This rare photo shows a Chinese brothel from the street. The word "bagnio", originally meant "bath house", but was commonly used in 19th century San Francisco to describe a brothel. There were two types of bagnio in San Francisco's Chinatownβthe parlor house and the crib. The former, comparatively few in number, was to be found principally in Grant Avenue, Ross Alley, Waverly Place, and a few other important thoroughfares in or adjacent to Chinatown.
Many of them were sumptuously furnished with a great clutter of teakwood and bamboo, embroidered hangings, soft couches, and cushions of embroidered silk, while exotic paintings and clouds of fragrant incense emphasized the languorous atmosphere of the Orient.
The number of girls in each house ranged from four to twenty-five, all richly clad and seductively perfumed. Cribs existed in great profusion in Jackson and Washington streets and in China, Bartlett, Stout, Church, and other alleys throughout the quarterβthey lined both sides of China Alley, a dingy, fifteen-foot passage which extended from Jackson to Washington Street.
Several other alleys were likewise entirely given over to cribs. In Brooklyn Alley, off Sacramento Street near Stockton, were half a dozen cribs which during the late eighteen-nineties were occupied by Japanese girls, the first prostitutes of their race in San Francisco.
In these places several ancient customs of the Yoshiwara were observedβa visitor was required to remove his shoes at the threshold; and when he departed, he received a gift, usually a good cigar, while his shoes were returned to him cleaned and polished. The Japanese cribs and the Chinese parlor houses were for white men only, but the ordinary Chinese bagnio catered to men of all races and colors. The wealthy and influential Chinaman was seldom seen in the public houses, except in a few operated for his exclusive use, the inmates of which were white women who had succumbed to the fascinations of opium.
