The Tenderloin has been a downtown residential community since shortly after the California Gold Rush in 1849. However, the name “Tenderloin” does not appear on any maps of San Francisco prior to the 1930s; before then, it was labeled as “Downtown,” although it was informally referred to as “the Tenderloin” as early as the 1890s. The area had an active nightlife in the late 19th century with many theaters, restaurants and hotels. Almost all of the buildings in the neighborhood were destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and the backfires that were set by firefighters to contain the devastation. The area was immediately rebuilt with some hotels opening by 1907 and apartment buildings shortly thereafter, including the historic Cadillac Hotel. By the 1920s, the neighborhood was notorious for its gambling, billiard halls, boxing gyms, speakeasies, theaters, restaurants and other nightlife depicted in the hard boiled detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, who lived at 891 Post Street, the apartment he gave to Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Also around this time, due to Red Light Abatement Act, prostitution and other vice began to be pushed out from the Barbary Coast district to the more southern and less business-occupied Tenderloin.
The Black Hawk Jazz Club on the corner of Turk & Hyde Streets in 1961.
The same corner in 2017.
The Tenderloin has long been a place where traditional values have been challenged, and often overcome. It has been the San Francisco neighborhood most ahead of its time. And the neighborhood whose role as a home to emerging social movements has often triggered a moral backlash by the city’s elites. In the post-1906 era, the Tenderloin’s “outcasts” were independent women who insisted on the right to dance and drink in public with men. In the 1950s it was gay men seeking community in Tenderloin bars. In the 1960s it was transgender women seeking to associate in public places, as well as gay and lesbian activists who felt that being homosexual should not disqualify you from receiving anti-poverty resources. The Tenderloin’s social pioneers often paid a steep personal price for adopting values years and even decades ahead of their time.
Today, the Tenderloin, officially referred to as the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and contains 408 contributing buildings. The neighborhood has managed to avoid much of the gentrification process experienced by virtually all other central city urban neighborhoods thanks to strong community involvement in the fight to preserve its unique character and maintain it as an affordable place to live for many people who would otherwise be displaced by rising rent costs.