Of all the unsavory dens that lined the Barbary Coast in its sordid 19th century heyday, the Bull Run was the lowest.
The joint was depraved and dangerous from the get-go. “Women, the very lowest and most abandoned of their class, haunted the place by night, and hideous noises and drunken revelry made the place a synonym of all that is low and vile,” The Chronicle wrote.
The Bull Run had been open only a few months in 1868 when it celebrated its first Christmas with a vicious knife fight, during which one man was killed and three others slashed. It would not be the last time blood covered its filthy dance floor.
The Bull Run was located on the north side of Pacific Avenue at Sullivan’s Alley (now, in truncated form, Jason Court), between Grant and Stockton on the western edge of the world-famous vice district and adjoining Chinatown. This was not, to put it mildly, a reputable neighborhood.
根据一个臭名昭著的1885年唐人街com的地图missioned by the Board of Supervisors, Sullivan’s Alley and its immediate vicinity featured no fewer than 41 houses of Chinese prostitution. The map, which depicted every building in Chinatown — the brothels featuring Chinese women were colored green — was part of an official anti-Chinatown crusade, but there is no reason to doubt its accuracy.
'Pretty waiter girls’
The Bull Run fit right into its seedy environs. It featured a dance hall and bar in the basement, a similar setup on the ground floor, and upstairs a warren of little rooms where “pretty waiter girls” — the term universally applied to the female employees of Barbary Coast dives — could conduct their business.
据赫伯特艾斯拜瑞的经典“巴巴里市Coast,” the Bull Run featured 40 to 50 of “the most brazen, hopeless, and abandoned women on the Barbary Coast.”
In most dives — also known as deadfalls — the pretty waiter girls drank tea or colored water. But the Bull Run’s owner, Ned Allen, insisted that his girls drink real liquor, which he often spiked with a supposed aphrodisiac called Spanish fly to make the ladies more lascivious.
Not satisfied with drugging his girls and forcing them to get drunk, Allen and his bouncer, a man known as One Year Tim, also forbade them to leave the dance floor often enough to relieve themselves. As a result, Asbury writes, “they wore diapers instead of the frilly undergarments which the prostitute, even more than her virtuous sister, prefers.”
A drunken, drugged, bottom-of-the-barrel Barbary Coast whore wearing a soiled diaper would not appear to be a particularly enticing amorous partner, but the men who frequented the Bull Run were not choosy. Good looks, witty conversation or even consciousness were not required.
“If one of Bull Run Allen’s pretty waiter girls became unconscious from liquor, as frequently happened, she was carried upstairs and laid on a bed, and sexual privileges were sold to all comers while she lay in a drunken stupor,” Asbury writes. “For an additional quarter a man might watch his predecessor, an extraordinary procedure which was supposed to give an extra fillip to the senses.”
The joint’s motto, not surprisingly, was, “Anything goes here.”
The lowlifes who wandered into the Bull Run — also known as Hell’s Kitchen and Dance Hall — were usually fleeced of their money. According to The Chronicle, the Bull Run was “the resort of the lowest kind of thieves and cutthroats, and in it the poor sailor or soldier was robbed of his hard-earned pennies without feeling and without remorse. ... From its doors poor drunken wretches were turned away after their last cent had been taken from them, to stagger through the streets in a devious but sure line to the Station-house.”
Big name, big nose
Allen, who rejoiced in the title “the wickedest man in San Francisco,” was one of the more colorful characters in the Dickensian universe of the Barbary Coast. He purported to be a veteran of both the Civil War battles of Bull Run —hence the name of his bar.
A huge, foul-mouthed man in his mid-30s who always wore a dazzling white ruffled shirt adorned with a big cluster of diamonds, Allen was especially famous for his enormous, shiny red nose, which he regularly dusted with flour from a salt shaker he carried in his pocket.
除了他outsized proboscis, Allen had a violent temper. On Aug. 28, 1872, The Chronicle reported that he had been arrested after hurling a bottle at a crowd of gawkers loitering outside his establishment who had refused his invitation to come inside and “put your damned bellies up to the counter!”
A similar encounter the next year had fatal consequences.
Mysterious killing
Around 9 p.m. on Nov. 1, 1873, Allen’s deadfall was packed with the usual crowd of criminals, pretty waiter girls, grifters and sailors when three men entered, partially blocking the entrance.
Allen asked them to come in or leave. Two of the men came in, but the third walked behind a large painted screen behind the door.
Allen grabbed a club, walked over and confronted the man. Moments later, according to The Chronicle’s report the next day, “Allen turned quickly around, walked to the bar, passed around it, fell, and within two minutes was a dead man.” He had been stabbed just below the heart.
No one realized at first what had happened. When they did, it took a few minutes for the “half-drunken wretches to recover from the stupor into which the tragedy plunged them,” The Chronicle reported. Meanwhile, the killer fled.
San Francisco’s most famous police detective, Isaiah W. Lees, was informed that a murder had been committed at the Bull Run. Lees and another officer hurried over to Pacific Avenue.
The Bull Run killing was little different from the dozens of other murderous brawls, known as “affrays,” that constituted the majority of San Francisco’s homicides in its early years and were usually scarcely noticed. Because this case involved a local celebrity — albeit a sleazy one — it drew extensive press coverage, offering a rare close-up look at a typical San Francisco murder during the city’s wild youth.
Next week: Who killed Ned Allen?
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail:metro@sfchronicle.com
Trivia time
Last week’s trivia question:Where in S.F. did O.J. Simpson grow up?
Answer:The Potrero Hill housing projects.
This week’s trivia question:What street was briefly the city’s main commercial hub after the 1906 earthquake and fire?
