Though he never apparently signed the hotel register, it is well-established (via his wife’s extensive journals) that another exalted guest of the Tip in its heyday was the Union general turned whiskey enthusiast who followed Lincoln into the White House, Ulysses Simpson Grant. A dedicated heterosexual, Grant nonetheless was constantly on the lookout in his wide travels for what his openly bitter wife called a “saucy” atmosphere. And he fell in love with the Tip. Indeed, the very day he departed the White House, President U.S. Grant headed straight for DC’s Union Station and decamped, without further ado (and without bitter wife), for San Francisco, where he purchased a modest Victorian home on California Street from which he could sally forth nightly to the “pickle circus” on the waterfront.
When Grant died — of cirrhosis — his son Adam hosted a three-day wake on the top floor of the Tip. But that was not the end of the tribute.
Where his father had turned into a bankrupt lush, Adam Grant had turned into an audacious young businessman and construction mogul, as skilled at leading men into complicated building projects as his father was leading them into battle. As San Francisco stretched vertically and Adam’s business prospered mightily, the builder made plans to raise a grand edifice to house his own expanding enterprises at 114 San Somme Street, on the corner of Bush. In fact, construction was almost complete when Grant received a tip from a city hall insider that the Tip had been formally (if surreptitiously) slated for destruction, posthaste. Without pause, he assembled his team and developed a brilliantly mad plan, a plan more than worthy of the son of the architect of the victory of Bull Run.
At two in the morning, a crew of 75, with vast mule teams, sleds, wagons, pullies, saws, awls, horse-drawn cranes and torches, made their way east on Bush to the Embarcadero. Within 90 minutes they had erected a complex scaffolding around the building. Within three-and-a-half hours, they had completely sliced the top off the Tip. With great guile and greater courage, they then strained to slide the one-story fragment off the rest of the five-story structure and onto two massive wagons, lashed together with nautical rope and drawn by 40 mules, whereupon, creaking like a massive schooner at sea, they returned with their booty to San Somme by dawn. As the City awakened for a new business day, crowds of men in bowler hats, workmen in canvas pants and ladies in long hoop-skirts carrying parasols gathered in the middle of the street to stare up in awe at what Adam Grant had wrought.
Above the 14th floor of the almost completed U.S. Grant Building was nothing less than the top of the Tip, and 75 burly men bolting it in place.
“This,” Adam announced to the astonished reporters crowding around him 14 stories below,
“is for Dad.”
A reform politician named McDonough Norris expressed his outrage at “this grand larceny on a scale never before witnessed” and demanded Grant’s arrest. But no one could find an applicable statute, and anyway this dazzling feat of both engineering and, in one tabloid columnist’s frank opinion, “balls” had already found a place in the town’s legend, just as its author, Adam Grant, had found a place in its people’s hearts.
And the old top of the Tip, all thousand-square-feet of it — many times modified, but never obliterated — is there today, its curious history explaining why a visitor travels via one elevator to the 14th floor, but must change to another for the trip from 14 to 15.
One thing that has changed, if only slightly, is the name of the building atop which perches the Tip. Two years after Adam passed away in Panama during a fishing expedition (literally, he was eaten by an alligator) at the age of 63, San Francisco was struck by the great earthquake of 1906. The US Grant Building was severely damaged. Worst of all, the Tip — “recklessly” tacked on to the building 20 years earlier (according to the city inspector’s failure analysis) – slipped its moorings, and fully half the structure dangled menacingly over Sansome (the street’s name had been modernized) for more than 17 days. City inspectors marked the entire building a loss and scheduled it for the soonest possible demolition. But, alerted by the newspapers, the stricken population managed to raise a phenomenal hue and cry. In fact, some history books note that the beginning of San Francisco’s post-quake renaissance began when the citizens, seemingly as one, stood up for the Tip.
Once again, the Tip was saved, as was the building. And following the painstaking restoration of the structures, the city’s aroused citizens further petitioned that the U.S. Grant Building be renamed the Adam Grant Building in honor of the roguish local hero who had once captured their hearts.
And so it was. And is.
For the last 20 years of his life, Adam Grant had used the Tip as a private men’s club, with membership limited to 100 of his nearest and dearest. After the restoration, Adam Grant’s heirs sold the building, and the Tip remained a private gathering place for the new owners, a somewhat shadowy group about whom history records very little — except that they were Masons. In any case, if anyone had wanted to recapture the glory days of the bar, the Volstead Act arrived in 1919 to put a stop to it.
A Langhorne or a Grant would have turned the inconveniences of Prohibition into a brand new excuse to party. But the Masons evidently lacked such instincts. Accordingly, the Tip went dry. Over the next three decades, the one-story elevator was bricked over, and the room itself left to the city’s soot and spiders. And the Tip went mostly forgotten by all.
Except for one guy.
The year was 1950. Birth of the Cool. Opening days of post-war prosperity. In music, Big Bands were done, and the heppest of the hep had turned their attention to the West Coast, where players like Stan Getz and Ernie Fathom had picked up the gauntlet of cool jazz, as thrown down in the Big Apple by Miles Davis, and run with it. Big time.
One of those fans was named Mickey Haff. And when he bought the Adam Grant Building off the stolid Masons, for him it was all about the Tip. Not only did Mickey know at least some of the history, not to mention the legend, he was excited about extending that legend into the modern era. Mickey’s vision was of a semi-private club, with a membership culled from friends, fellow jazz fans or anyone else he thought was fun, hosting semi-private performances by Miles, Bird, Getz, Fathom and Antell — the cream of contemporary (mostly cool, mostly west coast) jazz. Like so many of the super-fans, Mickey didn’t play an instrument himself. And like so many of the super-rich, Mickey, California’s biggest Cadillac dealer, had more or less lost touch with reality.
According to an exhaustive profile in Downbeat magazine, Mickey poured money into the Tip — $110,000 (in 1950 dollars; $27.9 million in 2008 dough) — adding a spectacular tufted-leather bar, four chandeliers, a giant antique mirror edged in silver, a “wine cellar in the sky” filled with the finest of France, Italy and Spain, handmade flocked wallpaper from Belgium, an eye-popping black-and-white floor and a “moonroof to let in the stars.” He restored the Tip’s famed silver-tin ceiling and got the crazy, little one-floor elevator to work again. The room shone like a jewel, like the legend it deserved to be.
And then Mickey caught a Constellation to New York to personally book Miles for the opening.
A mercurial personality, who didn’t suffer fools gladly, Miles was at first amused by this presumptuous California car dealer who had stopped by the great man’s apartment building unbidden. For four days straight, Miles talked to Mickey over the intercom. Once, he even loudly blew his horn into it, after which Mickey could hear him laughing. But Mickey, ever the used-car salesman, was undaunted. And on the fifth day, the jazzman, perhaps short on funds, invited him up. As Miles recounted in his autobiography, the two had a cocktail (Pernod on the rocks) in the apartment, and then the trumpeter invited Mickey to take them both out on the town. More or less, for a month.
Miles was on a booze and heroin bender, and “Mickey the Millionaire,” as Miles called him to everyone they met, was his perfect pigeon.
In the course of their 28 consecutive days of carousing, the “odd couple of cool,” as Whitney Balliet dubbed them in the New Yorker, cut a swath through the Big Apple wide enough to end up as, well, a Whitney Balliet item in the New Yorker (June 17, 1950 issue). They were tossed out of the “21” Club after a drunk and high Miles climbed on the back of a booth and grabbed the little electric train that ran around the perimeter of the storied main room. Miles made Mickey buy a continuous evening’s worth of drinks for everyone at Toots Shor’s, while the jazz great and Frank Sinatra cackled like high school bullies in the corner.
With Mickey’s money, they rented the presidential suite atop the Waldorf Astoria and proceeded to completely trash the place during a now legendary (among the cognoscenti) and still top-secret (among the rest of us) three-day party, where, as documented by gossip columnist Earl Wilson, guests included Frankie, a dozen Rockettes, Today Show co-hosts Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters, Joe DiMaggio, Rock Hudson, tennis great Don Budge, George C. Scott, the Swedish starlet Anita Ekberg, Albert Einstein, Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle, Don Knotts and, for a few unbelievable hours, a completely smashed Russian premier Nikita Kruschev, in New York to deliver his famous, shoe-thumping speech to the UN and evidently practicing his performance by thumping his shoe on the suite’s bar to demand Russian vodka. (Later in the evening, columnist Wilson reported in a posthumous, unpublished, transparently encoded memoir housed at NYU’s Bobst Library, “Miles D.” turned “Comrade K.” on to “H.”)
And that was just the first week.
Suffice it to say, there never was and never will be a bender quite as bent, and while Miles eventually went home and slept it off, Mickey Haff was launched into orbit. After about two more weeks, Mickey the Millionaire was hopelessly hooked on heroin and completely lost touch with his family and business associates. Six weeks after that, his banker called Mickey’s distraught wife Georgette at their vacation home in Palm Springs to say that, between the drugs and the Tip, the financial well had run dry, and it would be necessary to sell the Adam Grant Building or declare Chapter 11.
It is widely assumed — and one look at the document would seem to confirm it — that Georgette forged Mickey’s signature on the Adam Grant’s deed of sale because after July 29, 1951, Mickey Haff was nowhere to be found. Even Miles, as the musician related in his autobiography, wondered “what ever happened to that car-dealing cracker.” There were rumors, years later, that it was Mickey, under the assumed name of Neal Cassady, driving the Furthur bus for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. There were unconfirmed sightings of Haff in the sixties with LSD-avatar Tim Leary in Millbrook, NY, with the Beatles at Apple Corps headquarters in London and with Carlos Castaneda and Minnesota Twins slugger Harmon Killebrew in Oaxaca, Mexico. (But considering that most witnesses were habitual drug users, this testimony is considered highly dubious.) And so, in short order, the Grant Building passed, at a fire-sale price, into the hands of a Stockton CPA firm, Sandoz and Cedalia, whose young and, apparently, exceedingly patient principals planned to do nothing but hold it and wait for appreciation.
And when they said nothing, they meant nothing.
Over the next 25 years, the roof leaked, paint peeled, windows cracked, water puddled up in basement nooks and crannies, toilets overflowed (or took two minutes to flush) and elevators broke down, while the elevator to the Tip was again ignominiously plastered over and the fabled barrroom itself, with Mickey’s pricey Belgian wallpaper and, now, six busted windows, was inadvertently transformed into the world’s most glamourous pigeon coop.
Blue-chip businesses moved out, and various sweatshops, fake ID companies, Sea Monkey purveyors and “media agencies” (a common masquerade in those days for houses of prostitution) moved in. And still, Sandoz and Cedalia did nothing. And then in 1975, they abruptly did something. The Stockton CPAs, who had waited so patiently for a quarter of a century, sold the Adam Grant Building — for which they had paid $310,000 in 1951 — for $112 million and retired to their own island in the Caribbean.
The buyer, and still owner today, was Sealane Properties.
Or should it be quote-unquote “Sealane Properties”?
Because a Freedom of Information Act request clearly shows that the company was founded by the CIA as a front for a pilot project to warehouse munitions destined for East Asian anti-Communist insurgents in commercial properties up and down the West Coast. Apparently, the project lasted three years before it dawned on CIA planners that they were putting a goodly amount of their taxpayers at substantial risk, every day. Subsequently, according to the heavily redacted government document, the munitions were hauled away by dead of night in unmarked trucks to a Colorado facility, and no one ever knew the better (until, perhaps, now). A current Sealane executive, when asked to comment, laughed it all off, offering a somewhat weak denial in a fumbling attempt to reassure current tenants: “Ha-ha-ha, those days are long gone, long gone — actually, those days never were. Actually, no comment.”
It’s said by some old-timers at the Adam Grant Building that when the wind isn’t blowing too hard and the sun is out you can still smell the gunpowder.
Like Captain Plumpot-Brambley, the law-skirter who started it all, Sealane, by all appearances, has gone legit. They have also made an earnest, even heroic, effort to redress the wanton and widespread neglect of the Sandoz-Cedalia years. But it has literally taken decades to completely clean up the damages, repair the infrastructure and force out the financially tentative, socially marginal, semi- and fully-criminal enterprises that had effectively taken over the building — stripping it of copper pipe and wire, no less than operating capital — and to finally make the place amenable to well-respected firms like Duncan/Channon.
Duncan/Channon, the advertising/design/consulting firm, formerly of Marin County, first heard of the Adam Grant Building and, yes, the Tip from the one man who knows it all, a freelance advertising copywriter by the name of Grant Montero.
Montero is not only a distant relative of Ulysses S. and Adam Grant, he is the great-great-great grandson by her first husband of Maria Montero-Sanchez, Captain Plumpot-Brambley’s wife. A master’s candidate in US history at Princeton, where the hotel registry for the Tip is centerpiece of a 19th Century California collection, Montero was intrigued by the wild stories surrounding the saloon and soon was pursuing the story himself. In the process, he would be astonished to discover his own multiple connections to the Tip, after which it seemed “inescapable,” as he put it in his preface, that this colorful history would form the basis of his masters thesis, “Just The Tip: Alcoholism, Sexuality and Decadence in Early San Francisco.” (Which is precisely the basis of this website entry.)
When executive creative director Parker Channon mentioned to Montero, his go-to freelancer, that Duncan/Channon was considering a move south to the city and was looking for a building with “character,” Montero instantly replied that he had just the place. “Maybe more character than you even bargained for.” Whereupon the copywriter spun the short version of his tale for the instantly impatient Channon and then sent over a copy of his thesis. The D/C partners were immediately on the phone to Sealane, insisting that they not only see the 14th floor, but the Tip on 15 as well.
It was not clear that the Sealane representative on the phone had ever even heard of the Tip, let alone seen it. And the moment the prospective tenants and the Sealane guy creaked open that dusty door to reveal the storied room — now barely visible behind a dense skein of cobwebs — it was clear that the next chapter in the story was about to be written. Above the bar was the name “The Tip” and beneath it, in barely legible Latin, the motto: “We never give you the shaft.”
The D/C guys were in love.
Actually, they were probably in love from the moment they finished Grant Montero’s book. And over the next six months, like modern-day (if way poorer) Mickey the Millionaires, in the face of apopleptic financial advisors and sobbing significant others, the three — P. Channon, A. Berkenfield and R. Duncan — would maniacally pour their company’s and then their own fortunes into this magically bewitching place high atop the old Adam Grant.
And so it was that on 29 March 2008, a man in a bunny suit clipped the satin ribbon across the doorway and “The Tip on 15,” as the new logo outside had styled it, was re-opened for business in its 221st year.
Inside, the vast throng of guests marveled at the tufted-leather bar and silver-edged mirror, the moonroof and flocked wallpaper, the “wine cellar in the sky” and the viticultural best of France, Italy and Spain. Indeed, Mickey Haff would have felt right at home. And as the debauchery commenced, as the drinking turned into dancing and nudity and bizarre sex and more drinking, so would Nigel Langhorne and Spanky and the high-living Lord Lucky, the heroic Adam Grant and his drunken dad Ulysses, Ivanovich the bartending blacksmith and maybe even the man who erected the original residence on San Somme and surely never imagined what it would become — the ex-pirate Plumpot-Brambley, back from the sea looking for the best damn time in the whole damn town.
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