San Francisco’s rowdy and racist chicken-themed restaurant: Topsy’s Roost

For a while, the most exciting evening in San Francisco was a human chicken coop.

To get there, you had to drive to the edge of town, where the Pacific crashed against the banks of a huge amusement park. Near the screaming roller coaster, below the Cliff House, a giant neon rooster waved.

The exterior of Topsy’s Roost on the Great Highway in San Francisco, circa 1930.

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Under the “Topsy’s Roost” sign were 11 larger-than-life chickens, neat and white, all in a row. Fifty cents half-fried chickens! To dance! proclaimed the sentences painted on the outside. Once inside, first-time guests must have caught their breath in the surreal scene in front of them.

Topsy’s Roost was an arena-sized wooden barn with rafters overflowing with “coops”. On a busy Saturday – they regularly served 900 people a night on the weekend, even during the Great Depression – the stalls were full of people, all of whom ate chicken, cookies and salad with their hands (no utensils allowed, house rules). After finishing their famous roast chicken, eager dancers skipped the stairs on the top floor: their stables were connected to the floor by a slide. Squeaky ladies slid onto the dance floor at regular intervals.

A postcard from the 1920s showing San Francisco’s Topsy’s Roost chicken restaurant. Postcards were sold in the restaurant and could even be given to the waiters to mail.

Public domain

Though it’s hard to see beyond the garish chickens and bright banners, Topsy’s wasn’t the quirky palace it appeared on colored postcards. His aesthetic – and his name – were shaped by the racism and slavery that were characteristic of the time.

Topsy’s Roost was the brainchild of the Whitney brothers George and Leo in the 1920s who made Playland at the Beach a national sensation. The name comes from a character from the novel “Onkel Toms Hütte” by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The little black girl became her own kind of spin-off sensation, and white companies used her image and name on products they thought were “popular” or somehow resembled the Antebellum South.

The Whitneys did a lot of advertising, almost all of which featured minstrel cartoons of black girls. A car that drove through town, built like a basket and covered with chickens, also contained several depictions of black children with large, white-rimmed eyes, exaggerated mouths and bare feet. In Topsy’s, almost obscured by the spread of chickens, similar caricatures could be seen near the roof. The pictures were so popular that a 1930 chronicle profile of the illustrator said he was famous for drawing “the goofy little negroes in Topsy’s Roost ads.”

Playland at the Beach’s Leo Whitney drives his Topsy’s Roost car and promotes the restaurant-nightclub on the Great Highway in 1935.

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The racist issue was extended to the restaurant’s menu. The Whitneys also ran the Cliff House, a more toned type of night; They billed Topsy’s as a budget option for families in San Francisco. The food was “Mediterranean” – a synonym for cheap – and was made by “only the best colored chefs”. A 1940 menu shows that half a roast chicken was only 50 cents, a piece of “Mammy’s Apple Pie” was 15 cents and if for some reason you wanted a bowl of just chicken broth, you could get it for 15 cents.

In 1930 the Whitney brothers signed what was then known as “the largest chicken contract in history”: 163 tons of chicken to serve the restaurant for the next year. An ad in the Examiner with Topsy was titled: “BAD NEWS FOR CHICKENS!”

The concept of the Topsy was hugely popular for both its theme and its prices. The Whitneys opened new stores in East Bay (on San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito) and in Los Angeles on Long Beach Boulevard. It became known for its musical guests; Topsy’s had a regular radio hour with his house band over the weekend, and Duke Ellington even performed in LA. “Topsy’s is considered the largest and most unique company of its kind in the world,” said a 1930 advertisement.

Cheap and loud made for a strong combination. An expansion project in 1930 gave them the opportunity to “comfortably” serve 1,200 customers at the San Francisco location. When the ban ended in 1933, the Whitneys took a half-page ad in the examiner entitled “So what?” To reassure patrons about its alcohol policy.

“We were always against the 18th amendment,” said the ad. “… We never interfered in the personal rights of patrons who” brought their own “.”

Another shot of the exterior of Topsy’s Roost, seen in July 1934.

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Perhaps their BYOB policy explains why there were so many classifieds in the 1920s and 1930s looking for items that had disappeared on Topsy’s. Among them were countless pins, watches and rings, a “dark blue envelope wallet” and “2 clarinets” that the owner would take back “without asking”.

However, by the late 1930s, Topsy’s time was already running out. Visitor numbers declined during World War II, tastes changed and George Whitney annoyed that the sleeping place was always moments before disaster.

“My father was always terrified of fire,” George K. Whitney Jr. said in a 2002 interview. He remembered Topsy’s opening night that a fire started in the deep fryer.

“The fire department came in and drove people around very quietly and so on. … and practically nobody knew that such an event had taken place on the opening night. But from that moment on, my father was always afraid of fire. … It was an old wooden structure, the whole building. “

A look at Topsy’s Roost in Playland at the Beach in 1937.

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Topsy has escaped a fiery ending, but in 1946 it was announced that the restaurant would be demolished. A $ 300,000 ($ 4 million, adjusted for inflation) theater-skating rink-bowling-lane restaurant called Edgewater was planned in its place, funded in part by radio star and future Kids Say the Darndest Things creator Art Linkletter .

When Edgewater opened in July 1946, it was the exact opposite of Topsy’s Roost. It hosted well-known acts like Tommy Dorsey, lured dancers with a “floating maple floor,” and had a “coke bar” (the drink, not the drug) for teenagers. “A really nice place to dance,” promised a 1946 advertisement.

But it seems that the Franciscans wanted strange and cheap, not elegant and noble. Edgewater closed within the decade, and the building went through a few more iterations before being completely demolished. Today it’s vacant lot on the neat row of condos overlooking the Great Highway.

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