13 May The Scene of the Crime

In the movie, the murder takes place at the corner of Bush and Stockton and Miles Archer falls through a wooden railing and down a steep rocky slope after he is shot. The book specifies that the fatal shot was fired in Burritt Alley, just down the block from the intersection of Bush and Stockton. There is no longer a rocky slope for the body of a murdered private detective to tumble down—the terrain of Burritt Alley has changed in the 85 years since the book was published and an eight-story building housing a mini-mart, Taqueria Mana and the Boba Guys now stands between the alley and Stockton Street below. The southern end of the Stockton Street Tunnel, from where Sam Spade first observed the scene of his partner’s murder, is across the street from the alley. Dashiell Hammett Street is just to the west, between Pine and Bush. The book and the film are both The Maltese Falcon and the city is, of course, San Francisco.

 

My residence during my brief stay in San Francisco was the Mystic Hotel on Stockton, a building which provides evidence of the lowering of Stockton Street at the Union Square end of the tunnel: The present ground floor entrance of the hotel is what used to be the basement level back in Hammett’s day. I arrived too early on a Tuesday afternoon to check in so I left my luggage at the desk and headed out into the streets with camera in hand. The Stockton Street Tunnel, running beneath a section of Nob Hill, had a distinctly noir appeal so I headed north towards Chinatown. My wanderings through San Francisco over the next day and a half took me from Union Square through Chinatown, North Beach, the Financial District and the Embarcadero. I climbed up to Coit Tower, attended a Giants/Dodgers baseball game at AT&T Park, and bought volume 1 of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle at City Lights Bookstore. I bought a hat at a hipster haberdashery at Washington Square Park.

 

Perhaps the most picturesque element of that wildly picturesque city was the view of Burritt Alley from my hotel room window. From my vantage point the alley presented itself very much like a movie set, sometimes empty, sometimes sparsely populated with workers from neighboring businesses taking cigarette breaks. It seems entirely possible that it was this theatricality that inspired Hammett to set a critical early scene in his classic crime novel in this location. Despite its undeniable aesthetic appeal Burritt Alley remains a working thoroughfare, as I discovered when I was jolted from my bed around 5:00 AM. A paroxysm of of noise erupted from below—dumpsters being dumped, a sewer explosion, a zombie jousting match—I have no idea what the hell it was. The noise was so spectacularly loud and raucous I got up to find out what the fuck was going on down there but it was too dark to see anything. No gunshots or mysterious femmes fatale lurking, so I went back to bed.

 

A sampling of images from my 36 hours in San Francisco is posted on the Digital page of this site and a further selection is offered below. As always, click on the thumbnails to see a larger version.

 

P.S. – It’s rather humorous that the well-known poster for John Huston’s classic adaption of The Maltese Falcon features Humphrey Bogart brandishing two .45 Colts with the admonition “A Story as EXPLOSIVE as His BLAZING Automatics” In the film, Bogart’s Sam Spade proclaims his disdain for firearms and the only ones he gets his hands on are acquired from smacking around the simpering Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) and the wan, twitchy Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook, Jr.). Spade enjoys the occasional bitch-slapping but never fires a gun during the course of the film.