Next time you’re walking around the downtown end of Columbus Avenue, take a turn down a narrow one-block alley named Hotaling Place. Rather than staring up at the towering Transamerica Pyramid, look down between your feet, and you’ll see parallel waving lines etching the pavement along the quiet, narrow block. Those lines mark the old city shoreline, before hundreds of abandoned ships formed new land claiming the bay, when San Francisco was a very different place.

Hotaling Place may be the most unique street in the city and holds centuries of secrets that are rooted in a time when it wasn’t called San Francisco, or even America.

The little fishing village of Yerba Buena was part of Mexico until July 9, 1846, when US Navy officer John B. Montgomery landed his ship on this shore and planted an American flag at what is now Portsmouth Square (named after his ship).

Within two years, with the end of the Mexican-American War, the land became part of the United States, and Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco.

Hotaling Place, San Francisco.

Andrew Chamings

The Gold Rush that followed changed the growing town beyond all recognition. Its population grew from 1,000 to 25,000 in a year, with thousands more forty-niners leaving ships abandoned there and heading to the Sierra Nevada for gold. Those 500 ships and newly built wharves grabbed some 50 city blocks from the water. This old buried shoreline lies where Hotaling Place’s line curves along the alley.

The street earned its name from pioneering entrepreneur Anson Parsons Hotaling, who built his exquisite Italianate business headquarters at 451 Jackson St. in 1866. (Hotaling also owned Hotaling Annex West across the street. That later became a gathering place for artists and writers in between their work shipbuilding during World War II.) In the early 1900s, Hotaling’s chief line of work was booze, and his company was described as “the biggest warehouse for booze in the west.” Gallons of whiskey were stored there when the earthquake hit in 1906, and while nearly every building in the area was razed by the shake and subsequent fire, Hotaling’s whiskey store somehow survived. Archives report that a mile-long fire hose that ran from Fisherman’s Wharf extinguished the flames.

The Oakland Tribune, May 17, 1906.

Archival/Oakland Tribune

Hotaling, an opportunist who knew how to make a buck, promptly ran ads in Bay Area newspapers after the quake boasting that his liquor reserve survived, and if readers sent money he would ship them his “Old Kirk” whiskey. Though, likely due to the destruction of the city’s bank offices, he requested only “coin,” noting that “checks and exchanges are useless at this point.”

For those inclined toward the supernatural, a story shared on a ghost tour of the alley tells of a stampede of cattle rushing down the narrow street on a foggy day. The ghost cows are said to be the specters of the livestock that ran through the city during the chaos of April 1906.

Hotaling Place, San Francisco.

Andrew Chamings

While it’s impossible to verify if this actually happened on this street, there were instances of cattle fleeing their pastures across the city in Cow Hollow and running through the smoldering ruins. It was an eerie sight amid the darkest days of San Francisco. As one police officer described to the press: “The noise and the dust, and the feeling of destruction, all combined to daze a man. All about us houses were tumbling, and falling walls and chimneys and cornices were crushing men and horses in the street.”

(In other bovine-related earthquake incidents, the New York Times reported shortly after the disaster that a cow in Point Reyes was swallowed whole by a crack in the earth on the San Andreas Fault.)

The street was also known for the horse stables at 32-34 Hotaling. The alley was a hub for horse-drawn streetcars that used the road and stables as a turnaround point.

Hotaling Place, San Francisco.

Andrew Chamings

One of the most stunning structures still standing, which feels like it could line a cobbled alley in Victorian London, is the red-brick back entrance of what is now the Barbarossa Lounge, which fronts onto 714 Montgomery St. That structure also reportedly survived the earthquake And, similarly to Hotaling, an advertisement for the grocers that operated there in San Francisco’s Italian newspaper, L’Italia, in October 1907 said they continued to sell “excellent and select liquor.”

Neighboring that building is a somewhat foreboding brick structure that has housed private members club Villa Taverna since the 1950s. Between two medieval-looking lanterns, a goddess with wheat and snakes (this appears to be Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest) looks out over the alley, ensuring only those with invitations pass through the doors. The marble sculpture was erected above the doors in the 1950s, and the owner claims it was an ancient Roman piece gifted by the Italian government.

Hotaling Place, San Francisco.

Andrew Chamings

That building backs onto 716 Montgomery, another structure as old as the city; it was built in 1849 from the wreck of a ship named The Georgean. That building became an art studio after the earthquake and was visited by Frida Kahlo, according to historian Nancy Boas.

The street is now lined with art galleries, designer showrooms and high-end clubs, but until as late as the 1970s, Hotaling Place was described as a “dirty little old alley” in the press, as it had been for years.

After the earthquake in 1906, religious leaders in San Francisco blamed the Barbary Coast’s vices for the disaster, declaring that the event that took thousands of lives was a wrathful God’s retribution on the dirty town.

Hotaling Place, San Francisco.

Andrew Chamings

One plaque, on the corner of Hotaling and Washington today, quotes the words of poet Charles K. Field on finding the building undamaged after so many churches crumbled.

If, as they say, God spanked the town
For being over-frisky,
Why did He burn His churches down,
And spare Hotaling’s whiskey?

The post The plentiful secrets and techniques of San Francisco’s oldest alley appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Silent film star Buster Keaton made films by letting places speak to him. While Keaton is most often remembered for his infamous imperturbability – his “Big Stone Face” never saw the chaos around him – stands out in many of his films nearing their 100th. His approach to screenwriting has been a beginning and an end to plan without worrying about what happened in between. He was inspired by a site; Gags arose from the details of the place.

Keaton and his fellow stars Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd all played with space in a way that makes it uniquely rewarding to find, visit, and study their filming locations. This is why film historian John Bengtson’s project to locate and remember the places where this silent comedy triumvirate filmed is particularly instructive.

Bengtson’s most incredible discovery – a seemingly nondescript T-shaped alley in the heart of Hollywood – appears in numerous silent films, including three on the National Film Registry, films kept by the Library of Congress for cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance.

The alley is the setting for one of Keaton’s most memorable stunts in the 1922 film Cops. He is running down the alley with a horde of cops who are insanely pursued. When he reaches the end, he stops in the street and looks back at the clumsy mob stumbling after him. A car drives past and Keaton holds on and flies behind the vehicle from the off. It’s pretty easy compared to some of his more elaborate stunts – but it became one of his most iconic spectacles.

Public domain; Courtesy John Bengtson

The place where Chaplin finds the eponymous child, whom he adopted in his 1921 masterpiece The Kid, is just a stone’s throw from where the cops were chasing Keaton. Harold Lloyd also sneaks through the alley to sneak late to work with his safety load! (1923). These three films on the National Film Registry are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to films made in the alley. It also appears in two other Keaton short films – Neighbors (1920) and My Wife’s Relations (1922) -. Groundbreaking director Lois Weber hit the boys straight to the point and shot Where are my children? in the alley in 1916, the same year Cleo Madison set up Eleanor’s Catch there. It also appeared in the series The Purple Mask (1917), the Al Christie comedies Hubby’s Night Out (1917) and All Jazzed Up (1920), Gale Henry’s The Detectress (1919), a star vehicle for the illusionist Harry Houdini called The. on Grim Game (1919), Ben Turpin’s Ten Dollars or Ten Days (1924) and a 1925 newspaper drama, The Last Edition.

As a filming location, the alley had a lot in its favor. Since it runs east to west, it was well lit and fairly quiet all day, says Bengtson. And at a time when studios were expanding, much of Hollywood was still orchards, open lots, or vacant fields; There weren’t many urban looking intersections to choose from. For a while, he adds, “it was essentially the only street in town”.

Courtesy John Bengtson / Public Domain

Bengtson – whose books Silent Echoes, Silent Traces and Silent Visions the Steps of Keaton, Chaplin and was filmed in San Francisco, not far from his place of residence.

When Bengtson visited the Daydreams locations, he found that things were very different. A scene near Lombard Street – famous today for its eight hairpin turns – had been filmed before construction began, so those attributes didn’t yet exist. “I was blown away because I realized that there was actually some history going on,” says Bengtson. “It’s not just the same place then and now.” The film froze a place in time while the real spaces developed, changed and aged.

Not long after this initial discovery, Bengtson was searching vintage photos of Los Angeles in an archive when he noticed a photo taken near the intersection of Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards. In the photo there was an alley south of the intersection with some signs on either side of the entrance. He immediately recognized it as the setting for Keaton’s cops autograb stunt. When Bengtson was finally able to visit the alley months later to see if it was still there, he found that it looked much the same and that it was also the location of another scene from cops where Keaton’s hand is bitten by one Dog. This sequence was filmed at the other end of the top of the “T” where the alley meets Cosmo Street.

Before Bengtson’s rediscovery of the site and his work on cataloging the silent films they used (which he recorded in his books and continues to describe on his blog Silent Locations), the alley was gradually fading from the collective mind. Although it appears in Tim Burton’s 1994 film Ed Wood, Bengtson believes it is unlikely that Burton knew the alley’s place in cinema history. “In my opinion, this was not an homage, just a functional, real Hollywood location,” he says.

EaCa Alley, photographed in 2013. It was reinterpreted a little during the COVID-19 pandemic. Alissa Walker / CC by-SA 2.0

If Bengtson has his way, however, there will be a tribute to the place: he wants the city to celebrate history by naming part of the Chaplin-Keaton-Lloyd Alley passage. He shared it on his blog, where he offers free PDF guides for DIY tours of the nearby filming locations, and recently produced a video about the alley that is currently banned as an outdoor dining area during COVID-19, but is going today mostly flanked by chic restaurants, cozy lofts and office space. He emphasizes that he does not want to rename the longer north-south section that runs parallel to Cahuenga Boulevard. This part already has a name – East Cahuenga Alley (or EaCa Alley for short) – and has become a hip hangout thanks to the revitalization by the EaCa Alley Association.

However, the vertical part of the alley is currently nameless. Much like the Music Box Steps in Silverlake, christened for their appearance in the 1932 Laurel and Hardy short film The Music Box, Bengtson wants film history to show up on the map.

“I can absolutely guarantee that nowhere are three of the greatest stars and three of their most important films to be found in one place.”

David Gadja, president of the EaCa Alley Association, is thrilled with Bengtson’s proposal and says he and his colleagues are thrilled with the opportunity to have the top east-west portion of the alley named in homage to Chaplin, Keaton. and Lloyd. ”Gadja and Bengtson have maintained a dialogue, but ultimately it’s not up to them. Urban bureaucracy is often labyrinthine, so it’s hard to say what the best way to go, especially in the midst of a global pandemic when officials have so much else to worry about. For now, Bengtson’s goal is to get the word wide and wide in the hope that the proposal will find widespread support. “Once enough people know about the alley, the right people will know about the alley, and once the right people know about the alley, it will happen,” he says.

He argues convincingly that there is no better place to honor Hollywood in its creation. There are a few other places where Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd’s paths crossed – on a cliff in Santa Monica and at a long-ruined Pasadena train station – but this place is special. “I can absolutely guarantee that nowhere are three of the biggest stars and three of their most important films in one place,” says Bengtson. “That’s absolutely two or three layers above anything I’ve ever found.”

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