San Francisco’s reputation for accommodating progressive and unconventional identities can find its roots in the waves of transients and migrants that flocked to San Francisco between the gold rush and World War I. In the era of yellow journalism, San Francisco’s popular presses broadcast shocking stories about the Waterfront, Chinatown, Barbary Coast, hobo Main Stem, Uptown Tenderloin, and Outside Lands. The women and men who lived in these districts did not passively internalize the shaming of their bodies or neighborhoods. Rather, many urbanites intentionally sought out San Francisco’s “vice” and transient lodging districts. They came to identified themselves in ways opposed to hegemonic notions of whiteness, respectability, and middle-class, heterosexual domesticity. With the 1906 earthquake marking its destabilizing halfway point, James Mallery’s
City of Vice
explores the imagined, cognitive mapping of the cityscape and the social history of the women and men who occupied its so-called transient and vice districts between the late nineteenth century and World War I.