place famous among artists, writers, and other Bohemians, in the days
when San Francisco was care-free and held her arms wide open in welcome
to all the world.

It was such a dinner as has been accorded to few. Few there are who have
the heart to make merry amid crumbling ruins of all they held dear in
the material world. The favored ones who assembled there will always
hold that dinner in most affectionate memory, and to this day not one
thinks of it without the choking that comes from over-full emotion. It
was more than a tribute to the days of old--it marked the passing of
the old San Francisco and the inauguration of the new.

It was Bohemia's Swan Song, sung by those to whom San Francisco held
more than pleasure--more than sentimentality. It held for them
close-knit ties that nothing less than a worldshaking cataclysm could
sever--and the cataclysm had arrived.

The old Coppa restaurant in Montgomery street became a memory and on its
ashes came the new one, located in Pine street between Montgomery and
Kearny streets, and for a number of years this remained the idol of
Bohemia until changed conditions drove the tide of patronage far up
toward Powell, Ellis, Eddy and O'Farrell streets. At that time there
grew up a mushroom crop of so-called restaurants in Columbus avenue
close to Barbary Coast such as Caesar's, the Follies Cabaret, Jupiter
and El Paradiso, where space was reserved in the middle of the floor for
dancing. Coppa emulated the new idea by fitting out a gorgeous basement
room at the corner of Kearny and Jackson, which he called the Neptune
Palace. It represented a great grotto under the ocean, and here throngs
gathered nightly to dance and eat until the police commissioners closed
all of these resorts, as well as Barbary Coast.