Flame of the Barbary Coast
Last year, Phillip Margulies published Belle Cora, a well-researched, well-crafted fictional memoir about a real-life San Francisco madam. Beyond her rise to privilege and respectability during the Gold Rush, the facts about Cora are few. In 1855, it was recorded that the wife of a U.S. Marshal demanded she be ejected from a society playhouse. Two days later, Cora’s lover, an Italian gambler, was arrested for the Marshal’s murder. Reading between the lines of the short newspaper article, it is clear that Christian respectability and hypocrisy had come to the city, but the Barbary Coast would not be easily tamed. During Bawdy & Naughty Historic Walking Tour, a two-block stroll through the heart of a long-gone red-light district where gambling, vigilante justice, prostitution, and opium were once more common than laundry, we will learn how dancehall workers were regularly rousted as pickpockets and wild women like Philomena Falkner, “the Galloping Cow,” targeted drunken sailors. We will also learn more about the real Belle Cora and her brilliant and more powerful Cantonese counterpart, Ah Toy, who ran a chain of brothels beyond the control of Chinese tongs until 1854, when anti-prostitution laws began wresting power from those formidable ladies of the night who held more than the ear of the city’s most prominent gentlemen.
