James Mallery’s City of Vice: Transience and San Francisco’s Urban History, 1848–1917 explores the origins and boundaries of lodging and vice districts in late nineteenth-century San Francisco as they were imagined, maintained, avoided, and transgressed by white, middle-class urban residents. Mallery examines transformations in the social production of space, emphasizing the role of the popular press, anti-vice reformers, and urban boosters in forging cognitive maps of districts defined by the transgression of established social norms. In particular, this book highlights the emergence of such urban districts as the waterfront, Chinatown, Barbary Coast, Outer Lands, Main Stem, and Uptown Tenderloin. As Mallery argues, the perceived and physical sequestering of “non-domestic” behaviors in these clearly delineated, “bordered” districts was largely the result of the social policing of urban populations and behaviors (6). As Mallery deftly illustrates, San Francisco’s tendency to deviate from dominant social norms dates back much further than the consolidation of the countercultural Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in the 1960s. Likewise, long before the city’s current epidemic of homelessness, much of San Francisco’s central-city population could be characterized as transient in nature, whether because of migratory labor practices or the permeability of urban spaces and gender roles.

City of Vice begins as Mallery traces the emergence of lodging and vice districts in San Francisco to the immediate aftermath of the California gold rush. Spaces of questionable entertainment, such as saloons, brothels, and gambling houses, were once interspersed throughout the city, with sites of sporting entertainment, such as racetracks and roadhouses, found in the encircling Outer Lands. During these early years when men vastly outnumbered women, San Francisco evoked an atmosphere of escape from the norms of so-called civilization that might otherwise temper and control volcanic eruptions of masculine violence and vice. Yet Mallery argues that as the city population grew, the increasing influence of Protestant moralizing, as well as the passage of city ordinances to hide vice-related activities from public view, led to the formation of a set of neighborhoods that housed diverse, transient, and migrant populations. Mallery fleshes out a range of urban typologies that challenge traditional notions of the binary between private/feminine/domestic space versus public/masculine/commercial space. Ranging from commission girls, flappers, and new women, to tramps, sporting men, and “over-manicured” men (187, 220), Mallory demonstrates the degree to which women and men lived beyond these dichotomies, even as their actions were often hemmed in from the outside.

In his description of San Francisco’s waterfront district, Mallery decodes the complex relationships between boardinghouse masters, crimps, ship captains, and the thousands of sailors employed in a system of blood money, who decried the industry as a form of wage slavery.

The waterfront docks were segregated by race, as Asian sailors tended to work on transoceanic steamships and African American sailors often filled in as scabs during union strikes. The vast majority of sailors in San Francisco were Northern European-born immigrants, mostly Scandinavian, who joined together “in their claim to ‘whiteness’” (49). Similarly, Mallery examines the experiences of the “industrial army” of “tramps” and “hoboes” who populated the “wintering-lodging-house district” of the Main Stem (82). Occupying boardinghouses, lodging houses, and tented city lots, this transient population “provided urbanites with a negative reference point held against marriage, stability, respectability and domesticity” (74). Religious and charitable organizations attempted to distribute relief to seemingly deserving individuals who were willing to work, and ultimately a city-wide relief effort prioritized (at least in intention, if not in follow-through) married men as supposed breadwinners.

Mallery’s analysis of the Chinatown district reveals how the borders of this durable ethnic enclave were both cognitively bordered in the minds of the middle class and literally regulated by public officials. The policing and medical quarantine of Chinatown’s borders revealed public anxieties over the feared spread of the bubonic plague throughout the “labyrinth of diseased, subterranean dens” (99). While transgressed by white, voyeuristic participants of slumming tours, and white, Protestant women attempting to combat vice with virtue, the boundaries of this seemingly unassimilable district were occasionally cordoned off in a quite literal sense. Proposals to remove and reconstruct Chinatown along the coast according to more Westernized standards of planning and architecture were overturned in favor of the sustained efforts of boosters and merchants to profit from tourism and growing interest in the seeming otherness of the neighborhood. The 1906 earthquake and subsequent firestorm that swept through the downtown had a leveling effect on more than just the physical landscape of San Francisco. As the city succumbed to mass homelessness, anxieties over the collapse of district and moral boundaries, as well as concerns over the “dependence and pauperization” of the urban poor, shaped the city’s relief and rebuilding efforts (144). Resources and reconstruction favored property owners, while the city sought to harness the labor of able-bodied, single men. Ultimately, San Franciscans changed the narrative they told themselves about the earthquake and fire, recasting the disaster as an “opportunity” to both physically rebuild and morally refine the city by harnessing the “right type of pioneering masculinity” (151).

As the city recovered from the destruction of the earthquake and fire, progressive reformers sought to further control and suppress vice districts through anti-vice programs, urban planning efforts, and the passage of new legislation. In the Outer Lands, this involved the transformation of rural racecourses into suburban “residence parks,” implementing an early form of urban zoning to eliminate “borders and lodgers” along with “flats, apartment houses, tenements, hotels and public boarding or lodging houses” (178). Urban reformers attempted “nailing down the lid” to confine vice within certain zones, and real estate developers in new subdivisions such as Ingleside Terraces sought to keep vice out (192). In the increasingly “heterosocial spaces” of the Barbary Coast, reform efforts targeted the sale of alcohol in concert saloons, where the “ragtime dance craze” had “lured” middle-class men and “respectable” women into “slumming,” thereby blurring the lines between virtue and vice (186). These “fluid social boundaries” were even more pronounced in the Uptown Tenderloin district, where anti-vice and red-light abatement efforts sought to render legible the ambiguous position of New Women within a non-domestic landscape of cafés and resorts, hotels, and apartment houses (230).

In response to Mallery’s critique of middle-class anxieties about urban vice and deviance from moral and social norms, some readers might find themselves hoping for a more nuanced analysis of efforts by reformers to cultivate virtue within the city. Mallery makes a convincing case that seeming vice activities, such as drinking, gambling, and prostitution, could be viewed as coping or survival mechanisms for disadvantaged groups. However, the text tends to underplay the range of negative outcomes for urban populations as a result of addictive substance abuse and the objectification of women. The author’s portrayal of religious groups can at times feel static or flattened, conflating differences between a mainstream Protestant cultural ethos and the active, urban-focused Social Gospel movement, for example.

Throughout the book, Mallery demonstrates a sophisticated historical unpacking of the urban landscape, undoubtedly enhanced by his professional experience as an architect. Mallery designed the book’s maps by drawing from the U.S. Census and Sanborn Map data, as well as from comprehensive archival newspaper research, adding significant value to his spatial description of downtown districts. Another main contribution of the book is in its portrayal of agency exhibited by the city’s marginalized communities, as groups and individuals embraced a degree of independence by flouting middle-class morals and norms. In this sense, the districts of San Francisco were not solely created by those on the outside, intending to limit them or keep the lid on the pot, but vice districts were also created by those who occupied them and resisted constraints placed upon them.