“
When he died penniless in 1880, more than 30,000 people lined Market Street for his funeral procession. In the 1890s, the gauntlet passed to Mayor Adolph Sutro, who used his fortune from the Comstock Lode silver mine to build monuments to himself, including the Sutro Baths, an indoor swimming complex next to the Cliff House that was more elaborate than the fantasy pools in Hawaii. The Baths closed when I was a kid, but you can still see the ruins. Over the decades, other luminaries included beat poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, a stripper named Carol Doda who headlined the city’s first topless club a few blocks from where we were sitting, and a high-end madam named Sally Stanford who became a restauranteur and later the Mayor of Sausalito. The list would not be complete without mentioning flamboyant lawyers like Melvin Belli, Jake Ehrlich, Vincent Hallinan, Tony Serra, and Nate Cohn. Nick “the Dick” was one of San Francisco’s few
”
”