The Elegant Art of Dining: Bohemian San Francisco, Its ... - iMedia

Sang the Swan Song
In the latter part of April, 1906, when the fire-swept streets presented their most
forbidding aspect, and when the only moving figures to be seen after nightfall
were armed soldiers guarding the little remaining of value from depredations
of skulking vagabonds, a number of the old Bohemian spirits gathered at the
corner of Montgomery and Commercial streets, and gazed through the shattered
windows into the old dining room where they had held many a royal feast.
On the blackened walls might still be seen scarred pictures, fringed by a row
of black cats along the ceiling. They turned their steps out toward the Presidio,
hunted among the Italian refugees and there found Coppa--he of the wonderful
black cats, and it took little persuasion to induce him to go back to his ruined
restaurant and prepare a dinner, such as had made his place famous among
artists, writers, and other Bohemians, in the days when San Francisco was carefree
and held her arms wide open in welcome to all the world.
It was such a dinner as has been accorded to few. Few there are who have the
heart to make merry amid crumbling ruins of all they held dear in the material
world. The favored ones who assembled there will always hold that dinner in
most affectionate memory, and to this day not one thinks of it without the
choking that comes from over-full emotion. It was more than a tribute to the
days of old--it marked the passing of the old San Francisco and the inauguration
of the new.
It was Bohemia’s Swan Song, sung by those to whom San Francisco held more
than pleasure--more than sentimentality. It held for them close-knit ties that
nothing less than a worldshaking cataclysm could sever--and the cataclysm had
arrived.
The old Coppa restaurant in Montgomery street became a memory and on
its ashes came the new one, located in Pine street between Montgomery and
Kearny streets, and for a number of years this remained the idol of Bohemia
until changed conditions drove the tide of patronage far up toward Powell, Ellis,
Eddy and O’Farrell streets. At that time there grew up a mushroom crop of socalled
restaurants in Columbus avenue close to Barbary Coast such as Caesar’s,
the Follies Cabaret, Jupiter and El Paradiso, where space was reserved in the
middle of the floor for dancing. Coppa emulated the new idea by fitting out a
gorgeous basement room at the corner of Kearny and Jackson, which he called
the Neptune Palace. It represented a great grotto under the ocean, and here
28