by kbronson | Sep 10, 2026 | Episodes
In October 1893, San Francisco society was rocked by the secret marriage of millionaire Charlie Fair and Maud Nelson, a well-known madam. The couple quietly crossed the bay to Oakland intending to elope without attracting attention. Instead, their wedding became...
by kbronson | Sep 2, 2026 | Episodes
San Francisco has always looked good on film, but in The Sniper (1952) and The Lineup (1958), the city becomes something more than scenery. It becomes a character—a maze of steep streets, fog, waterfronts, alleys and lonely neighborhoods where killers can disappear...
by kbronson | Aug 26, 2026 | Episodes
Henry Miller came to Big Sur with no money and even less interest in behaving himself. He had already spent years writing books that were banned in America, smuggled into the country and sold under the table, and now he was living in the coastal hills with artists,...
by kbronson | Aug 11, 2026 | Episodes
Dolly Adams hit Frisco as a wild and precocious child, already carrying the kind of trouble that would follow a girl in the late 1800s. She became infamous as the Water Queen, and she could stay underwater long enough to make a North Beach crowd forget its manners....
by kbronson | Jul 26, 2026 | Episodes
The jury’s out, sequestered up at the Fairmont like kings in exile, and Frisco holds its breath after four weeks of front page testimony. Part Three opens with the strange coda nobody asked for — a state Attorney General’s daughter kidnapped for an hour...
by kbronson | Jul 21, 2026 | Episodes
Fog rolls into the North Beach basements, and Nick DeJohn is still not talking — a garrot saw to that back in May of ’47. Part Two picks up the case cold with Freddie Francisco’s break down of rumors in the Tenderloin whisper stream, jumps forward to a...
