Last night, I was hanging out at 21st Amendment before Lopez handed the baseball game to the Giants on behalf of the Phillies. A new friend says (naively) “You’re not a Steelers fan too, are you?”. No no, I’m from Philadelphia, not Pittsburgh. He says “Good, because I hate Shanghai Kelly’s when the Steeler’s are playing”, to which I respond “But you love the story of Shanghai Kelly, right?”. He looks at me blankly along with another friend of my mine. This makes me realize that I possess this little bit of knowledge about our city that I very rarely find other people know about. So I decided to share the story with them last night, and now with anyone who cares to learn more about the history of San Francisco.
Back in the day, before the gold rush of 1949, San Francisco existed primarily as a port city, with boats leaving for far off places like Shanghai, China to bring back goods to the Pacific Northwest for trade. Newcomers to the city quickly found jobs staffing these boats as deck hands and sailors alike. Tons of people were coming from near and far to the city, including boats that sailed from the New York, all the way around the southern tip of South America, because the Panama Canal wasn’t open yet, north to the California coast. One of those boats carried an Irish dude named Jim Kelly.
Kelly’s boat wasn’t the smartest, and when they sailed through the golden gate, they had no idea where San Francisco actually was; so they docked on Pelican Island, a.k.a The Rock, a.k.a. Alcatraz. When they “docked”, they tore apart most of the hull, and had to be rescued by more seasoned veterans of the bay. They dragged the boat to the Pacific pier and called it awash. Well, everyone did except for the enterprising Jim Kelly.
Jim Kelly sawed off the bow of the boat and opened the ship saloon. He served drinks out of that bow until he had enough money to open up his own hotel and bar, where new and old citizens of the city could congregate and rest their heads. New sailors were coming in everyday to the saloon, and heading off to far off lands for trade. Trade was the dominant business until news broke that there were “gold in them hills”. Suddenly it became very difficult to find sailors.
Being the ever enterprising man that he was, Kelly knew there was a service he could provide to captains of boats who now found themselves struggling to find sailors. So developed the ruthless practice of drugging naive newcomers to the city, and selling them off to boat captains. These poor men would wake up from their drugged daze by the time the boat was in Shanghai and have no other choice then to man the boat if they wanted to get back to San Francisco. This practice became known as ‘Shanghaing’, and the most ruthless of them all? Jim Kelly, who earned the name Shanghai Kelly.
The next time you’re at the Old Ship Saloon in the Jackson Square Historic District, or at Shanghai Kelly’s nestled between Russian and Nob Hill, you can know that both are an ode to a San Francisco legend.
I’m a huge fan of my grandparents, so I’ve sent them links to the taco crawl generator and, more recently, pictures of my foray into creating a cupcake smorgasbord buffet. Their official reviews are in. First, for the taco crawl generator:
Now I know why my computer could not retrieve all this information earlier today. it is now 12:30 a.m.and I know exactly where to go on a taco crawl. especially not to Chinatown.
And the cupcakes? Not so much:
A few comments : I’m not coming for dinner. Your hamburgers do not cut the mustard with me. I would rather go on a taco crawl. Some of the pictures are reminiscent of “still life” paintings in Museums. Artists like Chardin, Cezanne, Manet. You definitely are more to the Impressionist School. I thought your placement of the Tabasco added spice to the picture.
They are far funnier and more intelligent people than me. If I received a quarter of their humor and smarts, I’m lucky.
For those of you close to me, you have definitely heard about a small side project I started at the end of May called the Random Taco Crawl Generator. I dreamed up this great idea of being able to query a website for a random sampling of taquerias in San Francisco while I was at the gym over memorial day weekend. The night before I had been on a Taco Crawl for my friend Kevin’s birthday. He had held a few before, but this was my first with him, and with almost 20 other people that joined in for the celebration!
While we were sitting stuffed at our 5th taqueria, one of Kevin’s friends pondered aloud “I wonder if tacocrawl.com is taken.” Everyone in ear shot with an iPhone started scouring the internet to see if the domain had been secured, and then to see if they, themselves, could secure the domain. As I watched them scramble, I wondered too, “Why don’t you just call GoDaddy? They have a horrible UI, but great phone service.” (I really am a true believer). They ignored me! I speculated, this time silently, it was because they didn’t want to listen to a girl (because guys know so much more about tech then us females, clearly).
Finally, I decided to grab GoDaddy’s phone number (on my blackberry, mind you) and give them a call. Sure enough the domain was available, they had my account number and credit card on file, and I had the domain signed, sealed, and delivered within 5 minutes. Everyone was dumbfounded for two reasons:
It didn’t occur to anyone (except for me) that you could secure a domain name by phone.
No one thought that any two-word combination was still even available in the domain space.
So while I was at the gym the following day, I was thinking about what I could do with my new domain. Around that same time I decided I wanted to start getting back into more interactive web-development (pages that do things, not just show information). For the past few years, my day job has confined me to strictly requirements and design, but no development. Even with a few of my side projects – including this website, The General History Project, and The Bead Store – I hadn’t really written an if() or while() statement, in a while.
What started as a fun challenge to see who could secure the domainwww.TacoCrawl.com fastest, turned into a side project using the Yelp API. I wrote most of the logic in PHP, but sprinkled some jQuery and XML throughout the site. The basic idea is that I query Yelp for as many taquerias within a 2 mile radius of the neighborhood selected. I check to see if the data set returned to me is greater or less than the number of taquerias the user requested. Ideally, the data set is greater, so I can generate a set of random numbers, and select from the full array of taquerias randomly. If the data set is less than the number of taquerias the user requested, than I return to the user all the taquerias Yelp returned to me.
All in all, once I got back into the swing of things, I found the Yelp API to be really easy to work with, and the google group to be very helpful. I also started using this handy tool for cross-browser design – check out Browser Shots.
In the process, I got a lot of really great feedback through uservoice and email. Some people want to see the site extend to other food genres, other cities and mobile browsers. Other food genres are hard because few delicacies are small and edible repeatedly in crawl fashion the way tacos can be consumed. For other cities, I checked in my own home town, Philadelphia, and only one neighborhood Yelp lists in its API has enough taquerias to make a taco crawl possible. Finally, there’s no excuses, mobile browsing capability would be great, and so would a google map mash-up. The truth is, I want to eat tacos, not program tacos; I need a break! I want to work on other things!
Andale! Go find you some tacos!
PS: There’s an easter egg in the program. I’d like to know who finds it!
…I didn’t go in the Louvre, didn’t go to the top of Arc de Triomphe, nor did I check out the stain glass windows inside Notre Dame. These are all things I didn’t do in the 8 days I spent in Paris last week. But I did ride the Velibs!
More on those later!
Here’s my itinerary from Monday – Sunday:
Kenzie and Me at Jess's Wedding
Monday
Walked around the Luxembourg Gardens, to Montparnasse and returned on Rue de Renne in the morning
Uploaded my friend Jess’s wedding pictures to Flickr. Kenzie wouldnt have done it if I hadn’t!
Walked to the Louvre, rode on the ferris wheel and walked around the Tuilleries Garden.
Met Kenzie at Arc de Triomphe, wen to Harry’s New York Bar and then to vietnamese for dinner.
Tuesday
Went to the Latin Quarter market to buy fruits, veggies and cheese.
Did some accessories shopping
Got on my first velib! Biked to the Eiffel Tower and then the Trocadero, watched street dancers.
Biked to Centre du Pompidou and then back to Kenzie’s. Met her at the cafe and then made dinner, including my first tapenade!
Wednesday
Did some more shopping; St Germain is great for that.
Biked close to Montmartre and stopped at a Jewish deli on the way. Surprised they’re easier to find in Paris than San Francisco
Took the metro to Monmartre, walked to Sacre Coeur, started reading A Moveable Feast by Hemingway.
Descended, biked to Marais, got lost somewhere north of Bastille on the way
Ate some L’As du Falafel. Spoke Hebrew with a Druze employee
Met Kenzie at the Ferris Wheel, got drinks, rode the Ferris Wheel.
Walked along the Seine, found the Jefferson statue and then got some amazing gelato.
Me on the Ferris Wheel in Paris
Thursday
First day waking up before 10:30. Took a Fat Tire Bike Tour of Versailles.
Spoke some decent french trying to buy a cheese to eat with my smoked salmon
Biked the grounds, around the canal and then stopped for lunch
An Australian couple got engaged while we were there
Took a tour of the chateau, found Louis XIV’s mom to be horribly unattractive, and lucky to be royalty (else who would have paid attention to her?)
Met Kenzie for dinner in St. Germain
Friday
Slept really late
Went to Montmartre to check out the painting I “commissioned’. It was ugly, didn’t buy
Bartered for some awesome work, then the guy wouldn’t take credit card. Oh well
Headed back to St Germain, got Kenzie, and went to Musee D’Orsay for the last hour the employee was opened
Back in the day, before the gold rush of 1949, San Francisco existed primarily as a port city, with boats leaving for far off places like Shanghai, China to bring back goods to the Pacific Northwest for trade. Newcomers to the city quickly found jobs staffing these boats as deck hands and sailors alike. Tons of people were coming from near and far to the city, including boats that sailed from the New York, all the way around the southern tip of South America, because the Panama Canal wasn’t open yet, north to the California coast. One of those boats carried an Irish dude named Jim Kelly.
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