Historical Essay. If you get tired of the posh respectability of Union Square, and find yourself with a hankering for sin, sleaze, and assorted sordid stuff, where can you go?
In the words of the immortal Horace Greeley, "Go west, young man. You'll traverse the Tenderloin District, San Francisco's scummiest neighborhood, a filth-encrusted hotbed of immorality, indecency, lewdness, corruption, and all manner of vice.
The Tenderloin got its name from the custom of paying higher salaries to police that worked in this crime-ridden area, thereby enabling them to buy choicer cuts of meat. Actually, O'Farrell isn't really San Francisco's sleaziest street; it has to compete with cross-streets Taylor, Jones, Leavenworth, Hyde, Larkin, and the inimitable Polk, where runaway children of both sexes may be bought and sold; and with parallel thoroughfares Ellis, Eddy, Turk, and Golden Gate.
These dens were occupied by women of all colors and nationalities; there were even a few Chinese and Japanese girls. And not only were the Morton Street cribs the lowest in San Francisco's red light district; they were also the most popular, partly because of the great variety and extraordinary depravity of the women to be found there, and partly because the police seldom entered the street unless compelled to do so by a murder or a serious shooting or stabbing affray.
Ordinary fights and assaults were ignored Every night, and especially every Saturday night, this dismal bedlam of obscenity, lighted only by the red lamps above the doors of the cribs, was thronged by a tumultuous mob of half-drunken men, who stumbled from crib to crib, greedily inspecting the women as if they had been so many wild animals in cages. From the casement-windows leaned the harlots, naked to the waist, adding their shrill cries of invitation to the uproar, while their pimps haggled with passing men and tried to drag them inside the dens.
