, decorated with travel posters and the postcollege crowd; the (continued on page 76)New Barbary Coast(continued from page 73) Coexistence Bagel Shop is now a fancy dress shop run by a tartly witty Assyrian model; the rows of girlie wholesalers are now interior decorators' emporiums; and fine old antique shops have become swim-dancing clubs or nude-models-while-bearded-artist-sketches-to-jazz shops ... But what is going on here? Like the phoenix, tradition dies and is reborn--but next door. And burns brightly, old bohemian. The phoenix burns brightly.

To chart North Beach, which is, in fact, neither the northernmost part of San Francisco nor a beach, one needs the map of a condition of spirit, the compass of an intention about the world, and a persistent dream of both grace and lust just beyond the next blare of trumpet or whine of bouzouki. North Beach is a slanting hollow and a tipping bulge; it is a hill and it lies between the hills; it is a corner of the eternal kingdom of bohemia, here composed of an edge of elegant Telegraph Hill, a pinch of noisome Chinatown, a pastel and burlap swatch of the beat encampment of upper Grant, and the great binding of a traditional Italian settlement. (Basques and Filipinos squeeze in, too. And Mexicans. And White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.) The main streets of North Beach are Grant, Columbus and Broadway, and its passionate center is that frantic corner where these three streets come banging and sizzling together. If you stand in the center of the street, you might see Chinese groceries, Basque eateries, a French bar; swim dancers, callgirls, a mass of orthodontists on tour, a phalanx of female impersonators prancing to work at Finocchio's; Hube the Cube entering the Methedrine Palace, a cafeteria officially named the Hotdog Palace, but more renowned for the various stimulants and calmants said to be consumed by its clientele; the Condor, an energetic tavern which is known as the Gangster's Enrico's; and Enrico's Coffeehouse itself, which is as close to a Parisian sidewalk café as can be found west of Le Havre; and El Cid, a wilder but less woolly club which is known as the Tourist's Condor; a semi-all-night drugstore, selling aids to survival in a difficult time; Mike's Pool Hall, where the beat and the Italians and the society folk meet and the floorshow seems to consist of interracial couples eating minestrone; the City Lights Book Shop, which is the moral and metaphysical center of the beat movement and a late-night gathering place for both deep readers and those who want to meet deep readers; the Vesuvio Bar, whose motto is "We Are Itching to Get Away from Portland, Oregon," and it has booths for psychiatrists; La Bodega, a Spanish restaurant, and the Tosca, which has non-eight-bar music on its jukebox, and an all-night newsstand; and the traffic and the cries of pleasure and the shriek of the sound track from the Chinese movie, and. And. And by this time, you had better have lived a full life, because you are dead in the traffic. You might as well move along in North Beach, because it does not stand still for anyone.

Just down the slope a little, there is a stretch of Pacific which was once properly called the Barbary Coast. There are still iron scaffoldings at both ends of this block, relics of the time when it was defended from the attacks of married women, vigilante committees, children and temperance societies, and there once were gates, guarded by private and sometimes by official policemen. The emplacements still stand as a hallowed memorial.

In France, at about the time of the Barbary Coast's first fine flowering in San Francisco, literary and aristocratic celebrities used to amuse themselves by the launching of deluxe courtesans, who were known as horizontales. These dandies rescued poor but dishonest young girls--those whose beauty merited rescuing--from the "vain, obsolete and immoral hope of marriage"; they launched them as stars in the music halls, et cetera, with emphasis on the et cetera. A sugary version of this activity is known in Greek as the myth of Pygmalion and in English as My Fair Lady. In San Francisco, the "pretty waiter girls" of Miss Piggott's, Shipwreck Kelly's or The Shanghai Chicken were not expected to know Zola or Flaubert personally, and the rain on the plain fell mainly on the miners and sailors who were doped, drugged, head-busted, or otherwise persuaded to acquiesce in the alchemic task of filtering cold money from hot bodies. Sometimes they were merely persuaded by love; a man long on the wet sea, long in the dusty gold fields, much values a lady's company. Ye Olde Whore Shoppe, as Madame Lucy named her establishment, gave good value and expected as much in return. Both fun and blood ran in the streets. The mulatto procuress, Mammy Pleasants, who treated both girls and clients generously, married well and lived long and so honorably that she managed to die poor.

Mainly the Barbary Coast was ruled by the Sydney Ducks, convicts from Australia who adopted the frontier custom of gallantry toward the pretty waiter girls, but sometimes grew wroth and murdered their clients. In return, the stable citizens of San Francisco occasionally rose in their intolerance, formed a vigilance committee to string up a few of the Ducks, and then subsided with a sense of civic pride into a dignified promenading in the cleaned-up Barbary Coast. It revived. It filled an acute need. It tried to fill the acute needs of the former vigilantes, too.

A document of 1856 describes the surrender of James Casey and Charles Cora to the Vigalance Comittee. Belle Cora said to her husband, "Goodbye, Charley, I've done all I could," and then he was taken off to be cannoned. The same document describes one of the murders committed by James Casey. He approached James King, asked if he was armed, said, "Prepare to defend yourself," and at the same time fired from within his cloak. Mr. King said, "Oh God! Oh God! I am shot!" The document adds, "He turned toward the Pacific Express, still uttering expressions of pain, and paying little or no attention to Casey, entered the Express Office." Presumably he wrote out his will and then died. The San Francisco Morning Globe does not commit itself on this point. After all, death is inevitable for all.

Tong wars, gang fights, race riots, fires and, of course, the famous earthquake of 1906 all contributed to the jauntiness of life on the Barbary Coast, and kept the population down.

As the years passed, tidal waves of reform swept over San Francisco; sometimes the payoff did not connect, and so brothels mutated into bars, into burlesque houses, into emporiums of the knockout drop; and sometimes the tide went out--back to brothels again; back and forth over the years. Finally, as a byproduct of Puritanism and venereal disease, military pressure closed up the Barbary Coast during World War II. More or less. Almost. Remember the B-girl? Gone, gone.

But even now, the Pacific street looks a little like the old Barbary Coast in the watery sunlight of the San Francisco morning, as the elegant long-legged San Francisco secretary strolls to work. However, the Eureka Music Hall and Pincus and Magee's Seattle Saloon have given way to interior decorators, advertising agencies and theater-in-the-round, square dinner included. Some fading, faintly ribald murals still smile down upon the street; plaster cupids beckon to the shades of V-12 trainees, but Herman Miller chairs and Tiffany lamps offer themselves on the floors where once a pretty waiter girl gently clubbed a Far East or Around-the-Horn sailor in order to persuade him to share with her the benefits of world trade. Even today, the street is a mixture of styles. Its style is the carefree and empirical joke of styles --grande luxe and strict ceramics, Empire and Old West. Just inside the gates, one of San Francisco's most barbarously bohemian restaurants, the Brighton Express, run by a jolly and irascible couple, John and Joanna Draeger, still delights the cheap livers and the flâneurs. There, at early dinner, cocktail waitresses and writers, members of the Fair Employment Practice Committee and painters, performers and dead beats and guitarists, (continued on page 184)New Barbary Coast(continued from page 76) all the best in a casual mode can be found eating the "special," the steak, or the lamb chops, and drinking the 25¢ house wine. There is a long table, known as "the lonely table," and a small but ill-chosen library for those who come to dine in privacy. And someone may sing the song that stands as well as any for the spirit of San Francisco's bohemia:

The miners came in forty-nine,The whores in fifty-one;And when they got togetherThey produced the Native Son.

Those alone at the lonely table of the Brighton Express often go out together. Sometimes, less lonely, they must worry about a means to prevent the creation of another native son.

The above-cited ballad reveals an aspect of San Francisco high life and low life which provides one of the continuing special elements of both North Beach bohemia and Pacific Heights society--the peculiar phenomenon of San Francisco. Unlike most cities, San Francisco simply burst into existence with the gold rush around 1850. The primitive Spanish settlement of Yerba Buena--good herb--was as vague and evanescent as the good herbs on the shifting dunes for which the settlement was named. There was no steady growth of San Francisco. There was gold, and then bang--it was there. It also exploded out of being, with the great earthquake and fires, but the continual destruction and rebuilding helped preserve this improvisational character of the city. Along with the climate, which seems always to be April, and the gratifying slope of the hills, and the clement views of bay and ocean, the spirit of the city is based upon the fact that the gold seekers rushed across in caravans, eating one another at the Donner Pass only when absolutely necessary; the sailors, bringing supplies, deserted ship and built their houses of ravenously dismantled schooners; the Chinese were teased across en masse to work on the railroads; the French and the Spanish and the Jews and the Negroes and the Russians and everybody, almost everybody, arrived at almost the same time. The title of a book on the free-and-easy character of San Francisco street life should be: Nobody Came First. The vigilantes and the criminals were cousins, and both spoke with Irish brogues or in the rhyming slang of Australian convicts. The longshoremen have traditionally been among the most cultured of workers; and it often seems, as if to make a balance, that the girls who fill the society pages of the San Francisco Comical, as the Chronicle is sometimes irreverently described, have the souls of longshoremen. That is, they love backbreaking work.

Thus, with the entire city a kind of loosely structured bohemia, North Beach became a miniature, a concentrated, an instant San Francisco--hard-working folks, fishermen and such, plus the free-living and high-spending scrapings from the gold fields or the high seas, plus the occasional writers who are the mild glory of San Francisco's history in the arts--Jack London, George Sterling, Joaquin Miller--and on to contemporary times, with such artists as William Saroyan, Benny Bufano, Barnaby Conrad, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac briefly. The usual host of would-bes, sometimes-weres and might-have-beens give body to the mixture. North Beach may not have produced a Dostoievsky or a Modigliani, but it had its Paddy O'Sullivan, who wore velvet and gave great parties.

Nobody Came First would be one explanatory title. Forever April would be another. In other American climates, spring is the season that brings out young lovers and fresh vegetables, a surprised burgeoning of the senses, even in an epoch when vitamin pills and rapid interstate trucks, continual titillation and fertilizer tend to destroy the steady circularity of time. But in San Francisco, forever-April land, the place where it is always April, the restaurants of North Beach are continually stocked with crisp greens and fresh girls, hopeful men and languorous moods: the paperback library of the Brighton Express, the guitars of La Bodega, the open terrace at Enrico's.

Like San Francisco's great modern contribution to the art of the dance, the swim, San Francisco bohemia traditionally paddles a great deal, not getting too far, and does much hip-and-pelvis work, and pouts a bit, which does get it somewhere, psychically speaking. It charms. The swim passes; another dance takes its place, as the swim replaced Social Comment and Blabbermouth Night at the Anxious Asp. But there is a persistence in the tradition, and Enrico Banducci's hungry i, cradle to Mort Sahl, still has the sharpest traveling comics. A younger generation has created the Committee, a group doing social satire and jazz clowning at its highly fashionable locale on Broadway between a Greco-Turkish lunch counter and a recently defunct bookshop. One night the Committee's crew of wandering zanies might come up with a new organization, the Militant Boy Fascists for Christ, to delight an audience that loves to see another crack put in already-battered icons. Another night they may campaign against all-digit dialing, capital punishment, American policy toward Cuba and frigidity in women. What they sometimes miss in originality, they make up in energy and wacky enthusiasm. And anyway, who can discover a great new cause or philosophy nightly except Mondays on the stage of an improvisational theater? It is only the sour old sentimentalist who thinks things were better with Aristophanes in the great days of Athens.

The graffiti on the walls of the Brighton Express tell this story of the traditional and the new, the artistic and the pretentious, the modest and the San Franciscan:

Long live Togliatti!

All the World Who Is Anybody

Loves William Saroyan!

This seems to be the product of an evening last year when Saroyan went in to discuss the casting of God in a new play with the owners, the other diners and the waiters.

Perversion is My Game.

Pi equals 3.14159265.

Happiness is an Empty Bladder.

And perhaps the most darkly mysterious, Nouvelle Vague, suggestive, cool and hip inscription of all:

The U.S. is OK.

As North Beach itself is OK, super-OK, necessary. At one time it seemed to be a haven for misfits, bounded by winos on the north, opium on the south and heroin and whiskey in between. Now the drug of choice is Methedrine, a deceptively dangerous stimulant which tends to cause brain damage in users who cannot necessarily spare much of their brains. Since it gets its effect by constricting the blood vessels, it also tends to cause impotence; the blood cannot go where it is needed. Impotence is a depressing condition. Most men may lead lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau said, but impotence causes them to make noise. Under Methedrine the brain keeps on sending erotic signals, so that Methedrine users lean toward special fantasies. "If you freak out, man," explains one poet, "why, then your mighty brain just gives the blood a push. It's scientifically so, buddy. Wanna play?" Methedrine suits the period--a jumping, lazy, nervous, knockabout and frantic time in the career of North Beach. Like all violent ones, the Methheads seem to give their tone to the area; the quieter poets and the more contemplative painters show themselves as passers-by, while the girl who moves only in right angles--jerk-jerk, jerk-jerk--makes herself visible as she leaves the Hotdog Palace, propelled by chemistry, blinking, hilarious, feeling mighty. The middle-aged heroin peddler, Hube the Cube, has faded into legend; he still strolls like an honored relic with his latest recent graduate of Mills College, but she is more nurse than victim in 1965. And a strict eye is kept on everything.

The cops keep order, with clubs.

The sociologists and psychiatrists keep tabs, with foundation grants.

The journalists keep in touch, with quick surveys.

The cops keep order again.

An item from recent history can give a notion of the complexity of forces now at work in the cultural churning of North Beach. Allen Ginsberg, back from India, was making a sentimental visit to this turf which he, Jack Kerouac and others caused to become hallowed ground circa 1956--1958. Now the poet, forever youthful, was wearing a full beard, his hair down to his shoulders, blue jeans, T-shirt, tennis shoes, and his own natural sweetness compounded with the Hindu generosity acquired in the distant East. What was he thinking of? The beauties of the day, the ease of the air. But then he came upon a gang fight, a white gang against a Negro gang. Naturally, being a peace-loving soul, he leaped into the fray on the side of the Negroes. Soon the police arrived, swinging their clubs. Since they, too, love peace and justice, in the immemorial fashion of cops, they immediately swung their clubs upon the Negroes. It's not that they take sides unfairly; it's just that they have to swing their clubs at somebody.

Ginsberg leaped upon the biggest, brawniest sergeant and fell to kissing him on the cheeks and neck, saying, "You must try to love these colored boys. After all, they are lonesome in America." (Smack, smack; great wet kisses) "After all, these colored boys are lonesome in San Francisco and North Beach. When you hit them with your clubs, that doesn't ameliorate their lonesomeness. You must try to love them more."

The other brawlers split. Ginsberg stood alone, filling the air with kindness and kisses.

Without stopping to define the word "ameliorate," the cop threw Ginsberg into the patrol car; two others got in with him; they drove off toward the station. Silence for a moment. Then the cop spoke: "What's your name?"

"Allen Ginsberg."

Pause. It should be recalled here that the famous trial of Howl took place in San Francisco, and poetry won a mighty victory against the police censors.

"You the writer?"

"Yes," said Allen Ginsberg.

The cop looked at him pleadingly. "Aw. Aw. Listen, what's a nice Jewish boy like you running around needing a haircut?"

They stopped the car and let him go. Ginsberg stepped out of that black Ford. He was disconsolate. What is North Beach and the world coming to when Allen Ginsberg is no longer an outsider? Shortly after this distressing experience, he returned to less affable climes. North Beach now seems decadent to him. Afterward, word came that he had shaved off his beard and mailed it to Governor Rockefeller of New York as a love offering, together with an appeal to be more kindly to the lonesome arts.

It is true that many past epochs of North Beach and the Barbary Coast have disappeared. The day of the Sydney Ducks and the vigilance committees, Australian toughs and mothers uprisen--and the days of their violence and murders--have faded. The clay of the tong wars in nearby Chinatown has gone, though an occasional arrest for opium smoking still mars the steady progress of real-estate values; the Chinese businessman is engaged in the import-export business, not smuggling. The fine pot of the beat movement has gone to flower, though a few nearsighted beatniks still wander the Beach, not seeing that their former colleagues have, exchanged their bongos for washer-driers. The cheap living in fishermen's shacks on the slopes of Telegraph Hill has given way to expensive living in those same fishermen's shacks, now called "view studios," or to upper-middle-income living in the new aluminum-glass-and-redwood apartments springing up where once red wine was guzzled by fierce, runny-eyed artists who would not compromise with conjunctivitis. A wonderful all-night Italian grocery yields its space to the Galaxie--swim dancers. The Chowder Shop and the Coney Island Red Hots give way to swim dancers. Poetry to jazz gives way to sick comedy, which gives way to the twist, which gives way to the swim.

But still, but still, each earlier time leaves its residue, marking North Beach with evidence for the amateur archaeologist. The environs of the Barbary Coast still nourish far-out bars, quiet and noisy ones, like Gold Street, where it is always New Year's Eve, or Scrooge's, where it is always Christmas Eve, eerie lighting from strung-around colored bulbs. (This led a Jewish schoolteacher to complain because there is no Yeshibah West, where it's Yom Kippur every night, and no drinking or smoking.) Plus the Montmartre (berets and Edith Piaf), and the Moulin Rouge (Patti White, the Uninhibited Schoolteacher, strips from her cap and gown and horn-rimmed glasses) and Mr. Wonderful ("Live Stereo Music"), and the Off Broadway (Deedee takes an actual shower while dancing--wears a purple bikini), and El Matador (the story of Barnaby Conrad's literary success is told in framed telegrams), and the Chi Chi ("Saucy Nevada Review"--why not?), and Carol Doda, swimming from a raised piano in her topless chinchilla suit, her protein tablets and her hormone injections, and the Hotsy Totsy and Big Al's (regular stick-ups in guaranteed Warner Brothers speak-easy mood), and the Red Garter (banjos, beer and community singing--feh), and the Red Balloon (the entrance is a child's slide into an adult Luna Park), and the Jazz Workshop, where Lenny Bruce explored the language and suffered the consequences of using hyphenated epithets, and the Roaring Twenties (the girls on the red-velvet swings take Dramamine against seasickness), and the just plain Admiral Duncan again, where ex-college boys hang out over former college girls, even if these college boys now work in the brokerage firms of Montgomery Street and the girls are not acquainted with their wives. Ben Franklin may have discovered electricity near Philadelphia, but the Galaxie invented the swim and still has wall-to-wall swim girls.

The beat world still survives in the Coffee Gallery (interracial chess, jazz, folk music, old movies), the City Lights Books, Coffee & Confusion, Clown Alley, the Vesuvio Bar, and the Anxious Asp, which periodically revives Blabbermouth Night, when anyone with a tongue in his head can make a speech on any subject before an audience that seeks both distraction and the Truth. The Jazz Workshop and Basin Street West still import the best jazz artists. The old Bohemia still makes it among the Italians of the Trieste Caffè or the Tosca Café, and on upper Grant, and in the park. The Italian and the Chinese children now play together in Washington Park, near St. Peter and Paul's Church, although until ten years ago, Broadway was a strict dividing line between the two nationality settlements; the beatniks helped break the barriers. The neighborhoods still have their separate identities, but there is an interfiltration, and the Negroes have arrived, giving a new uneasy liveliness to this world. The Japanese have arrived. So have the Mexicans. Everyone is there.

In other words, the old inevitably passes, but it ineluctably remains. There are still fishermen, piano tuners, pimps, thugs, gangsters, poets, painters, your little neighborhood frame maker, tailors (and a shop making leather clothes for leather-wearing men), gaslights, hitching posts, cafés, coffeehouses, Hawaiian bars, Japanese bars, Chinese bars (one with an entrance shaped like female genitalia, and it's dark inside), English pubs and steak-and-kidney-pie emporiums, a beat mission or two, pool halls, improvisational theaters, elegant Fitzgerald-epoch saloons like the Roaring Twenties, all spangles and garters and weaving, bow-tied tourists; there is almost everything that there has ever been, including the marvelous old Seawall warehouse on Sansome Street, which was built from the timbers of schooners that once rounded the Horn for the gold rush. The Seawall now houses Synanon, a method of curing narcotics addiction and other character disorders by setting up a new style of community life. Characteristic of the appeal of North Beach, this branch of Synanon is its center for the arts--jazz combos, painters and photographers, moviemakers, writers and dancers under these salty beams flung up 100 years ago by men determined to find their Valhalla in San Francisco, fresh gold and immoral exhibitions, a new chance in the newest part of the New World. These men called each other Slim or Pardner because their old names did not matter.

In Synanon, too, a decayed style is discarded and the chance to make a new, free and better life is offered. The old remains; the new crowds in; the old endures.

Whatever happened to the Barbary Coast?

Ask the boys for hire, the girls for rent.

Whatever happened to the old bohemia?

Ask the sculptors of upper Grant, the wine-drinking poets who picnic in Washington Park, the roaring pranksters under the fig tree at the Old Spaghetti Factory Cafe & Coffee House.

Whatever happened to the beat paradise?

Ask the chicks who finger the books at the Discovery or City Lights, waiting for either true love, the connection, or something-to-do to come along.

In fact, what has happened is that one period of North Beach replaces another without actually replacing it, and in geological layers, all history exists simultaneously.

The cool yellow-gray sky of San Francisco, that aslant city, forever-April town, shelters everyone within its indulgent past and glittering future. "Nobody came first," as the philosopher said, and it also seems that nobody went away. At night, they can all be found taking the air of Broadway and Grant. If the epoch of nude modeling for painters succeeds the epoch of the swim, well, the Coast and the Beach will survive that, too. As long as there is good food in the family-style restaurants, good liquor in the family-style bars, and expensive food in the famous restaurants, expensive liquor in the famous bars, a bit of Emperor Norton's and Mark Twain's oddball San Francisco will survive.

In the spirit of the Barbary Coast is the ancient lady with a robust past, 87 years old now, who lives alone with a servant on an elegant slope of Nob Hill just up from the sunny hollow of North Beach. She is so old and grizzled by the years that they didn't want to let her down from the roof of Notre Dame last time she visited Paris. She has hemorrhoids which occasionally give her trouble. She asked the doctor to remove them. He demurred, stating that even a minor operation should be avoided at her age, and besides, with drugs and careful control of diet, she should have no trouble. "Ah," she cried, "but I want to be able to eat Chinese and pasta! I want to be perfect!"

At night, after two o'clock, when the bars close and the cocktail waitresses and swim dancers come off work, surely the ghosts of the dear departed Sydney Ducks see their lovely pretty waiter girls tripping home in their net stockings, their piled-up hair and their hormone-increased curves, wanting to be perfect. The contemporary American need to consume bohemias, leisure and the perfections of art may force the curves a little, but there are those curves anyway. They get medical help, perhaps, but those girls do curve. Ogling and tumescence and the light fantastic remain in style. "Goodbye, Charley, I've done all I could," says Belle Cora. "Oh God! Oh God! I am shot!" says Mr. King. "I used to know a girl in exactly that spot, just that spot there," says Enrico Banducci, former concert violinist, surviving veteran of the beat revolution, honored founder of the hungry i and Enrico's Coffeehouse, honored owner of Mike's Pool Hall and over 20 berets, plus pieces of fighters and films, plus an airplane, a ranch, a meat-packing plant, and an investment in alimony for an indeterminate number of former wives. "Wonder whatever happened to that there girl?"

Tell you what happened, Bandooch.

For the boys from across the Bay and from the Fillmore, for the boys from across the continent in the Midwest and New York, and for the boys merely itching to get away from Portland, Oregon, that girl lives. She is born every minute. North Beach is her domain. And for the girls who yearn for the salty, sloping, masculine grace of old-time San Francisco, there are the eternal lads searching through the hollow of pleasure bounded by Telegraph and Russian Hills, by Chinatown, by the Bay, by the limits of pride, lust and wallet. Those searchers want to be found. They seek to be reformed. They drink coffee in coffeehouses through the yellow-gray late afternoon of San Francisco. Then prayerfully, like Arabs at sundown, they turn their eyes upward, toward the bizarre blue dome of the Columbus Towers, once the headquarters for gangsters and panders, now an office building owned by the Kingston Trio. Not the muezzin peeks out from the sharp edge of the tower to chant at dusk, but rather, Ray Lopez, the hip barber, who offers his clients The Hudson Review and Réalités, comes to his window to offer a mild blessing to the worshipers gadiered below. A blessing, a discussion of new trends in the theater of the absurd, and an expert haircut.

What has happened to the Barbary Coast is that the kaleidoscope turns, the colors swirl, age comes and goes--as does youth, as do time and history. Implausible, incredible, impractical, impossible, it offers but one incontrovertible bit of evidence for its existence. It survives, it is there.