Abraham "Old Abe" Warner opened the Cobweb Palace in 1856 at the foot of Meiggs Wharf, where Francisco, Mason, and Powell Streets met at the waterfront. The wharf's original builder, Henry Meiggs, had fled San Francisco to escape fraud charges, leaving his wharf ownerless -- a perfectly lawless foundation for the establishment Warner would build. Abe served patrons of every class: sailors fresh off clipper ships, tourists gawking at the spectacle, and neighborhood regulars who came for the free chowder, seafood, and French bread. There was one notable omission from his menu. Warner considered straight whisky a lesser drink and refused to serve it. His entrance was flanked by two Alaskan totem poles, and a shooting gallery occupied one corner. The bar itself sat a few steps below the sidewalk, as if you were descending into another world.

Warner accepted exotic animals and curiosities as payment for drinks, and his collection grew into something between a menagerie and a museum. Live bears, kangaroos, monkeys, parrots, cats, dogs, and bats inhabited the bar alongside its human patrons. The animals ate table scraps and stole peanuts from the disabled sailor who sold them outside the entrance -- which meant Warner spent almost nothing on their upkeep. Beyond the living collection, he amassed weapons, scrimshaw, old coins, quartz specimens, taxidermied animals, Japanese Noh masks, and thousands of paintings. Everything was draped in dust and cobwebs, because Warner's prohibition against killing spiders extended to disturbing their work in any way. Writer Charles Warren Stoddard compared the bar's interior to a witch's home and described its overwhelming musty smell. And yet Abe himself was always impeccably dressed.

Mark Twain may have visited the Cobweb Palace -- the kind of qualified claim that itself feels appropriate for a place built on tall tales and waterfront legend. What is certain is that the bar attracted a remarkable cross-section of Gold Rush-era San Francisco, from the roughest sailors to the city's literary figures. The Palace was not merely a bar but a social institution, a place where the hierarchies of the outside world dissolved in the dim light and the smell of chowder. Warner ran it for nearly four decades before selling in 1893. He died in 1896, somewhere between eighty and eighty-two years old -- even his age was approximate, befitting a man who preferred mystery to precision.

After Warner sold, the Cobweb Palace faded. Competing amusements drew crowds elsewhere, and the North Beach neighborhood was changing. The bears and parrots dispersed; the cobwebs were finally swept away. The location where Old Abe's subterranean wonderland once stood is now occupied by a post office and restaurant -- establishments that serve their purpose without a single bear, totem pole, or profanity-speaking parrot. But the Cobweb Palace lives on in literature. Neil Gaiman included it in issue 31 of his Sandman comics, and it features in novels by Valerie Hansen and Gary Jonas. For a bar that existed in the physical world for less than forty years, its afterlife in the imagination has proven considerably longer.