The location of the Montgomery Street building that became Frida’s home away from home allowed her to easily explore the city on her own, either by foot or cable car. This area had been part of the infamous Barbary Coast section, where sexuality, alcohol, lewd dancing, and “hoodlums” were found in abundance between 1862 and 1917. Frida must have found it amusing that the building where she was staying had once been a brothel. In 1876, a local historian reveals the negative reputation the area had: “The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind.”[1] This included writers and social activists, such as Mark Twain (1860s), Ambrose Bierce (1880s), Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Emma Goldman, who lived and worked in the top three floors of the massive four story Montgomery Block brick building, located down the street from Ralph Stackpole’s building (where Frida stayed).
By the 1920s, this Barbary Coast area had been cleaned up and an artists' community had blossomed beyond Montgomery Street. The Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth moved to the area in the late 1920s and he remembered it as “a tiny enclave in Italian North Beach in those days: a cooperative gallery that soon failed; a speak-easy;…a restaurant, the Casa Beguine; the Montgomery Block; a row of studios in the next block on Montgomery Street; and a few shacks scattered among the dirt roads and goats on Telegraph Hill.”[2] Frida liked this area with its seedy history, its artists' colony, and ethnic neighborhoods. Her favorite haunt was Chinatown. © Celia S. Stahr 2014 [1] Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), 101. [2] Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1966), 365.
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Celia Stahr teaches art history at the University of San Francisco. She’s interested in women artists and artists who cross cultural boundaries. She fell in love with the power of Frida Kahlo's art in the 1980s, a feeling that has intensified over the years. Frida in America took 10 years to research and write, but Stahr never lost interest in this fascinating woman and artist.
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