The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco

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SAN FRANCISCO IN 1900 was a Gold Rush boomtown settling into a gaudy middle age. Fifty years earlier, it had been a miners’ camp pitched upon sand dunes. Now it had a pompous new skyline with skyscrapers nearly twenty stories tall, grand hotels, and Victorian mansions on Nob Hill. Cable cars scaled its hills on chains that jingled like the necklace on a vaudeville soubrette. The city filled three opera houses with the zeal of the nouveaux riches. But underneath its ermine opera cape beat the heart of its rowdy past: the old Barbary Coast was still alive in the saloons and vaudevilles, bawdy houses and “French restaurants,” with dining downstairs and women upstairs.

Keening seagulls rode the cool currents of fog and sun, circling town with their rusty cries. At street level, the city (while eager to embrace electricity and motorcars) still lived on gaslight and horsepower. Horse-drawn buggies and streetcars rattled west from downtown, past churches, temples, and sandlots, toward Ocean Beach. The oblique slash of Market Street bisected the town, running from southwest to northeast, from Castro Street, past the dome of City Hall, past the Palace Hotel, past the Emporium and Golden Rule Bazaar department store, and finally ending at the water’s edge, where the Ferry Building’s clock tower was a traveler’s first view of the city.

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