San Francisco Chronicle

February 28, 1932. This article is reprinted below.

Disclaimer: All newspaper articles are reprinted exactly as they appeared in the newspaper regardless of misspellings, grammar, errors, or omissions.


'Little Greece' Lives in Coffee Houses of S.F.

Series Describes City's Colorful Foreign Areas

Editors Note: This series of articles deals with the foreign colonies of San Francisco. The various foreign quarters - Chinatown, the Latin Quarter, Little Greece, and the rest - are veritable cities within a city. There are more than twenty of them, with a combined population of over 190,000. Each Sunday you are to explore one or another of the colonies, with George and Emilia Hodel.

The foreign populations of San Francisco have merged their interests inseparably with those of all San Francisco. In many respects, life in the "colonies" is indistinguishable from that of the entire American scene. Nevertheless, each group has brought over with it it's old world heritage - customs, festivals, philosophies, foods. The old ways have in many cases been carefully preserved, and each now lends its special color to the life of San Francisco.


Curtained Windows Force Visitors to Enter and See

By George and Emilia Hodel
No.3 - Little Greece

Every evening, at about 8 or 9 o'clock, the window-fronts of San Francisco's Greek coffee houses are carefully curtained. There is no way of looking in. You must either come in or stay out.

In the daytime there are no curtains. As you walk up Third street, or along Folsom, you will see groups of swarthy Balkans in the coffee halls, playing cards and sipping their glasses of thick, sweet coffee. In one corner will be a man drowsily puffing at a water-pipe.

But at night the curtains are drawn across every window and door. The reason for this privacy is a simple one.

The windows are draped so that you cannot watch the show without paying for it. Each of the rival coffee houses puts on a nightly song and dance for its patrons.

The three-piece orchestra plays strange dissonant music in the Doric scale, while dark-eyed girls dance the dances of Athens and Constantinople. The music and dancing are not formal entertainment, in the cabaret sense. They simply go with the coffee like sugar.

CAN STAY ALL EVENING

And you do not pay cabaret prices. Order a cup of Turkish coffee - which costs 10 cents - and you are welcomed to stay all evening.

The same faces are to be seen in each cafe, night after night. If you are an admirer of Mary or Katina, you go to the "Beautiful Greece." If you prefer the histrionics of Mme. Cula or the soft insolence of Cleopatra (the boys call her Cleo), you will sip your coffee at the Minerva.

Or you may like the Mavronihalis, with its shadowed-pantomimes and its actor-proprietor, or the Killkis for its wall decorations, or the Arcadia for its name. There is a wide choice.

START WITH CLEOPATRA

Tonight we start with Cleopatra, who is really our first love.

There is a good crowd in the coffee hall tonight, as there always is on a Saturday evening. At several tables prefa is in progress - an intricate Greek card game played with thirty-two cards. The roll of the dice tells us that tavli, too, is being played - not for money, but simply to decide who pays for the coffee. The Greeks are great gamblers - perhaps the world's best - but you will not see them playing at coffee houses. When they feel like plunging they go up town to the American gambling halls.

The waitress - a plump Italian girl who after eight years in the place is beginning to pick up a few words in Greek - wakes us from our reverie. Coffee? Yes. One sweet boil, and one medium boil. Waterpipe? No, thanks, not tonight.

MIXED WITH SUGAR

The fine-ground coffee is mixed with sugar and put onto a tray of sand over the fire. Soon the little brass pot is boiling, and our "sweet boil" and "medium boil" come to us.

There is not a woman in the house, except for our party and the dancers. Greek women stay at home.

Madame Cula is doing her bit just now on the little wooden platform. It is partly a dance and partly a declamation - full of stage effects and grand gestures. Cula is an old-timer - she sang for Victor recordings twenty years ago - but she still holds her crowd by virtue of her gusto and her strong stage voice.

THREE-PIECE ORCHESTRA

The singing is accompanied by an orchestra of three pieces. There is a portly clarinetist with bushy eyebrows and perspiring bald head. Beside him is a young Greek who plays the lagouta - a stringed instrument bearing an affinity to the mandolin and guitar. And presiding over the group is a thin Aremenian nesthete who labors at the cymbalon.

The cymbalon, they say, was the progenitor of the piano. It is a complicated stringed affair, played with two little hammers and occaisional quick pluckings of the strings. Playing the cymbalon keeps a man busy. Imagine playing the piano without the aid of keys.

PLAINTIVE SCALE

Greek music is almost invariably written in a plaintive Doric scale, and follows an intricate Doric scale, and follows an intricate interwoven rhythm of seven-eight and nine-four time. It is a thick, rich pattern, bitter and satisfying like our coffee itself.

And now it is Cleopatra's turn to dance. During Cula's song, Cleopatra made a tour of the room with her tambourine, gathering nickels and dimes - with perhaps an occasional dollar bill from a devoted admirer.

The two dancers will make anywhere from a dollar or two up to twenty or thirty dollars apiece. In the old days - before the depression raised its head in Little Greece as in all other quarters - there would be an occasional gala night when the girls would be really in the money. On Ethniki Eorti - the Greek Fourth of July - as much as three or four hundred dollars have been piled into the tambourines or tossed onto the platform.

NATIONAL HOLIDAY

Ethniki Eorti is Greece's great national holiday. This year it comes on March 26. It commerates the day when Greece wrested its independence from Turkey in the year 1821.

Ethniki Eorti is celebrated with double enthusiasm because of the fact that it happens to fall on one of the great holy days of the Greek Orthodox church - The Feast of the Annunciation. Elaborate services are held, and the icons are brought out and carried in procession. The usual rites of the Greek church are impressive enough - we hope some day to witness the celebration of a high holy day. Perhaps this year. But we have said that to ourselves for the last five years.

At any rate, here we are now, in the smoke-laden atmosphere of the coffee house, listening to Cleo sing a Turkish love song. The words seem from their very sound to be heavy with innuendo. The orchestra warms up to the task, and our young lagouta player joins in with an occasional encouraging shout.

Turkish music is more discordant, to the untrained Western ear, than the milder songs of Greece. It almost suggests the unassimilable strains of Far Eastern music that one hears at San Francisco's Chinese theaters.

DANCE BEGINS

And now Cleopatra is beginning to dance - An intricate half-sensuous dance, with many crouchings and whirlings. Her long mauve-colored evening dress seems strangely out of keeping with her dance. She clicks her fingers and loudly stamps her feet. Her face never loses its mask-like calm.

Cleo is a heavy-bodied girl of about 28, the toast of Little Greece. Her full mouth and Greek nose - with just the suggestion of a hook - give her a strange air, half invitation and half scorn. A useful combination for a dancer.

As we sit sipping the syrupy coffee, an ancient vendor of nuts comes into the hall, and passes from table to table. He rests his tray on the corner of our table while we look over the assortment.

"What are the little white nuts that look like clams?"

"Little white nut? She are fastiki. Love-nuts."

So love-nuts it is. Love-nuts, indeed, with the saltiest taste this side of the Embarcadero.

If the love-nuts make us thirsty, however, we shall not have far to go. For in Little Greece there are to be found the wines of Salonica and clear delicious mastiha, with its potent warmth and its flavor of anise.

MAGAZINES SOLD

Another vendor is bearing down on us with an armful of Greek magazines. We are afraid of yielding to the temptation and looking through all of his spicy literature, so we decide that it is time to go. Cleopatra and her expressionless gymnastics she is beginning to pall on us, anyway.

Shall we go into the Beautiful Greece and see Mary and Katina, or shall we walk around the corner to the Mavronihalis? Jim Mavronihalis is showing shadow pictures tonight - a sort of a pantomime Punch-and-Judy. He calls them "satires." Rival coffee house proprietors call them "Mutt and Jeff shows."

Satires or no satires, we must pay our respects to Mary and Katina.

Here at Beautiful Greece, we find the same scene, with minor variations. A large hall, with round tables and rickety chairs. Half a hundred men, smoking, talking, drinking coffee, playing cards or tavli, loafing - like ourselves. Here and there a man is smoking one of the elaborate brocaded narghiles, rented from the house at so much an hour. A girl from the streets sits a table alone, sipping her pick-me-up of Turkish coffee.

DRESSED IN BROWN

John, the proprietor, dresses completely in brown. In his brown suit and soft brown shirt he looks like some satyr from the forests of the Hellespont. We have even seen him dance a few steps of his own hand in hand with some jubilant customer.

And here the clarinetist is the very picture of Pan himself, with his lip curling sardonically over the reed. To say nothing of Mary and Katina. They will talk to you about the old days in Constantinople or boast of the time when they danced for the Emperor Ras Taffari at the royal court of Abyssinia.

We must leave all these discoveries to you, who are just as free as we are to idle an evening in the coffee houses of Little Greece.

And you will find other things on Folsom street besides Turkish coffee and Turkish dancing. You may taste the delicious glossus (never mind what it is) what is cooked in the Greek restaurants, and try the strong cheeses - caseri and the black kephalotina - that are displayed in the delicatessen windows.

RICH DISH

Then there are the enigmatic-tasting candies - halvah and loukoumi. And for those with a competent digestion there is the honey-bread, baclava, which is without exception the richest dish in our experience. And if you are lucky, you may wash down your baclava with a glass of the bitter red krassi, or the handy mastiha.

There is only one pass-word needed - epharisto - which means "thank you." It is an open sesame in Little Greece. Find out for yourself.

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