Iconic SF building was home to Bohemians for decades. Then it was destroyed

The previous Portals told the story of how the Montgomery Block was erected in 1853 in response to devastating fires that ravaged Gold Rush San Francisco. It was the grandest building of its time, a fireproof structure at Montgomery and Washington filled with prosperous businesses, but within 30 years it had fallen on hard times.

Driving the decline were new office buildings erected farther south on Montgomery Street. As Oscar Lewis writes in “Bay Window Bohemia: The Brilliant Artistic World of Gaslit San Francisco,” “The more up-and-coming business- and professional men moved into these, and the Block’s big, outmoded rooms came to know a quite different sort of tenant: tailors, fortunetellers, Chinese herb doctors, dealers in old clothes, and the like.”

At the end of the decade, yet another new class of tenants began to move into the Block: painters, sculptors, musicians and writers.

Among the artists who took up residence or hung out at the Block during the late 1880s and ’90s were Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, Yone Noguchi — a Japanese poet of whom it was whispered that he had “gone insane from too much poetry” — a half-Japanese poet named Sadakichi Hartmann, painter Charles Dickman and jeweler James Kinraide.

But the group that gave the Block its reputation for outrageous bohemianism in the 1890s was a mischievous band of writers, artists, architects and designers who called themselves Les Jeunes (The Young Ones).

Their leader was a Bostonian named Gelett Burgess, who had been fired from his job at UC Berkeley after he helped topple a statue of a teetotaling dentist. Along with designer Bruce Porter; writer, designer and editor Porter Garnett; and a fiery young architect named Willis Polk, Burgess started an irreverent literary magazine in 1894 called the Lark, which was filled with nonsense doggerel like Burgess’ most famous poem, “The Purple Cow.” (“I never saw a purple cow/I never hope to see one; But I can tell you anyhow; I’d rather see than be one.”)

After the Lark’s two-year run, Les Jeunes and their associates, including writers Jack London and Mary Austin, poet George Sterling, and painters Maynard Dixon and Javier “Marty” Martinez, outraged the bourgeoisie from the center table at Coppa’s, the most legendary of the fin de siècle watering holes associated with the Block.

Sterling, the “king of Bohemia,” had a room on the Block’s fourth floor. He was often seen pacing the corridors in a robe, reciting his verses while beating time with his hand. A heavy drinker and insatiable womanizer, Sterling committed suicide by taking cyanide in 1926.

Not all the Block’s inhabitants were starving artists. Wealthy philanthropist Adolph Sutro had an office in the building, and used it to house thousands of volumes of his invaluable book collection. Because the fireproof building withstood the 1906 earthquake and fire, those volumes were saved and make up a large part of the Sutro Library, now held at San Francisco State University.

After the 1906 catastrophe, demand for office space caused rents in the Block to spike, and insurance companies and steamship firms replaced artists and writers. During the Great Depression, however, rents dropped again and the bohemians returned.

As many as 75 artists and writers lived at the Block in the 1930s, New Deal historian Harvey Smith writes in an essay on the website FoundSF, “New Deal Artists and Programs During the Depression.” Many received monthly stipends from the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Although the stipends were modest, typically $75 a month, they allowed the artists just enough money to pay their rent and eat.

Rents at the Block, once the highest in the city, had fallen to $12 to $20 a month. Cheap restaurants and bars abounded, too. Coppa’s was long gone, but the artists and writers of the 1930s and ’40s found congenial new hangouts, including the Black Cat on the ground floor of the Canessa Building across Washington Street. The building survives to this day.

WPA-funded artists who had studios at the Block included Sargent Johnson, Dong Kingman, Herman Volz, Paul Carey and Clay Spohn. They were part of an illustrious North Beach artistic community that included sculptor Ralph Stackpole, whose studio was just two doors up from the Black Cat on Montgomery Street, Maynard Dixon, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Lange and Ruth Cravath. Many of them recalled the time they were on WPA assistance as some of the happiest and most productive years of their lives.

It was during this era that the building was nicknamed “the Monkey Block,” a jocular reference to the erratic behavior of its inhabitants.

According to the Block’s manager, immigration lawyer O.P. Stidger, in 1947 there were “more artists and writers working in studios in this building than at any time in its history.” In his book “Ark of Empire,” Idwal Jones writes that more than 2,000 people engaged in creative pursuits resided in the Montgomery Block during its long life.

But that rich repository of history was to be lost forever. The neighborhood around the building and the building itself had become increasingly rundown. In his 1943 book, “San Francisco: A Pageant,” Charles Caldwell Dobie wrote, “At nightfall the sound of jangling pianos and the bark of radios drift through its halls. ... The old Montgomery Block has seen better days.”

Eight years later, Jones wrote, “It is not (the Block’s) fault that its environs should now, especially at night with the wind strong and grit and papers blowing about, be verging on the unkempt, with an undertone between sinister and squalid.”

In the late 1950s, the Block’s owners decided to tear it down. There was no historic preservation movement to fight for the old building. A few voices were raised in protest, but what a wire-service reporter described as the forces of “progress” prevailed.

In 1959, the building built on a raft of redwood logs in 1853, whose corridors once felt the footsteps of the Vigilantes and Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and Frank Norris, Jack London and Ambrose Bierce, was torn down for a parking lot. Today, the Transamerica Pyramid stands on its site.