California Collision: Is something going on here?

She stood there bright as the sun on that California coast
He was a Midwestern boy on his own
Bob Seger, "Hollywood Nights, 1978.

Last night I wrote about The Castro, the capital of gay San Francisco. But the City by the Bay also has oriental "massage parlors" offering "private baths."

Is there something else going on?

As for The Green Door establishment pictured on the left: There's a famous pornographic movie, or so I'm told, "Behind the Green Door," where, let's just say, people get together and socialize. Lots of them.

Most of these massage parlors are located in The Tenderloin, a center of San Francisco vice for a century. How The Tenderloin district got its name is a subject of much debate. Here is one version: Supposedly policemen working the district were able to afford tenderloin cuts of beef, instead of chuck, because of the extra income they received while patrolling there.

We stayed in the adjacent Cathedral Hill section, but we walked through The Tenderloin several times to get to Union Square. During one of those hikes, I overhead a man about my age mutter to a dreadfully thin woman in her twenties, "Hey, thanks for the love last night."

She just nodded.

Maybe he was just some nut.

But I have to wonder, "Is something going on in these places?"

Next: Homelessness

Other California collision posts:

The Castro
F-line Streetcars
Alcatraz
Angel Island
San Francisco's Chinatown
Fisherman's Wharf
Harvey Milk's Camera Shop
San Francisco's Union Square
The Painted Ladies
San Francisco and the military
Haight-Ashbury
Mission San Francisco de Asís
San Francisco's sea lions
San Francisco's blues mural
San Francisco: Cable cars

Technorati tags: California travel travel blog photography photos san francisco history massage parlors