The Barbary Coast emerged in the 1850s as San Francisco transformed overnight from a sleepy Mexican settlement into a boomtown of gold-hungry migrants. Thousands of men with money and few social constraints created immediate demand for entertainment, alcohol, sex, and gambling. The district that arose to meet that demand was famously lawless. Shanghaiing -- the practice of kidnapping men and forcing them into service on ships -- was common. Robbery was routine. Violence was the cost of doing business. The district's reputation was so extreme that it became a tourist attraction in its own right, with guidebooks leading visitors through its streets like a tour of hell.

Amid the crime and exploitation, the Barbary Coast also functioned as an incubator for American popular music. Jazz, ragtime, and early blues found audiences in the district's concert saloons and dance halls. Musicians who might have been excluded from respectable venues played to mixed crowds in spaces where the only criterion for admission was the ability to pay. This democratization of entertainment -- crude, sometimes dangerous, but open in ways that polite society was not -- contributed to the development of San Francisco's enduring identity as a city where cultural boundaries are more porous than elsewhere.

Progressive-era reformers eventually shut down the Barbary Coast in the early 20th century, aided by the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed much of the district's physical infrastructure. The neighborhood was renamed and rebuilt. Pacific Avenue today shows no trace of the dance halls and brothels that once lined it. But the Barbary Coast's spirit -- the idea of San Francisco as a place where vice and virtue coexist openly, where the entertainment economy operates without apology -- persists in the city's character. From the Barbary Coast to the Summer of Love to the present-day tech industry's own brand of excess, San Francisco has always been a city that makes money from appetite.