An auctioneer showed up at the Cobweb Palace on Meiggs Wharf and started accepting bids.
The San Francisco Chronicle covered it the next day. Thirty-seven years of Abe Werner’s life went on the block: the curiosities, the caged animals, the paintings. A statesman bought Abe’s grand piano for two bits. The collection of small pictures sold in lots, people bidding them down in groups of three and four. The birds and animals went to whoever would take them. I’m afraid many of them didn’t get a happy ending either.
I’d been thinking about Abe ever since I found him, first in Herbert Asbury’s The Barbary Coast, then on FoundSF (This site is so much fun!) then in period newspapers, including a San Francisco Chronicle piece from the day of the auction itself. I was working on the early research for Necromancers and Navy Grog and I made a note: use the Cobweb Palace. It was so rich and so weird and so very San Franciscoey I knew I had to work it in.
The Real Cobweb Palace was as weird as my fiction
The Cobweb Palace was a real waterfront saloon on Meiggs Wharf. Abe Werner started running it in the 1850s, and somewhere along the way he’d stopped sweeping the ceiling. The cobwebs stayed. Asbury claimed it was intentional because Abe didn’t believe in disturbing the spiders.
be served chowder and Dungeness crab to tourists on their way to the Sausalito Ferry. He kept an impressive collection of brandy and port. And the animals — parrots, monkeys, bears, whatever sailors had dragged back from somewhere— Abe took them in. He collected curiosities from all around the globe, sometimes allowing Captain to settle their tab with trade. The place was half saloon, half museum, half menagerie. Yes, 3 halfs.
Abe Werner wore a top hat. In the 1880s. By that time they had thoroughly gone out of style for day wear. The photo above shows Abe in his top hat shortly before the Palace’s closure.
His Hot Toddy was famous enough to be mentioned by name in the San Francisco Chronicle article announcing the business closing.
Is Abe Sounding Familiar?
If you’ve read Necromancers and Navy Grog, you’ve met Sol. You’ve been to Arachne’s Castle. You’ve probably noticed the cobwebs.
Sol is directly based on Abe Werner. The top hat. The high-end liquor. The tourist-facing curiosities business. The animals. All Abe.
In the novel, Sol claims his first animal was an African Grey parrot, (like Abe’s parrot ‘Warner Grandfather’ who could swear in four languages). A sailor brought him to Sol too sick to sell, Sol nursed it to health and after that he couldn’t stop taking in the other extoics nobody wanted. Sol named that parrot Werner, that’s a hat tip to Abe. A small acknowledgment, from one eccentric waterfront operator to another, across the thin line between history and fiction.
(Sailors really did bring exotic animals into San Francisco to sell during this period, it’s not something I lifted from the modern era. The Gold Rush port attracted a genuinely strange variety of cargo.)
The real Abe collected curiosities as part of his tourist trade. I kept that, but gave Sol a another layer: curiosities shop on the surface, and a genuine mystical antiquities dealership underneath. And of course, Sol was in love with the San Francisco Bay Rusalka. To be fair, for all I know the original Abe Warner was smuggling antiquities and possibly cavorting with magical creatures, but if true, it didn’t make it into any of my sources. But, according to Asbury, he was tight with most of the old time Captains and Gold Rush San Francisco was the wildest of wests so I suppose anything is possible
Abe Werner lost the Palace in 1893, he was 80. The thought of him watching everything he’d built auctioned off for cheap on a Thursday makes my heart hurt.
As many of you know Sol came to a different end but I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read yet!