The Canessa Building, built in the late 1800s and located at 708 Montgomery, is an official San Francisco landmark. Canessa once housed printing presses and gas lights, and nearby, on Sansome Street, a bustling produce market district shook the neighborhood into pre-dawn life. Following the 1906 earthquake, most of the buildings on the 700 block of Montgomery looked like stage-sets from a wild western movie. The second story of Canessa was destroyed but soon rebuilt. In 1925, sculptor Ralph Stackpole and painter Timothy Wulff began work to turn the buildings at 716-718-720 Montgomery into artists’ studios. 

For the next 35 years, artists, including Diego Rivera, William Gerstle, Caroline Martin and Ruth Cravath, sculpted and painted in the “Ship Building,” so-named because a ship’s hull — historically thought to be the Georgian — is incorporated in the building. Though many of the original buildings in this area did not survive the era of high-and-higher architecture, the diminutive gem known as Canessa has. 

Today, the old brick building still glows with light and life and is home to an art gallery and several creative professionals and small businesses. Black Cat Cafe For 30 years, from 1933 to 1963, the Black Cat Cafe, located at 710 Montgomery, was the Canessa Building’s next door neighbor. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Cat attracted a bohemian clientele of both straight and gay writers, artists and musicians from the neighborhood. 

Many lived and worked across the street in the historic Montgomery Block building where the Transamerica Pyramid now stands. Just north of the Cat, at 716-718-720 Montgomery, were the studios of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Emmy Lou Packard and Ralph and Peter Stackpole. 

Regular visitors to the Cat included artists Hassel Smith, Maynard Dixon and Ed Corbett. John Steinbeck and William Saroyan also dropped in from time to time — as did two veteran police reporters, Neil Hitt of the San Francisco Chronicle and Harry Debolt of the Examiner. According to Jerry Flamm, author of Hometown San Francisco, Hitt and Debolt, “an inseparable pair in the Hall of Justice press room after 5 p.m., would occasionally stroll down one block to the Black Cat for a thirst quencher after advising the police radio dispatcher where they would be in case all hell broke loose somewhere in the city.” 

In the 1950s, Black Cat proprietor Sol Stoumen hired José Sarria, a female impersonator, to play host at the Cat every Sunday. Clad in an ornate costume, Sarria performed camp versions of operatic arias. Sarria’s performances started drawing a large gay clientele, and police began raiding the bar. Printer Henry Evans’ reaction to the Cat was typical of the time. “The Black Cat … [once] was by far the best place for a wild drunk that an adventurer could hope for,” he writes in Bohemian San Francisco (1955). “But … the place changed hands and the new owner encouraged the fruit and the place went to hell.” 

The Black Cat lasted until 1963 when its liquor license was lifted by State Alcoholic Beverage Control Board agents the morning before the bar’s annual Halloween party,” reports Jerry Flamm in Hometown San Francisco. “The state agency had been threatening for several years to close the saloon, charging that ‘lewd and indecent acts’ took place there. The boisterous ‘witches night’ celebration was held anyway, with only fruit juice and soft drinks sold at the bar, but it was the last Halloween observance at the Black Cat.” 

A book consisting almost almost entirely of direct interview quotes, The Empress Is a Man: Stories from the Life of José Sarria by Michael R Gorman, appeared in 1998 (Jesse Monteagudo review).  Chapters cover history of The Black Cat (The Nightingale of Montgomery Street) and much of Sarria’s career including becoming the first openly gay candidate for public office (San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 1961) and founder of the Imperial Court System, an association of charitable organizations (Empress José I, The Widow Norton).