North Beach Part 2: Plague, Panic, and a Ripper in the Fog

Welcome to our series exploring The City’s rich and diverse neighborhoods. There are nearly ninety of them, each with its own story to tell. Every week, we’ll highlight a different corner of The City, diving into its history, how it’s evolved, and the local nooks and crannies worth exploring. Our goal is to celebrate the neighborhoods that shaped this place we love and the people and stories that continue to make it what it is today.

Welcome back to Part 2 of the North Beach series. After decades of raucous nights and easy money, the neighborhood faced a far darker challenge.

In 1900, a mysterious illness crept through the crowded tenements of Chinatown and into the narrow streets of North Beach: bubonic plague. The first cases were found near the waterfront, where sailors, longshoremen, and merchants lived side by side. At first, city officials tried to hush it up – shipping and tourism were on the line, and the idea of The City as a modern metropolis couldn’t coexist with whispers of medieval disease. But word spread fast.

Quarantines soon followed. Wooden barricades sealed off parts of Chinatown, and fear began to ripple north through North Beach. Merchants watched customers disappear, doctors in long coats and masks patrolled the alleys, and families whispered about the dead being carried out under the cover of night. Some claimed the plague was overblown; others swore that rats scurrying from the docks were carrying death into every home.

Rumors ran wilder than the disease itself. Newspapers debated whether the plague was real, and federal health officials clashed with local politicians over how to contain it. The uncertainty sowed distrust among neighbors, and a quiet tension replaced the neighborhood’s usual noise. For a place once known for music, laughter, and neon light, the silence was eerie.

As if disease weren’t enough, the 1890s and early 1900s brought another terror: a string of brutal murders that the press called the work of a “Jack the Ripper of the West.” Women were found dead in alleyways and boarding houses near Pacific Avenue, their cases never solved. The killings gave an already infamous district a new layer of fear. The same streets that had once pulsed with music and mischief now felt shadowed by something darker.

By the time the plague was officially declared over, The City had changed. Health inspectors had torn through North Beach’s aging buildings, demolishing some, repairing others, and forcing modern sanitation onto an old, unruly grid. The transformation wasn’t just physical - it marked the beginning of the end for the Barbary Coast era. The wildness faded, replaced by a city trying to appear civilized.

And yet, North Beach endured. The neighborhood absorbed every blow: earthquakes, fires, disease, and even its own ghosts. Its resilience became part of its identity, the heartbeat beneath its narrow streets and aging Victorians.

From saloon revelry to whispered curfews, North Beach proved it could survive chaos of every kind — and come out stronger.

Next up: Part 3, where the beatniks, poets, and the legendary Vesuvio Café breathe bohemian life back into these storied streets.