Mar 21, 2024 - Sale 2663

Sale 2663 - Lot 200

Price Realized: $ 500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
(ENTERTAINMENT--MUSIC.) Street view of San Francisco's famous Black-owned early jazz hotspot, the So Different Club. Photograph, 9¼ x 6¾ inches; unevenly cropped, laid down on early paper with later notes on verso, "The Midway" sign overlaid and pasted down on image, a bit of white retouching, moderate wear including chip in corner and ¾-inch closed tear. [San Francisco, CA], circa 1909-1911
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A view of San Francisco's famous but short-lived entertainment district. Building on the ruins of the rowdy Barbary Coast district on Pacific Street after the 1906 earthquake, it was known as Terrific Street and featured some of the earliest jazz clubs in the nation before a hostile mayor hastened its gentrification even before Prohibition hit in 1920. One of the top clubs was the Black-owned So Different Club (seen at left), later known as Purcell's Café, owned by two former Pullman Porters. They catered to a racially diverse audience and were among the originators of taxi dancing--customers bought tokens and then hired women to dance with them by the song. Sid LeProtti, a pianist of African-Italian ancestry, led the house band: the So Different Jazz Band, thought to be the first band in the nation to use "Jazz" in its title. The club's sign in this photograph promises "Singing, Dancing, Entertaining Every Night!"

This is a cropped portion of a fairly well-known image; another example extending much further to the left is at San Francisco Public Library. However, this one appears to be cropped from the original maquette. We can here see that the giant "Midway" sign is not in the original photograph as it appears in the library example--it was cut out from another photo and pasted in here for compositional effect. Another massive sign in the library's copy, reading "Diana" above the So Different Club, is not seen here, but the adhesive remnants can be seen here.

The So Different building still stands today as 550 Pacific Avenue.