Monday, October 27th, 2008

Timecapsule podcast: San Francisco, October 27-November 2

Sparkletack weekly timecapsule podcast, October 27-November 2 [ 8:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup


A weekly handful of weird, wonderful and wacky happenings dredged up from the kaleidoscopic depths of San Francisco history.

October 28, 1881:
A murder in Chinatown

chinese man with queue

A murder in Chinatown.

Newspapers, particularly the often very nasty San Francisco Chronicle, were full of anti-Chinese propaganda in the last decades before the turn of the century. Stories dealing with Chinese people were usually over-heated, pretty racist, and sometimes hard to even get through.

This item was short and straightforward, though, and I might have even skipped over it if I hadn’t noticed an article about the very same case in a legal journal. The tiny bit of testimony from the victim in that piece helps capture the flavour of the parallel world of 1880s Chinatown.

CHINESE CRIME
Shooting of a Courtesan in Kum Cook Alley

Between 7:30 and 8 o’clock last evening, while Choy Gum, a Chinese courtesan, was bargaining with a fruitdealer in her room on Kum Cook Alley, a Chinaman named Fong Ah Sing walked up to her door and fired a shot at her … 3 Comments » - Posted in San Francisco history blog,San Francisco history podcasts by

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Sunset neighborhood — televised history tour

The ubiquitous and erudite Woody LaBounty of the Western Neighborhood Project takes Brian Hackney of CBS Channel 5 on a televised history tour of his beloved Sunset stomping grounds. Just in case you’ve been missing out, the Western Neighborhood Project (outsidelands.org) is a wonderful organization, a non-profit passionately dedicated to uncovering and preserving the legacies […]

2 Comments » - Posted in Just plain cool,San Francisco history blog by