A mid-century jewel in the Barbary Coast
The world is filled with Maiden Lanes, each with their own contradictions. There’s London’s Maiden Lane, which runs by Covent Garden—a road originally known for the stink from the beasts of burden. Or Maiden Lane in Manhattan, once a lovers’ path, and then the center of the jewelry district until the early 1900s. San Francisco’s Maiden Lane, off Union Square, was first called Morton Street in the late 19th century, and was a main vein through the Barbary Coast. That was the city’s rough and ready district, known for a murder a week and the bordellos run by that incomparable lord of the underworld, Jerome Bassity. He wore three gold rings on each hand and ran 200 ladies in his demimonde.
These days the only “maidens” strolling the lane are strictly members of the wealthy elite, ever sensitive to the seductive windows of Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, and the like. They shop the boutiques and sit at the outdoor cafes, and listening to the “Italian opera tenor of Maiden Lane,” a portly man in suspenders named Robert Close.
Info
Address 140 Maiden Lane, San Francisco, CA, 94108, www.xanadugallery.us, +1 415.392.9999 | Public Transport Bus: 2, 3 (Post St & Grant Ave stop) | Hours Xanadu Gallery, Tues–Sat 10am–6pm| Tip Around the corner is the 49 Geary building, housing four floors of art and photo galleries. Every first Thursday of the month, many of the galleries are open late for a casual open house.
In some guidebooks, Maiden Lane is listed as a two-block pedestrian mall, but this is not a scaled-down version of Rodeo Drive. Maiden Lane is straightforward, and European, and more charming and moody in that sense. It’s also distinguished architecturally by the only Frank Lloyd Wright building in San Francisco, at Number 140, with its arched entryway in a facade of tan brick. The interior brings to mind the spiral walkway of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and some say that the building, erected in 1948, was the museum’s prototype. The translucent globes suspended above the circular space illuminate the interior filled with curved rooms and ramps. Originally the V. C. Morris Gift Shop, it’s now a home to the Xanadu Gallery of ethnographic art.
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