"Blue Velvet" – an often-puzzling concoction of small-town values mixed with a severed ear, kinky sex, drug use and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer – was a critical success.

The movie shot over the course of about 12 weeks in late 1985 and early 1986, using locations such as the Carolina Apartments and the Barbary Coast bar (Hopper's line "this is it" has long been ...

For a few months in 1919, visitors to San Francisco's Barbary Coast who wandered into a cellar nightclub called the Jupiter might have seen a slender, elegantly dressed piano player leading a 10 ...

A Montana cattleman comes to scoff at the pre-earthquake Barbary Coast of San Francisco and stays to like it; a 'gentleman' gambler runs the most successful joint in the district until the guy ...

Afterwards, the Barbary Coast was saved by Prohibition, first by Indiana's prohibition on the sale of liquor, and then by a constitutional amendment that made Americans everywhere flatout criminals.

The Barbary Coast begins with The Gold Rush in 1849 which saw the biggest influx of gold-seekers, gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians and other felonious parasites to the infant city.