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37.7915°N 122.4074°W
8:37 April 24th, 2018
The Stockton Street Tunnel.Revenue service through the tunnel was inaugurated by Mayor James Rolph on 12,29,1914
day 1
12 blocks beat
Start // PACIFIC STREET // Chinatown
01
M
Most Hammett locations take place in downtown San Francisco. In close proximity to The Flood building where The Continental Op. Detective Agency was located. I’m pretty sure SF was much smaller and close knit in the roaring 20’s when most all his stories took place. His stories resonated with the locals and he became kind of a big deal in his day. They even have a street or alley named after the man himself. I suppose this book wouldn’t be complete without mention or a small feature of the alley or street sign dawning the gods name.
After dropping the kids in North Beach, I made my way to Chinatown as I knew the first stop of this self-made tour would be the Stockton Street Tunnel. Parking would be a problem so I decided to grab a spot in Chinatown and hoof it the rest of the way. I had my wifes shoes with me cause she needed them cobbled. I knew of a shoe repair place at the mouth of the tunnel on the downtown side. My first stop.
the tunnel’s mouth a man was hunkered on Where Bush Street roofed Stockton before his heels before a billboard that held adslipping downhill to Chinatown, Spade paid vertisements of a moving picture and a gashis fare and left the taxicab. San Franoline across the front of a gap between two cisco’s night-fog, thin, clammy, and penestore-buildings. The hunkered man’s head trant, blurred the street. A few yards from was bent almost to the sidewalk so he could where Spade had dismissed the taxicab a look under the billboard. A hand flat on the small group of men stood looking up an alpaving, a hand clenched on the billboard’s ley. Two women stood with a man on the othgreen frame, held him in this grotesque poer side of Bush Street, looking at the alsition. Two other men stood awkwardly toley. There were faces at windows. gether at one end of the billboard, peeping Spade crossed the sidewalk between ironthrough the few inches of space between it railed hatchways that opened above bare and the building at that end. ugly stairs, went to the paraThe building at the other end pet, and, resting his hands on pg. II. Death in the Fog / The MalteseFalcon. I know the Tun- had a blank grey sidewall that the damp coping, looked down into Stockton Street. An auto- nel well. I always thought it was looked down on the lot behind a cool spot, a tunnel running un- the billboard. Lights flickered mobile popped out of the tunnel beneath him with a roaring der a large section of the city. A on the sidewall, and the shadows of men moving among lights. swish, as if it had been blown pretty impressive construction out, and ran away. Not far from given the geography of the location. This should be the start of the tour. The Tunnel is a great metaphor for the journey in creating this book.
12 min.
02
I knew this place existed, but never set foot inside. My wife needed her shoes resoled so I figued this place could take care of that.
I didn’t bring Cash, so I left.
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Shoe Craft 441a Stockton St, San Francisco, CA 94108 415 359 4016 Pay Upon Pick-up.
Cash Only
04 37.7849°N 122.4074°W
8:58am April 24th, 2018
870 Market St Continental Detective Agency, located in The Flood building.
The FLOOD building has a GAP storefront. :/
day 1
12 blocks beat
Start // PACIFIC STREET // Chinatown
05
The face she made at me was probably meant for a smile. Whatever it was, it beat me. I was afraid she’d do it again, so I surrendered.
06 day 1
12 blocks beat
Start // PACIFIC STREET // Chinatown
The initial idea for this book was to document a walking tour in San Francisco of important locations relating to the great American crime novelist, Dashiell Hammett. Don Herron has been giving this tour for years now and has gained recognition from the Dashiell Hammett Society as a credible and knowledgeable source for Hammett lore. Unfortunately, he recently had a heart attack, so I am on my own. Like the detectives Hammett wrote about, I have to do some digging on my own. Documented in this series of ZINES, I will attempt to research locations written in his books, articles on Hammett, and featured in films adapted from his stories. My first stop was a success in finding the Stockton Street Tunnel which was mentioned in The Maltese Falcon. I was on my way to The Continentiel Detective Agency where the Continential operative worked. Located on the third floor of the Flood building. I was making good progress.
I found the building. I never looked for it before. Never even knew its significants. Ive been in the building before. The Gap has a storefront on the ground floor. Its one of them FLAT IRON buildings. Making a great triangular shape jutting into the San Francisco sky. Walking its halls seemed like a step back into time. Back to Hammett. Back to The Continental Op.
37.7849°N 122.4074°W
8:58am April 24th, 2018
870 Market St Continental Detective Agency, located in The Flood building.
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08 37.7849°N 122.4074°W
8:58am April 24th, 2018
Continental Detective Agency, located on the 3rd floor of The Flood building.
day 1
12 blocks beat
Start // PACIFIC STREET // Chinatown
This self made tour was proving to be more of a hassle than anything. I could now see that this was going to take days, maybe weeks of preparation in finding locations. Day one was fruitful however, so If I can at least scout two to three locations per day, I might just have enough to pull this tour off. Who knows, if it yields great results, I might just go into business myself. Start giving the tour to tourist. Don Herron might not like me muscling in on his bread and butter, but hey, the way I see it, he can’t have the monopoly on Dashiell Hammett tours here in San Fran. A little healthy competition can only be beneficial for everyone.
09
As of so far, I have noticed that most of the locations will have one thing in common and that is each location should have a reference to the old San Francisco. The Flood building is a perfect example. It’s old, from the period, yet theres signs of the present. If I can capture in photographs just the “Old” SF, and edit out the new, I should be able to come up with some compelling content that will relate nicely back to the times when the Continental Op. and Sam Spade ran the streets.
These two reports read and practically thing?” He looked at me blankly for a momemorized, I left the Agency and went down ment out of wide brown eyes.”Killed?” to Ogburn & Whitacre’s suite in the Packard “Yes,” I replied, and told him what litBuilding. A stenographer ushered me into tle I knew about it. a tastefully furnished office, where Ogburn “You don’t think —” he began when I had sat at a desk signing mail. He offered me a finished and then stopped. “You don’t think chair. I introduced myself to him: a medium Herb would have done that?’ sized man of perhaps thirty-five, with sleek “What do you think?” brown hair and the cleft chin that is asso“I don’t think =Herb would commit murciated in my mind as orators, lawyers, and der! He’s been jumpy the last few days, salesmen. and I was beginning to think he “Oh, yes!” he said, pg. 145 of Dead Yellow Women. Find suspected I had discovered his pushing aside the mail, out more about this Packard Buildings thefts, but I don’t believe his mobile, intellilocation. Locate Ogburn & Whitacre’s gent face lighting up. office. Pick up incense for the home “Has Mr. Teal found any- along the way.
25 min.
10
When Toshiro M Clint Eastwood Bogart stride in fight with only our belief that t to win, they’re following the d largely forgotte Dashiell Hamm
xxxxx
11
INTERSTITIAL
Mifune or d or Humphrey nto a hopeless their grit and they’ve just got many times dance steps of en crime writer mett. feat. TOSHIRO, M / EASTWOOD, C / BOGART, H Yojimbo / JA. National Flag
12
37.77919°N 122.41914°W
2:59pm April 26th, 2018
901 Van Ness Ave. Packard Showroom, Designed by Bernard Maybeck, built 1927.
day 2
5 blocks beat
Start // Webster Street // Japantown
Come to find out, The Packard building is and was a car showroom. Initially it was a Packard car showroom, but now they sell Lamborginis. To have a Packard back in the Continental Op days, i guess, was kinda like owning a Lamborgini. I’m gonna set out to find out more about this location, but first, I’ll need to stop by Japantown to pick
13
up some incense for the house as I am out of it. I’ll hop on the bus and try to read up on more possible locations for my self made Dashiell Hammett / San Francisco city tour. Finding locations in the books is time consuming so I might have to resort to some google searches to see what I can find. I just need to keep these locations obscure.
14
multi-tasking, running errands, I found my way to Japantown where I had to pick up some incense for the house.
Incense helps me relax.
15
ASAKICHI Incense 1730 Geary Blvd, Suite 209 San Francisco, CA 94115 415 921 8292 FX 928 1987 All Sales Final, No Refund
#51545
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day 3
2 blocks beat
Start // Union Square // Downtown
I
I knew I had to pick up the pace. Digging through these books wasn’t yielding the amount of locations I was hoping to uncover. I needed to improvise. I recall a dental visit I had in downtown at 450 Sutter. My dentist told me that I needed to get my wisdom teeth looked at by an orthodontist there. I remember walking into the main lobby and being blown away by the insane art deco treatment that covered every inch of every surface. I immediately felt like I stepped into a time capsule back to the 20’s or 30’s. This place has to be in one of Dashiell Hammett’s stories I thought. Without digging around to see if that was true or not, I figured I would pay 450 a visit. See if I could uncover something juicy. “How’d you rap to it?” Quayle asked me, politely. “Several ways,” I said. “First, one of Audrey’s friends saw her at Sutter between 8:15 and 8:45 at the Deco building the night she disappeared, and your letter to Gatewood was postmarked 9 p.m. Pretty fast work. You should have waited a while before mailing it. I suppose she dropped it in the post office on her way over here?” Quayle nodded. “Then second,” I went on, “there was that phone call of hers. She knew it took anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes to get her father on the wire at the office. If she had gotten to a phone while imprisoned, time would have been so valuable that she’d have
told her story to the first person she got hold of- the swithchboard operator most likely. So that made it look as if, besides wanting to thrown out the Twin Peaks line, she wanted to stir the old man out oh his bullheadedness. “When she failed to show up after the money was paid, I figured it was a sure bet that she had kidnapped herself. I knew that if she came back home after faking this thing, we’d find out before we’d talked to her very long-and I figured she knew that too and would stay away.
pg. 189 of The Gatewood Caper. Vintage Book Edition, Oct. 1972. Plowing through these stories to find a glimmer of a street or a building was taking too much time. In the Graphic Design world, we are working with strict deadlines, so keeping that in mind, I had to improvise. The above highlighted text was edited for the purposes of adding my New Mayan Art Deco location. I suppose you would call that a disclaimer. There you have it! 35 min.
37.7895°N 122.4077°W
10:06am May 4th, 2018
450 Sutter, “NEO MAYAN”, designed by architect Timothy L. Pflueger, built 1929.
largely dental and medical professional offices
17
18
U.S. Patent
Sept. 12th, 1926
Sheet 1 of 5
5,448,810
my mistake, 4 coffins.
xxxxx
19
INTERSTITIAL
MY MISTAKE... feat. TOSHIRO, M / EASTWOOD, C / BOGART, H Fistful of Dollars / Coffin Blueprint.
20
U.S. xxxx Patent x
Sept. 12th, 1926
Sheet 2 of 5
5,448,810
xxxxx
INTERSTITIAL
4 COFFINS.
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37°47’25.8”N 122°24’26.9”W
10:55am May 4th, 2018
93 Burritt St. Approx. spot Miles Archer was done in by Brigid O’Shaughnessy
day 3
1 blocks beat
Start // 450 Sutter St. // Downtown
J
23
Just around the corner was the plaque that pronounced the death of Sam Spades partner, Archer Miles, by the hand of a Brigid O’Shaughnessy. I could have easily walked, but thought I should probably jump on a street car or grab a taxi as Sam spade might have done. He wasn’t much for walking and I had already done a considerable amount
of walking. I don’t use uber and the streetcar wasn’t around so I hailed the next yellow cab and told me to high tail it to the plaque. Louis, my cabi knew exactly where it was and made some quick, illegal turns to get us there in a flash. It wasn’t much of a ride, but I was spent. I still needed to make it back to the garage before the cost shot up.
A uniformed policeman chewing gum under an enameled sign that said Burritt St. in white against dark blue put out an arm and asked: “What do you want here?” “I’m Sam Spade. Tom Polhaus phoned me.” “Sure you are.” The policeman’s arm went down. “I didn’t know you at first. Well, they’re back there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Bad business.” “Bad enough,” Spade agreed, and went up the alley. Half-way up it, not far from the entrance, a dark ambulance stood. Behind the ambulance, to the left, the alley was bounded by a waist-high fence, horizontal strips of rough boarding. From the fence dark ground fell away steeply to the billboard on Stockton Street below. A ten-foot length of the fence’s top rail had been torn from a post at one end and hung dan-
gling from the other. Fifteen feet down the slope a flat boulder stuck out. In the notch between boulder and slope Miles Archer lay on his back. Two men stood over him. One of them held the beam of an electric torch on the dead man. Other men with lights moved up and down the slope. One of them hailed Spade, “Hello, Sam,” and clambered up to the alley, his shadow running up the slope before him. He was a barrel-bellied tall man with shrewd small eyes, a thick mouth and carelessly shaven dark jowls. His shoes, knees, hands, and chin were daubed with brown loam. “I figured you’d want to see it before we took him away,” he said as he stepped over the broken fence.
pg. II, of The Maltese Falcon, Death In the Fog, We all know the story of Brigid O’Shaughnessy shot Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer in the alley way. Every biography, every tour or discussion is aware of this location. Where it happened. In Burritt Street just above the Stockton Tunnel. I gave in to the cliché and searched for the plaque dedicated to that part of the story.
42 min.
24
day 4
18 blocks beat
Start // Brendas on Polk. // Tenderloin
I
In looking back to a time when San Francisco was young and slowly becoming an international destination, a time after the great disaster of 1910 earthquake and subsequent fires that destroyed most of the city, I begin to get a glimpse into San Francisco’s true character. An American success story come to life. Money was to be had and no natural disaster was gonna stop it. After the fires, SF rebuilt itself. Glimmers of opulence and modern life was thriving in the city by the bay.
pg. 358 of The Big Knockover. Vintage Book Edition, Oct. 1972. No detective novel would be complete without a bank heist. Researching Montgomery between Pine and Bush, I found the RUSS building with banks on the ground floor. The RUSS building was the tallest in SF. It was the center of the Financial district at the time.
The Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office is located in a Market Street office building. The Seaman’s National Bank occupies the ground floor of a tall gray building in Montgomery Street, San Francisco’s financial center. Ordinarily, since I don’t like even seven blocks of unnecessary walking, I would have taken a streetcar. But there was some sort of traffic jam on Market Street so I set out afoot, turning off along Grand Avenue. A few blocks of walking, and I began to see that something was wrong with the part of town I was heading for. Noises for one thing-roaring, rattling, explosive, noises. At Sutter Street a man passed me, holding his face with both hands and groaning as he tried to push a dislocated jaw back in place. His cheek was scraped red. I went down Sutter Street. Traffic was in a tangle that reached to Montgomery Street. Excited, bare-beaded men were running around. The explosive noises were clearer. An automobile full of policemen went down past me, going as fast as traffic would let it. An ambulance came up the street, clanging its gong, taking to the sidewalks where the traffic got worst. I crossed Kearny Street on the trot. Down the other side of the street two patrolmen were running One had his gun out. The explosive noises were a drumming chorus ahead. Rounding into Montgomery Street, I found few sightseers ahead of me. The middle of the street was filled with trucks, touring cars, taxis-deserted there. Up in the next block-between Bush and Pine Streets-hell was on a holiday. The Holiday spirit was gayest in the middle of the block, where the Seaman’s Band and the Golden Gate Trust Company faced each other across the street. For the next six hours I was busier than a flea on a fat woman.
37°47’29.9”N 122°24’10.3”W
8:57am May 14th, 2018
235 Montgomery Street, The RUSS building, Neo-Gothic tower, built 1927.
25
I’ll RING FOUR TIMES, LONG, SHORT, LONG, SHORT. AND NO, YOU NEEDN’T BOTHER TO COME TO THE DOOR, I’LL LET MYSELF IN. 26
xxxxx
27
INTERSTITIAL
feat. TOSHIRO, M / EASTWOOD, C / BOGART, H The Maltese Falcon / with Mary Astor.
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37°47’12.9”N 122°24’42.9”W
9:11am May 14th, 2018
93 Burritt St. Approx. spot Miles Archer was done in by Brigid O’Shaughnessy
day 4
18 blocks beat
Start // Brendas on Polk. // Tenderloin
29
I
I started to appreciate the city more thanks to the research going in on finding locations not too familar or off the beaten path from your everyday Hammett enthusiasts map checklist. Sure, I prolly would be dumb if I didn’t get Burritt street in or possibly John’s Grill... which btw, I have plans on getting over there to finish this off with a stif drink. Prohabition may or may not have been in full swing during these days, but either way, a strong spirit will do me well after all the running up and down these San Franciscan hills just to capture that ideal photo that keeps some resemblance of the old San Fran. The days when cabs and streetcars ruled.
Spade snapped his mouth shut, turned with a long step, and started for the door. “Did you find her?” the girl called. “Tell you about it when I’m back,” he replied without pausing and hurried out. A taxicab brought Sam to the Belvedere within ten minutes of his departure from his office. He found Luke in the lobby. The hotel-detective came grinning and shaking his head to meet Spade. “Fifteen minutes late,” he said. “Your bird has fluttered.” Spade cursed his luck. “Checked out--gone bag and baggage,” Luke said. He took a battered memorandum-book from a vest-pocket, licked his thumb, thumbed pages, and held the book out open to Spade. “There’s the number of the taxi that hauled him.
27 min.
“I am at the Hotel Belvedere when you wish to communicate with me-- room sixthirty-five. I confidently expect the greatest mutual benefit from our association, Mr. Spade.” He hesitated. “May I have my pistol?” “Sure. I’d forgotten it.” Spade took the pistol out of his coat-pocket and handed it to Cairo. Cairo pointed the pistol at Spade’s chest. “You will please keep your hands on the top of the desk,” Cairo said earnestly. “I intend to search your offices.” Spade said: “I’ll be damned.”
I sat down and watched the Maltese Falcon with Bogart and dah gawd Peter Lorre. I noticed there was alot of discussion over Cairo’s hotel (Lorre’s character. I had to find out more about this hotel. It had to been nice, judging from the descriptions. Bookmarking The MARKER HOTEL as the next stop.
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It all had to come to an end. What better way to wrap it up than with a Hammett’s Classic Martini.
A Martini helps me relax.
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John’s Grill 63 Ellis St, San Francisco, CA 94102 415 986 0069 FX 989 7766
$52 + 20% tip