Bay Area Stew
​Nonfiction

Urban Legend or Not:
The Questionable Circumstances Surrounding the Death of a President in 1920s-Era San Francisco​
​by Monika Trobits

In December 1917, the U.S. Congress submitted to the states for ratification a constitutional amendment for nationwide prohibition of the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors or beverages. By 1919, the required number of states had ratified the proposed 18th Amendment. In October 1919, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act (also known as the Volstead Act) implementing the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
 
When Prohibition officially began on January 16, 1920, the owners of the House of Shields bar on New Montgomery Street in San Francisco realized they had to relocate in order to continue doing business, albeit unlawfully. The bar, which had been established in either 1908 or 1912, moved from its street-level location in the Sharon Building down to the building’s basement where it continued operating as a speakeasy. Across New Montgomery was the Palace Hotel.
 
The House of Shields actually began as the Grand Buffet and had moved into the just-completed Sharon Building in 1912. In the 1920s, a man by the name of Eddie Shields bought into the business, renaming it for himself. Now, why would someone buy a bar during Prohibition, not knowing at the time when, or even if, it would end? It turned out that Mr. Shields was a successful bootlegger who “imported” alcohol up the California coast from Mexico during the Prohibition years. Ships outside the three-mile coastal zone were exempt from the law, a technicality exploited by many, including Eddie Shields. In the Bay Area, alcohol was frequently offloaded down in Half Moon Bay, a very popular site for that sort of activity in the 1920s. Much of it was then surreptitiously shipped up to San Francisco, where Prohibition was widely flouted.
 
Decades earlier, in 1849, the Old Poodle Dog restaurant had opened at Washington and Dupont Streets (later, Grant Avenue). The origin of its colloquial moniker are uncertain but is thought to stem from its formal French name, “Le Poulet d'Or.” If so, it was quickly renamed by Gold-Rush-Era miners as the “Poodle Dog” since most locals apparently couldn’t pronounce the proper French.
 
The restaurant moved to Bush Street in 1868, officially renaming itself the Old Poodle Dog. When that location was lost in the calamity of the 1906 Earthquake and fire, operations temporarily moved to Eddy Street, eventually returning to Bush Street near Claude Lane. Then came a man-made adversity: Prohibition.
 
Declaring that French cuisine couldn’t possibly be served without first-rate French wines, the restaurant closed its doors in April 1922. Upon further reflection, however, the owners decided to reopen, this time south of Market Street. The Old Poodle Dog’s new home was in the House of Shields’ former ground-level storefront on New Montgomery Street. The restaurant was upstairs and the speakeasy was downstairs.
 
The following year, the Hardings came to town.
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Warren and Florence Harding were both from Ohio. In 1880 at 19, a pregnant Florence ran off with her neighbor, Henry De Wolfe, the black sheep of his family and a budding alcoholic. Following the birth of a son named Marshall, Henry, who never married Florence, abandoned both. She returned to her hometown of Marion where her wealthy but tyrannical father refused to take in Florence and little Marshall. She found a room in a local boardinghouse and, falling back on her musical training, survived as a single mother teaching piano.
 
Warren Harding moved to Marion in the mid-1880s and became the owner of the Marion Star newspaper. He was known as an amiable rake who suffered from high anxiety, insomnia and stomach issues. Nonetheless, Florence avidly pursued the five-years-younger Warren. Both were the subject of local, small-town gossip. Florence was suspected of being part Jewish and Warren was rumored to have a strain of African blood. They were married in July 1891. Florence lied on the marriage license, making herself two years younger than Warren. (Henry De Wolfe would die of alcoholism and tuberculosis in 1894. When Florence became the First Lady in 1921, she told reporters that she had been a widow when she married Warren.)
 
During the summer of 1923, now-President Warren Harding and his wife, Florence, also known as “the Duchess” for her imperious manner, were on an extended visit of the western United States. This visit, which began in Alaska, allowed the pair to get away from D.C.’s oppressive summer heat and the scandals that beleaguered the Harding presidency. From the beginning of this journey, which the president called the “Voyage of Understanding,” he appeared to be plagued by cardiac-related issues. San Francisco was one of their stops and it would turn out to be Mr. Harding’s last.
 
The official story was that President Harding died at the Palace Hotel on the night of August 2, 1923, following a heart attack. But the unofficial story that swirled around town was that he actually died across the street at the House of Shields speakeasy in the company of his cronies and a woman that wasn’t his wife. As you can imagine, it was rather awkward to formally announce that the president had died in a speakeasy during federally-imposed Prohibition. Even for someone of Harding’s well-known reputation as an avid drinker, gambler and womanizer, it wouldn’t sound appropriate. The story goes that after a whispered discussion at the speakeasy, it was apparently decided to quietly carry the president’s body across New Montgomery to the Palace Hotel, sneak it up to his 8th-floor suite and then announce that he had died there. It was also rumored that the president’s body might have been carried through a tunnel that supposedly connected the speakeasy with the laundry room of the hotel. (Whether such a tunnel actually existed remains unclear.)
 
At the same time, there were further rumors that “the Duchess” had been poisoning her husband. He had arrived in San Francisco on July 29 not looking well, not feeling well and very, very tired. “The Duchess” initially blamed his death on food poisoning, which she suggested was caused by food brought up from the Palace’s kitchen. The Palace management vehemently denied this. The suspicious hotel manager, sensing that she had been up to something, immediately challenged the rather haughty Mrs. Harding. The manager strongly stated that no one who had eaten at the Palace in the past several days had shown any indication of a food-borne illness. (Maybe it was the fault of the Old Poodle Dog!) The manager then noticed a half-full glass near the deceased president’s bed. The liquid it contained had a strangely foul odor. The manager picked up the glass, telling Mrs. Harding that its contents would be analyzed. The First Lady grabbed the glass, quickly pouring its contents down a nearby drain. She then backed off and agreed to drop the issue. She refused to allow an autopsy of Harding’s body and instead directed that he be immediately embalmed. President Harding was 57 at the time of his demise.
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Did Florence Harding take advantage of the president’s heart condition by poisoning him as retribution for his philandering and fathering children outside their marriage? We will likely never know for sure. Harding’s body was shipped back to Washington for a funeral and then up to Marion, Ohio, for burial. “The Duchess” died the following year, joining her husband in the Marion Cemetery. Their bodies were reinterred in the Harding Tomb, completed in 1927 and located just south of the cemetery. In 1915, Florence’s son, Marshall, had died of complications from alcoholism and tuberculous; he was buried in Marion in an unmarked grave.
 
Warren G. Harding, an avid golfer, would be memorialized in San Francisco through the naming of Harding Road that leads to the Harding Park Golf Course, which opened in 1925; both are located at Lake Merced. The Harding Theatre, which opened in 1926 on Divisadero Street, was also named for the 29th president and is currently the site of the Emporium Arcade Bar.
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​Author’s Note about Prohibition: During the 1920s, an estimated 1,500 speakeasies operated in the city when it had a population of about 600,000. City officials knew about most of them and chose to look the other way. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution in 1926, instructing the local police not to enforce Prohibition. The House of Shields continued doing business unabated.
 
Prohibition came under fire, especially when the Great Depression began, in part because local governments needed the tax revenue generated by sales of alcohol. In addition, the alcohol beverage industry could provide thousands of much-needed jobs. Franklin Roosevelt ran for president promising to end Prohibition if he were elected in 1932; he was and followed through. Prohibition was repealed in December of 1933 via the 21st Amendment, which allowed for state and local control of alcohol.
 
When Prohibition ended, the Old Poodle Dog moved again, this time to Post Street to the ground-level of the Mechanics’ Institute Building and then briefly across to the Crocker Galleria during the restaurant’s final days; it remained in business until the early 1980s.
 
The repeal of Prohibition allowed the House of Shields to reestablish itself back upstairs in its former street-level location. It subsequently ended its “gentlemen’s club” days in the 1970s when it officially permitted women into the bar (prior to that, the only women let in were generally prostitutes). The House of Shields is still in business at its New Montgomery Street location. It’s an original tenant in the Sharon Building and one of the city’s legacy bars/businesses.
 
The Palace Hotel, which dates back to 1875, is still across the street.
 
February 2019
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A New York City native, Monika Trobits has lived in San Francisco for more than 36 years. She has studied local history since the mid-1980s. In addition to working in the corporate world, Monika was a docent/tour guide for historically-based organizations and local tour operators for more than 25 years. Nowadays, she teaches walking history classes for OLLI at SF State. Her article, "Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco in the 1920s," was published in the winter 2011 edition of The Argonaut, a local historical journal. The History Press published Monika’s first book: Antebellum and Civil War San Francisco: A Western Theater for Northern & Southern Politics in 2014 and her second book: Bay Area Coffee: A Stimulating History in February 2019.
Other works in this issue:
​Nonfiction
​The First Hill of Beans: Folger’s Coffee
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