Preserving the Tangible Remains of San Francisco’s Lesbian Community in North Beach, 1933 to 1960
Trudi Sandmeier 00:00
Today on Save As:
Shayne Watson 00:01
Lesbian spaces before a certain period of time were illegal, so women would risk their jobs, family ostracization, they’d risk everything, just to maybe meet up the love of their life. And that’s what made these spaces so crucial. They were community centers.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:24
Welcome to Save As: NextGen Heritage Conservation, an award-winning podcast that glimpses the future of our field with graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Trudi Sandmeier
Cindy Olnick 00:35
And I’m Cindy Olnick. So Trudi.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:38
Yes, Cindy.
Cindy Olnick 00:40
We are back with a wonderful Where Are They Now? episode. Our stellar producer, Willa Seidenberg, was up in the Bay Area recently and met with alumna, Shayne Watson for a little walk and talk around the city.
Trudi Sandmeier 00:57
Yeah, Shayne is kind of making things happen up in San Francisco when it comes to the LGBTQ community and the work that’s going on, sort of really groundbreaking work that’s happening in the city that’s really leading the way for lots of other communities around the United States. So it’s pretty exciting.
Cindy Olnick 01:15
So Shayne has been out of school for a while now, but her work is still highly relevant, very timely. And you know, like everything else is bumping up against these societal issues like the housing crisis. Okay, let’s hear Willa’s conversation with Shayne.
Willa Seidenberg 01:38
I am here with Shayne Watson, and we are sitting in the courtyard of the Maybeck Building in San Francisco. Shayne, welcome to Save As.
Shayne Watson 01:48
Hi. Thanks for having me.
Willa Seidenberg 01:50
There w e have some church bells to entertain us. Tell me about why you decided that we should do this interview in this building.
Shayne Watson 01:59
Well, a good friend and colleague has an office here, so it was easy for starters. But it’s also one of the best kept secrets, architecturally speaking, in North Beach, designed by preeminent Bay region architect Bernard Maybeck.
Willa Seidenberg 02:16
And it’s really kind of lovely, because we’re in this courtyard with a tree here, and there’s three floors, and you know, the sun is coming out, which is really nice in San Francisco. So, Shayne, when did you graduate from the Heritage Conservation Program?
Shayne Watson 02:34
I graduated in 2009.
Willa Seidenberg 02:36
How did you find your way into this profession in the first place?
Shayne Watson 02:40
I’ve always loved historic architecture, historic places. I can thank my parents for taking me to historic sites on vacations instead of other places that could have been more fun for kids — factories, mining sites, that sort of thing. But I was captivated by the sense of place, and trying to take myself back to being in a time period when I’m in a place. And so when I graduated with a degree in art history, and was sort of trying to figure out what I was going to do, many of my art history classes were architectural history, and I just kind of fell in love with that, and that took off. I realized I could do that as a living, and I’ve just been passionate about preserving historic places since.
Willa Seidenberg 03:31
Okay, so you’ve been out for a while, and this thesis was done 15 years ago, but still so relevant to a lot of the work that you’ve been doing. So the name of your thesis is Preserving the Tangible Remains of San Francisco’s Lesbian Community in North Beach, 1933 to 1960. Maybe first, why did you want to pursue this subject when it came time to write a thesis?
Shayne Watson 04:00
I had been working at Architectural Resources Group learning how to become an architectural historian, just by working with the brilliant, talented historians in that office. And ARG’s office is on the Embarcadero at the base of Broadway, and sometimes at my lunch break, I would walk around and just start thinking about where all of these stories related to lesbian history unfolded, especially as a young lesbian who’d moved to the city seeking that kind of freedom and exciting work opportunities. So I did a little research on the side and discovered that one of the earliest lesbian nightclubs was just up the street at 440 Broadway — Mona’s 440 Club — and just expanded into the one of the most popular lesbian clubs west of the Mississippi.
Shayne Watson 04:57
But what I noticed is this was, you know, an extraordinarily significant nightclub, but it was in an under-recognized part of town. There was no plaque, there was no landmarking, no sort of acknowledgement of the contributions of the space. And so that’s kind of when I started to think about doing this work asa thesis topic. And it also coincided with 2008 which was when we in California were going through the Prop 8 anti-same sex marriage fight. And that was, you know, hugely impactful to me personally. And I really wanted to tie my thesis work into something that I was interested in, personally and professionally, and feels so much more like an activism role than my previous topic.
Willa Seidenberg 05:52
I thought it was interesting that when you wrote your thesis in 2009 you mentioned in your thesis that there was only one site on the National Register which was associated with LGBTQ history, and that was Stonewall in New York. I did a little research, and I found that as of a year ago, that number has only risen to 30, which to me, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but the other thing that I found shocking is that there are still only 4% of sites associated with women’s history. So why are there so few of them on the National Register, both LGBTQ and women’s history?
Shayne Watson 06:37
Oh, well, that’s a big question. I think it relates more to how American society views LGBTQ people and women. So when I started researching this topic, what I really discovered right away, especially through the help of a historian named Gail Dubrow, who has been looking at how women’s sites are viewed in historic preservation for the last few decades, and I mean it essentially boils down to good old fashioned misogyny and also just a reluctance on behalf of the federal government to recognize histories that aren’t just part of the traditional American landscape, anything that falls outside of the norm. And so it really took a lot of convincing, actually, people within the National Park Service to get the Stonewall listed in the National Register, initially, because of so much resistance from the federal government, even wondering if these stories are significant to American history in the first place, it took a while for them to catch up. It’s going to take a while for us to catch up in terms of landmarks in the National Register.
Willa Seidenberg 07:56
So let’s talk a little bit about the things you mentioned in your thesis, when did North Beach become a homosexual mecca. Why do you think North Beach, in particular?
Shayne Watson 08:09
North Beach, from the very beginning, has been a kind of a tourist attraction. Early on in the city’s history, in the 1800s there was a street along the base of North Beach called Pacific Avenue, which became known as the International Settlement, and that was lined with saloons and brothels and speakeasies and dance halls that were crowded with men coming in from the gold mines off the boats. And when I say men, I mean men outnumbered women during the Gold Rush period, I think 12 to one. And so it was just sort of a party scene, and that ended up becoming transformed into more of a regulated party scene after the repeal of prohibition. So North Beach really took off as kind of a queer nightclub space after Prohibition was repealed in 1933. And as long as they had entertainment, they could sell liquor. That was the loophole. And so a lot of these entrepreneurs popped up to take advantage of that really bustling touristnight life seen in North Beach, and it was just an extraordinary confluence of events, these liquor laws changing after Prohibition, San Francisco really becoming an internationally known tourist mecca, especially for exoticized, sexualized entertainment.
Willa Seidenberg 09:48
So you mentioned Mona’s, which was the first one, and it’s interesting that Mona herself said basically her bar evolved into a lesbian bar.
Shayne Watson 09:59
Yeah, the way that she tells the story in her oral history interviews is that she was just part of the bohemian set. North Beach drew a bohemian crowd early on, and that started in the late 19th century, pre-quake, when artists and writers and poets all sort of gathered at this enormous block-sized building called the Montgomery Block, which the upper floors had tiny little studios, which were affordable to bohemians in the late 19th century, early 20th century, and so that building was also really close to Pacific Avenue, which was the thriving tourist center. And so there was a scene of intellectuals artists, gathering and thinking in a way that we really didn’t see anywhere else in the country at that point. And it was centered in North Beach in San Francisco.
09:59
So Mona lived at the Montgomery Block, Monkey Block. She was a heterosexual woman, as far as we know, and she had a lot of friends who were, she just called them bohemians, and she wanted a place for them to have wine and beer and a little food and gather and talk in a quiet place. And so right after the repeal of Prohibition, 1933 she opened up a tiny, tiny little bar on Union Street and called it Mona’s. But as the story goes, it was the warmth, it was the energy of the space that allowed lesbian, queer women to feel comfortable, feel safe. And by the time Mona opened up her second spot, Mona’s Barrel House, on Columbus, Mona was hiring lesbian women as waitresses who she dressed up in tuxedos, who not only provided bar service, but also the entertainment, which allowed her to have the liquor license. Mona said she was, helped save the lives of these young women who’d been kicked out of their homes for being lesbian and were ostracized in their family. And so by giving them jobs, it really allowed them to survive and form communities that ended up evolving into what we know as San Francisco’s robust lesbian community today.
Willa Seidenberg 11:21
Talk a little bit about what role the gay bars, and the lesbian bars particularly, had for women who needed a safe place to congregate.
Shayne Watson 12:43
These lesbian spaces before a certain period of time were illegal, so women would risk their jobs, family ostracization, they’d risk everything, just to maybe meet up the love of their life. And that’s what made these spaces so crucial. They were community centers.
Willa Seidenberg 13:00
And there were frequently raids on these bars, right?
Shayne Watson 13:03
Incessant raids, especially in the 1950s through McCarthyism, the San Francisco Police Department with a conservative mayor, was almost non-stop harassment of queer spaces throughout the city. In the 1950s and in North Beach, especially, one of the most significant raids on a lesbian bar happened just a couple blocks away from here on Broadway. The space was called Tommy’s Place, and Tommy was a really butch, openly lesbian bar owner named Tommy Vasu. And some time, in the early 1950s the San Francisco Police Department raided Tommy’s, and it’s today understood by many historians that the police planted drugs. And then that led to a very public trial of the bartenders who were lesbians. Ended up going to jail, But that was a culminating event in North Beach lesbian history, because at after that point, I think that’s when the bars started to leave North Beach, women started to look elsewhere in the city for neighborhoods, they felt like North Beach was no longer safe.
Willa Seidenberg 14:21
So let’s talk about some of the other bars that were notable besides Mona’s and Tommy’s.
Shayne Watson 14:26
So Mona had ended up having three bars. She had a first bar on Union Street, and then she went to Mona’s Barrel House on Columbus. And then the third was 440 Broadway, which was a nightclub space, unlike the previous two, which were more like little wine and beer joints. But Mona’s was a very big nightclub, very big draw with heterosexual tourists who would get their pictures taken with the butchy lesbians in the tuxedos. There’s this historian, Nan Alamilla Boyd, who finished a book right before I started working on my thesis called Wide Open Town, which focuses on San Francisco’s LGBTQ history during this period. And she talks about the importance of the existence of heterosexual tourism allowing this nascent LGBTQ community to form kind of not only as a focus of the tourism, but also just alongside. It’s always struck me as fascinating, that that’s sort of how it was able to happen together. But of course, it all boiled down to money.
Shayne Watson 15:54
In terms of another lesbian space, there was a lesbian entrepreneur named Charlotte Coleman, who I believe she worked for the IRS, but was ultimately discharged for being gay. She was able to take some money and opened up a bar in San Francisco’s vegetable packing district. It was on Front Street. This area was alive with activity early in the morning through afternoon, and then it would shut down. And so that kind of allowed in the 1950s, Charlotte Coleman, to open up the front which was a specifically lesbian bar, very, very small. The building’s no longer there. This entire area was demolished as part of redevelopment in the 1960s to clear for the Golden Gateway Center. Charlotte Coleman closed it, and then she opened up a bar in the Haight area called the Golden Cask. Charlotte Coleman probably had 30 years of queer bar running. She was a pioneer and had a fascinating story.
Shayne Watson 17:08
I would say the most influential bar in North Beach queer bar was the Black Cat Cafe, which wasn’t specifically lesbian, but North Beach wouldn’t have been the queer North Beach we know today without the Black Cat Cafe. And that opened, I believe, in 1933 right after the repeal of Prohibition, and the Black Cat Cafe was part of the bohemian scene I described around the Monkey Block. It was a combination of longshoremen, writers, artists.
Willa Seidenberg 17:45
I think it’s interesting that L.A. has a Black Cat bar that was the scene of a big police raid and protest. Interesting that both cities have featured Black Cat cafes as part of their LGBTQ history.
Shayne Watson 18:03
Right. Our Black Cat was the scene of again, another series of police raids, significant police harassment through World War Two. The Black Cat was on the list of places that military people in service could not frequent while they were in military on leave. So the Black Cat was owned by a heterosexual man named Sol Stoumen. He was an Austrian Holocaust survivor, and Stoumen fought back against the police harassment of his space. He ended up losing his license because the police, of course, accused him of operating a house of ill repute, and he appealed it, and he took his court [case] all the way to the California Supreme Court, and won. And I believe that was 1951 and that case essentially legalized the ability for LGBTQ people to congregate in public.
Shayne Watson 19:09
So essentially legalized gay bars in the 1950s but of course, there were loopholes the police took advantage of after that. You know, you couldn’t touch someone else of the same sex in public, and you couldn’t dress as a member of the opposite sex. There were all sorts of things that they could eventually arrest people anyway for, but the Black Cat decision is enormous still today in LGBTQ history. And Jose Sarria, who became famous at the Black Cat for his brunch operas, drag operas, he ran for supervisor in the early 1960s, ’61 I believe, and he was the first openly gay person to run for political office in the United States.
Willa Seidenberg 20:00
Did anything come up in your research that surprised you or was something you weren’t expecting?
Shayne Watson 20:09
I think just what surprised me most was the lack of recognition for any of these places, just in terms of, you know, interpretation, landmarking plaques, just any sort of basic recognition. What I found fascinating is a lot of these spaces are still there, but there’s just zero connection to the past. I would say I was most surprised to learn how significant of an event the repeal of Prohibition was on the development of LGBTQ spaces in the city.
Willa Seidenberg 20:42
So it seems like your thesis was really the beginning of a whole body of work that you’ve done on LGBTQ and women’s history sites in San Francisco. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve done since then?
Shayne Watson 21:03
Sure. So one of the takeaways from my thesis was, nothing is really being done to recognize these important spaces and their contributions to San Francisco’s history. You know, as someone working as an architectural historian, I knew that I could just do it. And so in 2013 I partnered with a public historian named Donna Graves to go after a grant from the City of San Francisco to write aHistoric Context statement for LGBTQ history. And we got the grant. We started the project in 2014 and I quit my job. And that was the beginning of consulting as a career.
Willa Seidenberg 21:47
All right, Shayne, so should we go take a look at some of these sites that you talked about in your thesis as the sun is coming out
Shayne Watson 22:13
Let’s go take a look.
Willa Seidenberg 22:18
Okay, so we’re walking down Stockton, walking by some bars, a long line waiting for Tony’s pizza. Some music. It’s busy. There are people out and about today.
Shayne Watson 22:34
Bustling. This building here, 524 Union Street, is one of the few LGBTQ designated landmarks in the city. This was a restaurant called the Paper Doll, and it was opened by Mona Sergeant. I want to say it opened in the 40s or 50s.This place was significant as one of the first gay restaurants in the city, which was different because it was an alternative to the bars. So people who weren’t necessarily interested in just going out for a drink, this became more of like a community center. It was known for delicious food, affordable prices, entertainment. And what’s interesting is this restaurant space is vacant, and the owners, who found out about the history of their building by reading the context statement I worked on contacted the city and said, We cannot believe our the history of our building, and we want to have it landmarked, which you know never happens in historic preservation. So I helped this, this mother and son landmark this building, and now they are just keeping it vacant, waiting for the right person to come and open another queer-themed restaurant.
Willa Seidenberg 23:57
Wow, that is so amazing that your work led to the owner wanting to do this.
Shayne Watson 24:04
That was a heartwarming story. Heartwarming phone call for sure. And then so just up the street from this building, I would say, two blocks up on the right was Mona Sergeant’s first lesbian bar.
Willa Seidenberg 24:19
Okay, let’s go take a look.
Shayne Watson 24:20
But the building isn’t there anymore. So this is where it was, and I did a ton of research to try to figure out if any of the building is still here. But I think this is a totally new building. But the Mona’s bar would have been in this corner storefront space.
Willa Seidenberg 24:37
And we should point out that this is a very boring, nondescript building, that I’msure would have been more interesting when she had it, but interesting that it’s on this corner that’s away from the business section, right?
Shayne Watson 24:55
Yeah, it’s tucked away from the commercial area. I found a historic photograph of what the place looked like when it was Mona’s, and there were these beautiful murals on the wall of scantily clad women. And so this would have been a different setting, quieter, kind of like how she described artists and writers just sort of maybe philosophizing, drinking wine. I think they had free soup.
Willa Seidenberg 25:23
Sounds wonderful.
Shayne Watson 25:25
I’d go there right now.
Willa Seidenberg 25:26
Yeah, exactly.
Shayne Watson 25:30
Grant Avenue, which we’re walking down right now was very big during the Beat movement in the city. This is where a lot of the coffee shops were.
Willa Seidenberg 25:42
It has that kind of very neighborhoody vibe.
Shayne Watson 25:46
One of the reasons North Beach grew up as a lesbian neighborhood is because of all of this cheap rental housing up above, all of these commercial spaces. This building up here was kind of known to be a little bit of a lesbian commune upstairs, where they just, I think, shared a space, living space together.
Willa Seidenberg 26:12
Well, that’s amazing that this was a place that people came for cheap housing, when today it is prohibitive.
Shayne Watson 26:20
Right. And this is the kind of area that’s ripe for redevelopment because it’s so low scale, two and three story buildings.
Willa Seidenberg 26:34
We’re at Broadway in Columbus, which is a kind of nexus of North Beach.
Shayne Watson 26:40
Right, where North Beach meets Chinatown.
Willa Seidenberg 26:44
And ahead of us, we have a little parade going into Chinatown. I’m not sure what it’s for, but lots of people marching and waving flags. On one corner we have the Condor, the Topless A Go Go, and then on the other corner, City Lights, which are just two very prominent locations in this area.
Shayne Watson 27:13
And then across the street, the Garden of Eden is where Tommy’s Place was, the bar that was raided in the 1950s owned by the butch lesbian Tommy. That was the front side and then the back side drops down into an alley called Adler Place. Then this building used to be this night club called Finnochios. It opened, actually was a speakeasy during Prohibition. Finnochios was the male equivalent of Mona’s. Finocchios had the female impersonating performers. And Mona’s, which is right up here, had the male impersonating performers. Little bit of something for everyone.
Shayne Watson 27:56
And then that building right there Monroe was Mona’s fourth bar, which she called Mona’s Candlelight. So this whole area was a huge concentration of lesbian activities in the 40s and 50s. No indication of what here.
Willa Seidenberg 28:17
Nothing. Okay, so here there’s a plaque built into the sidewalk. It says Mona’s 440 Club, where girls will be boys. 440 Broadway originally opened in 1934 Mona’s Club moved to 440 Broadway in 1939 and is credited with being San Francisco’s first openly lesbian club. The venue featured female entertainers dressed as men, an inverse to the transgender theme of nearby Finocchios, which brought a new form of sexual tourism to Broadway. Mona’s popularity among a lesbian, bohemian, and tourist clientele paved the way for more lesbian clubs to open in North Beach, contributing to a liberal convention that would influence later generations. Wow.
Willa Seidenberg 29:32
And how would you rate San Francisco in recognizing LGBTQ sites today in 2024?
Shayne Watson 29:42
San Francisco is ahead of the curve, I would say. But you know, there’s still so much to be done. For example, there’s not really a site in San Francisco listed in the National Register that is associated primarily with lesbian history, which I would love, love to see. We have the Women’s Building, which I believe is a National Historical Landmark, which, of course, has, you know, significant layers of lesbian history, but it’s mostly focused on women, feminism, and organizing. I’ve only had the opportunity to work on two National Register nominations for LGBTQ history, and the first I got to work on was for Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. And the second, I just finished the draft, andit’s on its way to the Oregon State Historic Resources Commission for review. But that is an HIV/AIDS hospice called the Juniper House, which was the first HIV/AIDS hospice in Oregon.
30:51
I have been involved with the GLBT Historical Society as a volunteer. I used the Historical Society’s archives for my thesis. I mean, I couldn’t have written it without them. They’re an extraordinary group of people. Their archives are in San Francisco, and they have an oral history collection, which was instrumentalin writing my thesis, because so many of those stories, if they hadn’t been recorded through oral histories, would have been lost and they, you know, for many reasons, mostly because LGBTQ people in the past were hidden from families and the law intentionally. And so a lot of these stories were not written down intentionally. And so these oral history interviews are just little gems in terms of insight, little windows into what was happening in the 30s and 40s in San Francisco.
31:50
The issue now is not a lack of recognition of these historic sites. It’s more broader macro level forces that are threatening to demolish them. San Francisco is a tiny, tiny peninsula, seven miles by seven miles, and a lot of people want to live here. We’re, you know, in the middle of a housing affordability crisis, and a lot of these LGBTQ historic sites are in buildings that are not architecturally significant, and they are just ripe for redevelopment, mostly also because they were in neighborhoods that were on the margins. So a lot of this history is threatened by things really far out of our control right now.
Willa Seidenberg 32:42
What are some of the current projects you’re doing for the city of San Francisco?
Shayne Watson 32:46
So in the last couple years, I have volunteered for the City of San Francisco as a committee member for the Citywide LGBTQ Cultural Heritage Strategy. And this was a working group brought together around 2018, pre-pandemic, by Senator Scott Wiener, who was then a supervisor who was concerned about the lack of resources for LGBTQ, specifically nighttime entertainment. And so that morphed into a much larger citywide study related to what are the concerns of LGBTQ community members today. We ended up conducting a survey to collect data from over 2,500 LGBTQ residents in the city to determine what are the critical needs facing the community. And of course, this work took us through the pandemic, and so it shifted dramatically halfway through. We published a report that we presented to the supervisors that is a series of recommendations on how the City of San Francisco can utilize resources and assign budget to issues impacting LGBTQ people in the city.
Willa Seidenberg 34:20
What were the top concerns?
Shayne Watson 34:22
So at the time, I think the number one concern was housing affordability. We don’t have LGBTQ culture in San Francisco if we don’t have LGBTQ people, and so many of us are facing issues of affordability. It’s just a very expensive city, especially young single women trying to live here on their own.
Willa Seidenberg 34:43
Do you feel like the affordability crisis has affected the number of LGBTQ residents in the city?
Shayne Watson 34:51
We’ve been seeing that since the 90s, especially in terms of lesbian communities. So after North Beach lesbians dispersed first to the Haightneighborhood and the Mission Valencia, and the lesbian community in Mission Valencia was quite strong through the 90s. And then I think just because that’s when the first tech boom occurred, affordability definitely impacted women’s ability to afford to live in the city on their own, and I think that that’s when we started to see a big flooding of lesbian women to the East Bay, particularly Oakland and Berkeley, which were more affordable than the city. I think Oakland today probably has one of the strongest lesbian communities in the Bay Area.
35:40
Fortunately, a lot of my work has focused on LGBTQ history. Most of it has been more as an activist, also working in policy change for the city of San Francisco on a few initiatives, but it’s just been pretty consistent for the last 10 years. And I would say any time there’s been an issue with an LGBTQ site of significance that’s been threatened. I’m part of a group that just jumps in and activates.
Willa Seidenberg 36:07
Thank you, Shayne, this has been so fascinating.
Shayne Watson 36:11
Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming to my favorite neighborhood.
Cindy Olnick 36:18
All right. Well, thank you Willa and Shayne for revisiting Shayne’s time in the program and recapping some of the many things that Shayne is doing in the community right now, and the work continues. It’s never done.
Trudi Sandmeier 36:35
Thanks so much for joining us. For this episode of Save As as always, for photos about these sites, for some notes, some links to various things. You can visit our website at saveas.place, and if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the podcast and tell a friend.
Cindy Olnick 37:00
This episode was produced by Willa Seidenberg. Our original theme music is by Stephen Conway. Save As is a production of the Heritage Conservation program in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
