This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate
在中国的前几天后关闭ever on New Year’s Eve, its retro sixth-floor bar was packed with people soaking in its revelatory views of Chinatown, the weary tuxedoed waiters and mysterious outside aquariums for the last time. The demise of the Empress was painful, but it invites us to travel back even further in time than the ’70s, Engelbert Humperdinck-Dick Cavett era captured on the yellowing, must-be-preserved-at-all-costs celebrity photographs in its lobby — back to the golden age of Chinatown’s nightclubs.
Starting in the late 1930s, San Francisco’s Chinatown unexpectedly exploded as a jumping nightlife destination. Clubs like the Chinese Sky Room, the Kubla Khan, the Lion’s Den, the Dragon’s Lair, the Club Shanghai, and the most famous joint of them all, the Forbidden City, attracted throngs of whites and Chinese alike with their all-Chinese floor shows — scantily clad chorus girls and dancers, comedians and singers. These nightclubs flourished for close to 25 years, providing a jolt of glamour, sexiness and show business panache to traditionally conservative Chinatown.
One man was almost single-handedly responsible for this eruption of Broadway glitter and gams along Grant Avenue: Charlie Low. As Arthur Dong recounts in his lavishly illustrated “Forbidden City, USA: Chinese American nightclubs, 1936-1970,” before Low came on the scene, not only were there no nightclubs with entertainment in Chinatown, there also were no bars. Low, who moved to San Francisco with his family in 1922 from Nevada, where his parents ran a store and sold merchandise out of a truck to ranchers, only had an eighth-grade education but was a born entrepreneur. He told Dong, “I thought the time would be right to open one, and I did.”
Resistance from elders
Low’s Chinese Village at 702 Grant Ave. opened on Nov. 12, 1936 — the same day the Bay Bridge opened. It was the first cocktail bar in Chinatown. The building still stands, on the corner of Sacramento Street.
Chinatown’s elders were not happy with Low’s initiative. “Oh, I had a lot of criticism about it,” he told Dong. “The old-fashioned Chinese in Chinatown have no foresight. They’re satisfied in their little herb business, run it for maybe 30, 40 years, but I’m a little different. I try, step by step, to advance. The Chinese people would say the Chinese people don’t drink; if they do, they do it at home — and they were totally wrong. Although our trade was not all Oriental, part of it was Oriental, but we catered mostly to the white trade, the trade from the street, so to speak.”
About this time another Chinese American entrepreneur opened the first nightclub in Chinatown, the Chinese Sky Room, on the sixth floor of the Grand View Hotel (now the Grant Plaza Hotel, on the corner of Pine Street and Grant). Inspired by the success of his Chinese Village bar, Low decided to open his own nightclub.
“I felt that I was doing the public, doing Mr. and Mrs. America, a favor by being able to present a show that was different, and to advance the Chinese girls,” Low told Dong. “We can’t be backwards all the time; we gotta show the world that we’re on an equal basis. And Chinese girls baring their legs … they have limbs as pretty as anybody else, so somebody has got to break the ice and do it. 'I’ve never seen an Oriental show. I’ve never seen the legs of an Oriental girl. Let’s go!’ — that is running through the mind of Mr. and Mrs. John Public.”
Recruiting performers
Low found a space big enough for his nightclub at 363 (now 369) Sutter St., one block outside the Chinatown gate at Bush Street and Grant and one block from Union Square. It was the perfect location for his cross-cultural endeavor, and it eased the anxieties of whites nervous about setting foot in supposedly vice-filled Chinatown. He tapped the second of his four wives, Li Te Ming, as a singer and hired chorus girls, a band and novelty acts, including acrobats and magicians. Perhaps most important, he came up with one of the all-time great nightclub names: the Forbidden City.
Finding Chinese women to appear at the Forbidden City was not easy. As Dong notes in his introduction, local Chinese balked at letting their daughters appear in risque costumes and derided male performers as “sissies” — a euphemism for homosexuals. So Low went outside San Francisco, recruiting his performers from Isleton (Sacramento County), Stockton, Salinas, Oregon, Massachusetts and Hawaii.
Not all of the performers in Low’s “all-Chinese show” were actually Chinese. Japanese, Korean and Filipino entertainers changed their names and passed for Chinese. The most famous of the counterfeit Chinese was a Japanese American named Jack Suzuki, who under the name of Jack Soo played the Charlie Low-like club owner in both the stage and movie versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Chinatown musical, “Flower Drum Song.”
'Unsavory cocktail’
紫禁城打开12月22日,1938年,featuring three shows a night. It struggled to attract customers until Low discovered a young UC Berkeley undergraduate named Noel Toy, who had been making $35 a week working as a nude model at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in an attraction called Candid Camera, in which customers would pay to take “candid” photos of nude girls. Low offered Toy $50 a week to work at the Forbidden City, billing her as the “Chinese Sally Rand,” after a famous burlesque dancer whose “Nude Ranch” was the top cash draw during the first week at the Exposition.
当约翰先生和夫人公众(特别是the former) heard about Toy’s act, the turnstiles began clicking at the Forbidden City — even though at first Toy barely knew how to dance and simply paraded around holding a giant balloon. Toy’s act was actually quite tame and tasteful, but as Dong notes, “male patrons flocked to the club to see a naked Chinese woman perform, eager to confirm the perverse rumors about the genital differences between Asian and white women. It was an unsavory cocktail of racism and sexism, but it was also lucrative. Business soared.”
Life Magazine spread
What really caused the Forbidden City to take off, however, was a three-page spread in Life Magazine titled “Life Goes to the Forbidden City.” Singling out Low’s joint as “the No. 1 all-Chinese nightclub in the U.S.,” the article asserted that “Chinese girls have an extraordinary affinity for Western dance forms. As singers, not many achieve success according to Occidental standards. But slim of body, trim of leg, they dance to any tempo with a fragile charm distinctive to their race.”
Within weeks, the Forbidden City had to turn people away, ringing up 2,200 patrons a day; the bar line was four people deep all night long. The golden age of Chinatown’s nightclubs had begun.
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
Editor’s note
Trivia time
Last week’s question:Name a street named after someone who killed a world-famous explorer.
Answer:Lapu Lapu, the Filipino hero who killed Ferdinand Magellan.
This week’s question:What street was hit by the most powerful shock wave in the 1906 earthquake?
