Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph

The Keeley Cure Institute opened in 1891 on E. Main Street and served as a treatment facility for drug and alcohol abuse.

Picture from the Past

John S. Baggerly

San Francisco's reputation as Sin City was deserved

Los Gatos a Sin City? Never has been and is unlikely to make the nation's top 10 in the future, but there has been titillating stuff going on in town and in the hills beyond our borders.

Today's photograph shows the home of the Keeley Cure Institute (for the treatment of alcoholism and narcotics), which opened Dec. 25, 1891, but operated only a few years.

A local joke prevailed that cured alcoholics would repair to the Lyndon Hotel bar to test the effectiveness of the cure. After the Keeley Cure closed, the building on E. Main Street served as a town hall until 1913 when a "real" one was built across the street, where Civic Center is located today.

In the mountains above Los Gatos, there were cottages where unwed San Francisco girls could have their babies before putting them up for adoption. Why these young women were described as "San Francisco girls" is unclear. Why not Oakland girls, San Jose girls or, yes, even Saratoga and Los Gatos girls? Perhaps because San Francisco was indeed a Sin City brought into focus by Herbert Asbury's The Barbary Coast, an Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld. Saloon keepers, in alliance with ship owners, administered knock-out drops to get unsuspecting drinkers aboard.

And then San Francisco boasted--if that's the right word--of a mile or so of "cribs" on Dupont Street from where the "working girl" regularly dropped coins into the tin-lined pockets of policemen. To reduce the stench of Dupont Street, the name was changed to Grant Avenue.

There were other evils in the hills above Los Gatos. The community of Alma was known as a "mile of saloons" to quench the thirst of the single lumberjacks whose lives held little sociability other than a bar stool. Indeed, Los Gatos' first hotel supplied a "watering hole" for lumberjacks.

It was believed that there were "abortion mills" in the hills.

One alleged mill was the first home of a Los Gatos couple in the mountains. They describe the place as secured by a high cyclone fence, lockable front gate, extensive dog kennels and a home piped for what looked like an operation room.

A few moments' auto ride into the hills from downtown Los Gatos was Lupin Lodge, a nudist camp. It was highly respectable and still is today under the name Lupin Naturist Club.

Early last June, the Lupin Naturist Club hosted a "clothed opportunity for non-nudist women to meet and socialize with nudist women of Lupin."

In mid-century, local barflies insisted that a San Francisco man arrived in town periodically with a different woman to spend a weekend at Lupin Lodge. There again is that "San Franciscan."

In the 1960s, Los Gatos Times-Observer editor Jean Johnson, now retired from state service and living in Sacramento, visited Lupin Lodge with the intent of joining so that her family would have a place to swim. Being a one-car family, the Johnsons had to pass on the opportunity. At that time, a beauty contest was held at Lupin and was pictorially covered by the Times-Observer.
A facial shot of the Queen modestly looking over her shoulder was run on the front page.

Hotel Lyndon picked up a reputation in matters of assignation. The regulars, mainly widows, rocking on the front veranda under the ceiling of high Chinese lanterns, would observe incoming couples and opine "married" or "not married."

The gentle breeze that swayed the Chinese lanterns still prevails out of Cats Canyon and northward along Santa Cruz Avenue.

The older Lyndon "permanents" were not a prudish lot. Indeed some had been married more than once. But they objected to owner/manager Louie Neuman when he registered a suspect couple, particularly young servicemen during World War II, into an adjoining room separated by a far from soundproof door. The next morning, Neuman's ears would burn with "please don't put those lovers in a room next to mine. I'm not that old!!!"

Los Gatos can be proud of not persecuting the Gypsies who lived in a two-story white house at the corner of E. Main Street and Fiesta Way, the current location of the Neighborhood Center. In Europe, rumors of child stealing, poisoning and witchcraft often followed Gypsies.