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Chapter 14: Genesis and true meaning of “just the tip”
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...
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Chapter 13: For your eyes only
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...
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Chapter 12: The phall after the Phall
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...
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Chapter 11: “H” to the “M” to the “K”
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...
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Chapter 10: Masons, millionayres & the Birthe of the Cool
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...
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Chapter 9: Hail the great erector
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...
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Chapter 8: A slyce off ye olde tip
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...
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Chapter 7: The origynal Original Ray’s
But what happened to the Tip after the Tip’s demise is most curious of all. With the chihuahua (named Spanky) as Nigel’s sole heir and Nigel’s most practiced drinking buddy as executor of his will,...
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Chapter 6: A brief Examinashun of the Management stile of Spanky, a dog
Truth is, Lord Langhorne or Nigel in his heyday could have deftly pulled the civic levers to ensure the new Embarcadero trolley circumvented the Tip. But younger, hungrier businessmen — rapacious real...
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Chapter 5: Highlights of the Hartman collection
And not statehood, which arrived in ’49 and brought with it the complications of new police and new politicians (though enough with the same old appetites), nor Civil War just over ten years later,...
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Chapter 4: Of practices Manly
By way of lamenting Langhorne’s presumed passing, the Call went on to describe his one and only heir: “Where the (apparently) late Lord Langhorne was robust of appetite and rotund of figure, his son,...
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Chapter 3: The goat of the Embarcadero
The ruins of La Punta would sit as mute testimony to the incendiary ignorance of citizen vigilantes for nearly a decade. Around it grew a dense district of publick houses catering to “saylors from the...
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Chapter 2: La Punta and the Curyous ailment
Curiously, it was the would-be assassin who immediately assumed ownership of the Plumpot-Brambley residence, at the intersection of San Ignacio di la Sangre Alley and San Somme Street, suggesting that...
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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...
View ArticleIn which is Set Forthe in grate detaile the Distinct and Compleat Tale of The...
The Tip (on 15), currently the private penthouse lounge of the advertising/design/interactive firm Duncan/Channon, has a colorful history, surprisingly, yet inextricably, interwoven with the colorful...
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