Morbid Fact Du Jour For January 11, 2011
Today’s Bawdy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
For at least a year after the beginning of the Gold Rush, the population of women in San Francisco probably did not exceed 300. Of this number, perhaps two-thirds were harlots from Mexico, Peru and Chile. Together with male natives of these and other Central American countries they were known as Chilenos or, contemptuously, “greasers”. These pioneer prostitutes occupied tents and board shanties in the vicinity of Clark’s Point, about where Broadway and Pacific Street run into the Bay, and on the eastern and southern slopes of Telegraph Hill. Sometimes as many as half a dozen Chileno women used the same rude shelter, receiving their visitors singly or en suite, with no regard whatever for privacy, and no furniture excepting a wash-bowl and a few dilapidated cots or straw pallets. A few made pretense of operating wash-houses, but there were scarcely any who did not devote the nights to bawdy carousal and to sexual excesses and exhibitions. And the days, also, if there was opportunity. Many of the men who had brought them to California had gone on to the goldfields, but others had remained in San Francisco, where they dwelt promiscuously with the harlots. They lived off the earnings of the women and what they could steal from the men who frequented the district. They also operated a few small, crooked gambling houses.
Culled from: The Barbary Coast
Just reading that paragraph makes me feel like I may have contracted an STD. Shudder…
THIS SOUNDS LIKE A DISCRIPTION OF ANY BAR OR CLUB IN THE PRESENT DAY S.F. AREA OR EVEN LAS VEGAS. I WANNA GO!!! “The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where blear-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also.” from wikipedia.
Forget STD’s, you don’t even have to go there. How about head lice, body lice, scabies, rotten teeth, infected injuries, fistfights, knife-fights, bad drug hits, overdoses, pneumonia, typhoid, TB…