History of The Tip

Chapter 1: Hanged by the Necke untill Ded

By one name or another, the Tip has been an establishment “licenced to purvey Strong Drinke” (as its original charter had it) nearly continuously since 1786. The building that would become the first of this long line of drinking establishments was constructed in 1777 as the private residence of Captain Frederick Plumpot-Brambley and his second wife Maria Montero-Sanchez. Plumpot-Brambley had been a well-known pirate in the Gulf of Mexico who, by a judicious change of name (in his pirate days he was known as Furious Freddy Towser), a generous distribution of some ill-gained booty and a politically shrewd marriage (Maria was the illegitimate daughter of California’s first Spanish Governor), was able to acquire a waterfront land grant in San Francisco and, in modern parlance, “go legit.”

His efforts to re-join polite society would not last long. Within 18 months, just as he was setting in motion a plot to have his second wife killed by a blacksmith, Plumpot-Brambley was arrested by troops of the Governor for the murder of his first wife, Nelly Suggins, whom he had apparently poisoned in order to marry up. Three days later he was hanged from an oak tree on Hangman – now Potrero – Hill, and Maria fled to the nunnery at Mission Dolores, where you can see her grave today.

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Next · Chapter 2
La Punta and the Curyous ailment