A Bus Ride from North Beach to South Park in 1857

The route of the North Beach to South Park omnibus is superimposed on a 1858 US Coast Survey map of San Francisco (courtesy of Wikipedia). In 1858, 16 horse-drawn omnibuses, working for two competing companies, carried 2,400 passengers a day along this route.

This description of the sights and sounds of an omnibus ride from North Beach to South Park in 1857 was written by H.L.N., a contributor to Hutching's Illustrated California Magazine. It makes an interesting pair with the more philosophical description of a similar ride from 1859 which I posted last month.

An omnibus waiting for passengers at the Plaza. Detail of a photograph from G.R. Fardon's San Francisco Album (Bancroft)

AN OMNIBUS RIDE.

Jump in — only a shilling from North Beach to Rincon Point — the whole length of the city: twelve tickets for a dollar. Gentlemen, jump in — make way for the ladies — and, bless me! do crowd closer for the babies. One, two, three, four! actually seven of these dear little humanities. Here we go, right through Stockton Street. Four years ago this was one long level of mud in the rainy season — not such a luxury as an omnibus thought of. Tramp went the pedestrian the length and breadth thereof, thankful for side-walks. But now note the handsome private residences, the neat flower gardens, the fruit stands, the elegant stores in Virginia Block, the display in the windows both sides the way — dry goods, toys, stationery, tin ware, &c, &c.

The Cobweb Palace at the foot of Meiggs' Wharf, near where the omnibus started. (Bancroft)

But let us get in at the starting point. Leaving the promenade which makes Meiggs' wharf so pleasant of a summer morning, we step into one of the coaches, which are ready every eight minutes, according to the advertisement; run along Powell street a few squares, catching glimpses here and there of the greatest variety of architecture in the residences, and remarking upon the neatness of those recently erected; thence down a square into Stockton street, where the attention is distracted between the outside prospect and the protection of one's own limbs from the fearful thumping into divers holes which the ponderous vehicle encounters every few minutes.

Steady now — we have passed the worst part, and there is the State Marine Hospital, — quite a respectable amount of brick and mortar, patched at the rear with appurtenances of lumber, and which in its time has used up more "appropriations" than would comfortably have supported three times the number of sick within its walls. It is at present in the hands of the Sisters of Mercy.

Passengers in a London omnibus, by William May Egley, 1859. (Tate Gallery)

There! make room for the lady in hoops! only a shilling for all that whalebone! so now — let out the thin spare man, he fears suffocation — and the nervous gentleman too wants to alight; that baby has whooping cough, and annoys him. Poor bachelor! he cannot begin to comprehend infantile graces, and he votes the whole race a bore; while glancing satirically at the lady, he observes to his friend, the spare man, “Poor little sufferer, how it hoops.”

Stockton street, from Fardon's 1856 San Francisco Album (Bancroft)

Rows of pretty cottages on one side the street — handsome brick buildings on the other — and at the corner of Stockton and Washington, a private garden laid out with exquisite taste and neatness. A refreshing fountain sends its spray over the blossoms of the sweet roses and verbena, while the graceful malva trees stand sentinel at the gateway. Only a passing glance, however, for the turn is accomplished, and down Washington street to Montgomery is generally a pretty rapid descent.

The Plaza (Portsmouth Square) in 1856, looking towards Washington street, along which the omnibus would have passed. (San Francisco Public Library)

That is a family market near the corner of Washington — quite convenient these — the nicest of vegetables, the best of meats, procurable at market prices. We up-towners could scarcely dispense with them. Past the Plaza — how well I remember that formerly as a receptacle for old clothes, cast off boots and shoes, cans, bottles, crockery ware, skeleton specimens of the feline race — dogs who had had their day — rats whose race was run, and various other abominations; but a treasure heap to the rag pickers, or bottle venders, who in those days were not. But now the Plaza has been smoothed into shape, and if the green things within its borders are perfected by sun and rain, it may yet flourish into grace and beauty.

Montgomery street, featuring the Montgomery Block, from Fardon's (1856) San Francisco Album (Wikipedia).

Montgomery street — look down the long avenue. Where can be found more substantial edifices? more elegant stores? a gayer promenade? Handsomely dressed ladies — gentlemen of business — gentlemen of leisure — mechanics — laborers — children— thronging the side-walks; glitter, and show, and wealth in the windows; equipages, omnibusses, horsemen, in the streets. Hundreds of human beings passing and repassing in an hour, and from almost every nation under heaven.

Montgomery Street, from Fardon's 1856 San Francisco Album (Bancroft)

The Frenchman with his “bon soir” greets you; the Spaniard and Italian, the Chinese, German, Mexican. The rose, the thistle, and shamrock [i.e. England, Scotland, and Ireland] have each their representatives, and beside these many others born in remote regions are congregated in this great thoroughfare of cities.

The view up Second street from Rincon Hill towards Market; from Fardon's 1856 San Francisco Album (Bancroft).

Past the fancifully arranged drugstores; past the tempting exhibitions of jewelry; past the attractive displays of dry goods, book and stationery establishments, banking houses, express buildings, lawyers’ offices, and here we are, turning into Second street. Whirling by the Metropolitan market, we drive down as far as Folsom street, and observe that the neat cottages in this part of the city have a more rural aspect than those in locations nearer to business. A tree is seen here and there, and vines clamber over the porches, and droop over the windows. At the corner of Second and Folsom a garden in luxurious bloom refreshes the sight, and the questioning stranger in the 'bus is informed that the house and grounds were formerly owned, and were the residence of the late Captain Folsom, whose remains now lie in Lone Mountain Cemetery.

The waterfront, viewed from Second and Folsom; from Fardon's 1856 San Francisco Album (SFMOMA).

Adjoining this, on Folsom street, is another stately private residence — another lovely garden, where luxuriant flower growths may be seen at almost any season of the year. Nearly opposite is Hawthorne street. Ah! what associations of “Seven Gabled Houses” are connected with that name. But the eye rests upon none such — only a line of pretty cottages are peeped at ere we are driven past into Third street.

A Daily Alta California ad for one of the two omnibus companies in San Francisco (California Digital Newspaper Collection).

Another long avenue — grocery, dry goods, fruit, market — ever-recurring reminders that humanity has numberless wants, and that, for a golden boon, the supply is always equal to the demand. There are few handsome residences on Third, but many comfortable looking ones.

South Park looking west, from Fardon's 1856 San Francisco Album (SFMOMA).

South Park — a passenger stops. There is a homelike appearance in this solitary row of uniform houses, charming to one who recalls images of long streets, whose “white marble steps” have no parallel in San Francisco. But beyond us is Rincon Point — and in view of the blue waters, the omnibus stops. Nurses and babies alight, and the inquiring passenger strolls, where? Perhaps I may tell you in my next.

By the early 1860s, the omnibus line had been replaced by horse-drawn streetcars such as this one (San Francisco Public Library).

For more on the history of San Francisco transit, see San Francisco's Transportation Octopus.

See Also:

A Bus Ride through San Francisco in 1859
A New York City Cab Ride in 1840
Streetcar Wars of San Francisco History, Vol. III
The Jitney Stand at 18th and Castro in 1915
A History of San Francisco's Cab Industry, in Advertisements

The Misadventures of Mike Brannigan (Part Thirteen)

Pimpin' Ain't Easy;

Or, The Worst Cabdriver in San Francisco (Again)

Sex workers in 19th Century San Francisco. (San Francisco Public Library)

(Read Part Twelve: "It is Legal to Shoot Mike Brannigan")

On February 2nd, 1868, two young women stepped off the steamer Montana onto the Pacific Mail dock in San Francisco. Mary Keating and Kate O’Rourke, ages sixteen and seventeen, were “respectable young Irish girls” from Boston, who had made the voyage west in hopes of finding “an honest living at a more remunerative employment than the older cities afforded.” On the waterfront they hired a hack to take them to an uncle’s home on Dora street (Now Langton), out near Eighth. The driver of the hack was a friendly, charming man named Mike Brannigan.

San Francisco sprawls out to the west in this 1868 bird's-eye view. The Pacific Mail dock is at lower left. (Detail of lithograph by Britton & Rey, New York Public Library)

As Mike drove the carriage away from the waterfront and through the city streets, he may have pondered on the changes that had come over the city in the years since the early 50s, when he had been one of the first hackdrivers around, as well as a thug and a “shoulder-striker” for the Democratic party machine. Back then, much of what was now the South of Market had been a maze of sand dunes and marshes. Mission had been the only street that stretched west to any extent; and even it was interrupted by a bog (near today’s Seventh street) which had repeatedly swallowed the bridges built to cross it. Now the sand dunes were levelled and the bogs drained; a neighborhood spread out to the south and west, right out to the Mission, which had once stood at a good distance from the city. Streetcars, powered by horses or by steam, criss-crossed the growing city with a transportation network that would have seemed impossible a decade earlier.

Mike had also gone through a lot since the old days. He had been driven out of San Francisco, marooned in Panama, almost executed in Guatemala, chased again out of San Francisco, sent to San Quentin for a rape in Sacramento, and banished from Virginia City.

Mike didn’t know it as he drove through those South of Market streets, but his greatest victim, Edith Mitchell, had died of cholera only a month before, halfway around the world in Bombay.

The girls’ uncle was a poor man, a “picker of rags and gatherer of bottles,” and when they arrived at the house on Dora—by all accounts a dilapidated hovel—Brannigan professed to be shocked. “This is a mean looking, dirty place for you to live in,” he told the girls. “Why don’t I come here to-morrow with a lady who will take you to a better place than this?” The girls were suspicious, and refused his offer.

But Mike did come back. He sensed that there was money to be made here.

Once again, Mike had picked up a second job to supplement the hackdriving trade. After all, most San Franciscans—indeed, many Californians—knew all about Mike’s sordid history, and were not likely to patronize his hack, or even to associate with him in public. The only place he could find business was on the waterfront, picking up out-of-towners who had no idea who he was. That, or working the night crowd, connecting drunk passengers with their vices of choice. The latter was more Mike’s style.

Back in 1856 when he had been exiled from the city by the Committee of Vigilance, the prostitutes of San Francisco had given Mike a going-away present of clothes and cash. Now he was back in league with the ladies of the night. For a kickback, he directed amorous passengers to the right locations. He assisted powerful madames in the shuffling of prostitutes from one city to another, even daring to venture back to Virginia City in the process. And he helped procure new flesh for the bordellos. It was in this role that Mike drove his carriage up to 505 Dupont street (now Grant), near Pine, to talk to Harriet Skillman, owner of a “house of assignation” at that address. Skillman had agreed to pay Mike $8 for leads on attractive young girls who could be lured into a life of prostitution.

All she had to do was lure the girls into her home. By the standards of the day, once a woman had spent any length of time in such a place, she was considered “fallen,” and could hope for no other prospects. It was the modus operandi of predators like Skillman (and Brannigan) to use this ideological trap to literally trap young girls in

the life of infamy and hopeless degradation from which there is no escape when once poor deluded victims fall into the hands of the procuress.

 (Daily Alta California, 11/2/1865, reporting on a similar case)

As promised, Mike returned to Dora street the next day with Mrs. Skillman in his carriage. She told Mary and Kate she was looking for a young woman whom she had been expecting to arrive on the Montana; she further claimed that she “was struck with the resemblance of one of them to the missing girl.” She invited them to come and work for her at her home on Dupont street. The girls, smelling a rat, declined; but Mrs. Skillman would not desist. Repeatedly she returned to their door, with and without Brannigan, each time imploring them to come and visit her home.

A 19th Century San Francisco police officer. (San Francisco Police Department)

The girls told all this to their uncle, who recognized Mrs. Skillman by reputation. The police were called in, and Detective Blitz was put on the case. Bernard S. Blitz, San Francisco’s first Hack Inspector, was under five feet tall, constantly active, a German-Jewish immigrant, a Mexican-American War veteran, a Forty-Niner, a drinking buddy of Mark Twain’s (according to one story), a teetotaller (according to another), and an absolute terror to all of San Francisco’s swindlers, thieves, and criminals during the 1860s. Twain wrote of him:

Blitz is a small man, but if there were eighteen more vacancies to fill in the police department, I think Blitz would come nearer filling the whole lot by himself and filling them well and doing justice to the position than any eighteen men in San Francisco.

With the dashing young Captain Hanna as his sidekick, Blitz hit upon a scheme to entrap the entrapper. He told the girls to accept Mrs. Skillman’s next offer, but to let him know; he and Hanna would follow them and catch Skillman in the act of enticing the girls into a house of disrepute.

A horsecar of the Central Rail Road passes 6th and Howard in 1868, about where Skillman and the girls would have boarded. (San Francisco Public Library)

The next afternoon, at 2 o’clock, Kate and Mary met Mrs. Skillman at a street-corner near their house, where they boarded a crowded streetcar. It was undoubtedly a horse-car of the Central Rail Road, which ran from South of Market, up through the Union Square area, and passed within a block of Skillman’s house at Dupont and Pine before heading down to the waterfront. A little after Skillman and the girls boarded the car, Blitz and Hanna slipped on, unseen.

On the ride, Skillman tried to charm the girls with talk of easy housecleaning work and trips to the Cliff House. Suddenly she caught a glimpse of Blitz and clammed up; but he allayed her suspicions by getting off the car. At Bush and Dupont, Skillman took the girls off the car and nervously shepherded them up the block, wary of being followed. They arrived at the steps of 505 Dupont, but

just as the door was opened and she supposed that she had the unsuspecting victims inextricably in her toils, the heavy hand of Capn. Hanna was laid on her shoulder, and she was taken to the Calaboose on the charge of conspiracy to reduce the girls to prostitution. (Daily Evening Herald, Stockton)

The girls were saved in the nick of time! Brannigan was arrested as well, on the same charge of conspiracy. It just goes to show: pimpin’ ain’t easy...

Skillman and Brannigan assembled a crack team of lawyers, including Col. James, who had helped Brannigan before, and ex-Judge Tyler. There were also rumors that Skillman—being, after all, a San Francisco madame—had plenty of dirt on “parties moving in the highest circles of society,” and would spill this dirt if she was convicted. The defense’s main strategy was the spreading of what we would now call “alternative facts,” producing witnesses to assert that Kate and Mary had already been prostitutes in Boston, were “addicted to intemperance and lewdness,” and had concocted the whole setup, intending to blackmail Skillman into a settlement. (And, just maybe, this was actually true).

There were trials, and then retrials. There were even all manner of side trials, of witnesses charged with perjury, of friends of the defense bribing witnesses; even Captain Hanna was accused of very improperly taking Kate O’Rourke out on a date. In the end, the defense succeeded in introducing doubt into the minds of the court. Skillman and Brannigan were convicted, but treated leniently; Skillman was fined $200, and Brannigan (who had spent some months in jail during the trial) was sentenced to time served, plus a fine of $60. The judge even went so far as to issue something unheard of: an apology (sort of) to Mike Brannigan!

Had some other man than Brannigan been tried for the offense, the verdict might have been different. … Still there is something surrounding certain men, a kind of magnetism, if it might be so called, which must influence jurors, and is not tangible. Doubtless the reputation of Brannigan—whether properly founded on bad conduct by him was not for the Court to determine—had an effect on the jury, and the fact was well known that at the time of the trial there was a strong prejudice against him in the community.

In other words, the Court recognizes that it’s hard out there for a pimp!

After paying his fine, Mike left San Francisco again. He appears to have spent some time in Sacramento, where he was arrested a few times for disturbing the peace. In 1870, he is mentioned in an article complaining about the presence of prostitutes at the State Fair:

The soiled doves have flocked to the city in large numbers this year, from all portions of the State, and are represented in force at the races, redolent of musk and paint, every day, in charge of such men as Mike Brannigan and his ilk.

After that he disappears for several years. Could Mike Brannigan's scandalous career be over at last?

In 1873, the Sacramento Daily Union found him:

The notorious Mike Brannigan, who was once convicted of rape in Sacramento, has turned up in Galveston, Texas, as a livery-stable keeper.

Next Time: The Worst Cabdriver in Galveston

Streetcar Wars of San Francisco History, Vol. III

Before the Google Bus, there was the balloon car...

A San Francisco invention, the "balloon cars" of the Sutter Street Railroad could be rotated on their own chassis, allowing them to turn around more easily. Unfortunately they could also be easily run off the rails, as the story below indicates. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library).

San Francisco Chronicle, December 23, 1877

“OUR BOYS."

HOW THEY HATE THE LARKIN-STREET BALLOON CARS

“Our Boys” residing in the vicinity of Hayes and Market streets have organized and harmonized themselves without distinction of creed, color or previous condition of servitude into an important party, the shibboleth of which is underlying enmity to the drivers of the balloon cars of the Sutter-street railway running along Larkin street. ...

The boys appear to divide themselves into regular strata of “pure cussedness.” At the corner of Hayes, Ninth, and Market streets they modestly content themselves with having so artfully laid a train of misleading rocks from the legitimate track that the driver is never awakened to his responsibilities till he drives his steeds half into the front balcony where a Larkin-street young lady is entertaining her young man.

Having backed out with profuse apologies he continues his frequently interrupted course to the corner of Grove street. There the boys change the programme by pelting him with stones. The only objection that can be made to the boys at this corner is that they are remarkably bad shots, and that every rock, well intended to do for the driver, shivers a window and scatters shattered glass rather promiscuously and dangerously among the passengers.

At Fulton street a low whitewashing investigating committee of three usually jumps aboard, and when the attention of the driver is distracted by some one of his numerous duties, one of the Committee rings the bell and they then all jump off and laugh at the driver for stopping to let off a supposed passenger.

The drivers have done all in their power to counteract this evil. They have laden the fronts of their conveyances with cobbles till they looked like Trojan war chariots, and they fired the said cobbles at the hoodlums with remarkable wickedness, it is true, but with distinguished ill success.

Individual drivers have been so enthused with the war as to leave horse, car and passengers on the track, and start out for a several blocks’ chase of supposed culprit. They have invariably returned with some good little boy who was just going home from an adjacent letter-box, or a contiguous grocery, whither he had been sent on an important errand, and being bound to let all these go, the assistance of the police is respectfully asked.