Early San Francisco was a profoundly strange city. The Gold Rush exploded a sleepy port into an expensive haven of vice and villainy, designed to separate miners and sailors from their cash with booze, prostitution, and blunt objects. The dense area of houses of ill-repute, named the Barbary Coast, was a real-life version of that Simpsons song about New Orleans. Asbury's book is from 1933, and takes pretty much every lurid newspaper article from the time at face value. There are some interesting anecdotes about such characters as Dirty Tom McAlear, who would eat or drink anything for a few cents and hadn't had a bath in fifteen years, to wars between proprietors of vice and the vigilant Vigilance Committee, or the various ruses used to shanghai sailors onto new ships, but overall this book is just long, early 20th century scandalizing about admittedly very bad vice, without much of an organizing framework.