The Dark Hotel was built in 1893 on San Francisco's Jackson Street, at the place where three of the city's more disreputable nighborhoods -- Chinatown, the Barbary Coast and North Beach -- meet. The hotel was built by Elfro Jefferson, a legendary South Carolina native and former slave who became California's first African-American millionaire.

The origin of the Hotel's unusual name remains something of a mystery. Some say Jefferson named it in homage to his beloved "cork face" minstrel performers, while others claim that he came up with the name after a dreadful nightmare in which he woke up screaming "Out of the dark! Out of the dark!" Whatever the case, it is certainly true that the Hotel was an early home for many of the great minstrels who played San Francisco. The greatest minstrel man of the period, Sweet Billie Emerson, lived there for many years.

The Dark Hotel was born in an age when San Francisco was still the farthest-flung outpost of the wide-open criminal frontier that made up the American West. Crime has long cast its lurid shadow over the hotel. Founder Elfro Jefferson was hacked to death on the hotel's front steps on the afternoon of Aug. 13, 1904. The murder was never solved, but rumor had it that a Chinese hatchet man whom Jefferson had hired to do away with a bothersome lover had double-crossed him after the lover matched Jefferson's fee and threw in a bottle of good whiskey, a five-dollar whore and ten pipes of opium.

It was only the first of a long series of violent, often inexplicable crimes to haunt the Dark Hotel.

In the Prohibition Age, gangland wars left their tommy-gun scars on the hotel's dingy facade. After the Second World War, a nest of Soviet spies was discovered brazenly operating from the hotel. But not only lowlifes, grifters and cheap cons have been drawn to the Dark Hotel. Artists, writers and musicians have always been associated with it -- drawn by its low rates, its murky bar and the discretion of what is now four generations of management.

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