“A fascinating account of San Francisco’s past. Packed with sharp historical insights from rich archival research, the book will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers alike. It will change the way readers view the city’s physical and imaginary landscapes.”-Clare Sears, author of Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco
“A vibrant history of San Francisco’s multiracial transient living and entertainment districts that unravels urban myths and offers cautionary tales of crusades against vice and crime.”-Nayan Shah, author of Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown
“A lively, thoroughly researched, and necessary corrective to the history of cities.”-Jessica Ellen Sewell, author of Women and the Everyday City: Public Space in San Francisco, 1890–1915
“Mallery’s study of San Francisco’s districts of the demimonde and ‘the dangerous classes,’ where tourists and residents enjoyed their illicit pleasures, is a fascinating addition to the historiography of the Pacific Coast metropolis from the gold rush to the Great War.”-William Issel, coauthor of San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development
“Urban historians and historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era will welcome James Mallery’s deeply researched history of the parts of San Francisco that the city’s dominant white middle- and upper-classes defined as different-different by race, or class, or marital status, or violations of the dominant classes’ morality.”-Robert W. Cherny, coauthor of San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development
