Sam Spade’s Apartment

William P. Arney

© 2005

I bought a hat—a grey fedora. That’s what started it all.

When I first moved to San Francisco back in 1981, I had a one-way plane ticket, two suitcases, and a job interview. I got the job, and after paying off some immediate expenses, bought the hat to memorialize my success.

I became a hat wearer, which involves some lifestyle adjustments. There are limitations of hair style. One must adjust to the hat, as the hat adjusts to the wearer. In order to wear a hat correctly, one must become comfortable with it. Whenever possible, one must remove the hat indoors. Otherwise it looks like part of a costume. In most cases, one must wear a coat and tie when wearing a hat—particularly a fedora. A hat can be a divider. Some people actually resent hat wearers. There are benefits, however. One can tip one’s hat to well-dressed blue-haired ladies, who really get a kick out of it. Some younger women like it, too. And of course, when it rains, one’s head stays dry.

That winter of 1981-82 was very rainy in San Francisco, so the hat was often accompanied by a trench coat. That’s when people started telling me about Sam Spade and Dashiell Hammett. I picked up some Hammett paperbacks and wound up on Don Herron’s Dashiell Hammett Walking Tour. Hammett names specific addresses in a lot of his stories, and most of those locations are within a few blocks of each other in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. That’s very conducive to a walking tour. One notable stop on the tour was 891 Post Street, where Hammett lived when he wrote his first three novels, including The Maltese Falcon. It was here that Hammett gained the fame that would propel him to riches and success. It was his last address in San Francisco, before leaving for the bright lights of New York and Hollywood.

Eleven years later, suddenly in desperate need of a new residence, I happen to pass 891 Post Street in a taxi. There was a “for rent” sign on the building, so I pulled over the cab and wrote down the phone number. Apartment #401 was the first unit they showed me, and Don had mentioned the tradition of that being the Hammett apartment. I moved in at the beginning of December, 1993. After reading The Maltese Falcon there, it became obvious that it was the residence of Sam Spade, and consequently, Hammett.

If it were not for The Maltese Falcon, we would not be able to identify the specific apartment as Hammett’s. Although Hammett was listed as living at 891 Post Street in the San Francisco City Directory, no specific apartment was identified. Likewise the return addresses on his correspondence. In the novel, however, there are three scenes that take place in Spade’s apartment, and Hammett provides ample architectural detail. Inside the corridor door, there is a passageway, with a bend in it, and a closet—just like in the novel. There is a door between the passageway and the living room, which Hammett calls a bedroom when the wall bed is down (the real apartment is a one-room studio). Just outside the living room door is the door to the bathroom, which is laid out so that Sam Spade can sit on the edge of the tub, put his pistols on the seat in front of him, and still leave enough room for Brigid O’Shaughnessy to take off her clothes without blocking Spade’s view of the door to the passageway. The tub and toilet are the original fixtures from the 1917 construction. Since it is inconceivable that Hammett would have lived in one apartment in the building and house his fictional detective in another, we can conclude that both Hammett and Spade lived in apartment #401.

The reason the place was vacant was that the contractor responsible for repairing the damage of the previous tenants had been paid before laying the vinyl floor tile in the kitchen, and then disappeared. I got a contractor friend to come in and take care of that, for which I got twenty-five dollars per month knocked off the rent. While he was working I was moving things around and bumped into the living room door frame. Paint chipped off old finished woodwork and there was beautiful wood grain underneath. It was then that I hit upon the idea of stripping and refinishing the woodwork in the apartment, and generally restoring it to what it would have looked like in the late 1920s. The molded baseboards are fourteen inches tall. There is a complex crown molding extending ten inches down the wall as well as into the ceiling. The door frames are topped with architraves. The windows are multiple panels of separated lights. If I had any idea what I was really getting into, I think I would have taken faux-woodwork painting classes. Nevertheless, I set out to scrape the paint off all the woodwork.

I didn’t know if Don Herron was still conducting the Dashiell Hammett walking tour, or even that he was still alive. I never expected anyone to ever know what I had done. I would know. That was enough. But a few months later I emerged from the building on a Saturday afternoon to find Don across the street with a group of tourists. I approached him and told him that he could bring his tour groups through the place. He’s been doing it ever since. It helps inspire me to get up and clean the apartment once in a while.

The furnishings are all mentioned in the novel. When the phone rings at 2:05 the night of his partner’s killing, Spade, in reaching for it, knocks his cigarette lighter off the table. It thuds softly on “the carpeted floor.” So the floor has a rug, and this was before wall-to-wall carpeting. There are also frequent references to “the padded rocker”, “the sofa by the windows”, and “the armchair by the table.” Based on the position of the wall-bed in the layout of the apartment, there are not many ways those pieces of furniture can be arranged in the twelve-by-fifteen foot room.

Some props were in order. After Hammett’s daughter, Jo, first came up to see the place (Spring/Summer, 1994), she mailed me an old travel alarm of her dad’s. Oddly enough, the hands were stopped at five minutes past two when I unwrapped it. Don Herron’s walking tour groups usually show up about that same time, albeit PM. To them, it looks like the travel alarm works!

I got a green-shaded banker’s lamp, a replica black bird, a 1923 typewriter, and a tinny alarm clock mounted on a copy of Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America.

That book is mentioned in the scene where Spade is woken by the phone call informing him that his partner’s been murdered:

“A tinny alarm clock, insecurely mounted on a corner of Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America—face down on the table—held its hands at five minutes past two.”

(Thomas) Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America is significant, because it is also referred to in The Thin Man (1933). Don Herron tells me there is another reference to it in a book review Hammett wrote, and so I have concluded that it is most likely the only possession Hammett took along to New York after leaving 891 Post Street. It is a 1910 publication, written by a retired San Francisco police captain, so it’s very unlikely that Hammett would have been able to acquire another copy in New York. The story goes that when Hammett sent The Thin Man to Knopf, they sent it back asking for another 1500 words of length. So Hammett created a scene where Nick Charles pulls Duke off a shelf in Mimi’s apartment and reads directly from it. Having lengthened the novel in this easy manner, Hammett sent it off for publication.

I put in a search request for Duke at the Argonaut Book Store, nearby on Sutter Street. The Argonaut deals in rare and out-of-print books. There is a scene from “Vertigo” filmed there in the shop. They found me a first edition several years ago, and I understand it’s been recently reprinted in paperback.

I found it odd that Hammett took along Duke, but apparently left his typewriter behind in San Francisco. I’m guessing it was not a portable. Publisher Vince Emery once went to examine the Hammett papers in Austin, and concluded that everything Hammett wrote—novels, letters, and short stories—was written on a single typewriter right up to his departure from San Francisco in late 1929. The last thing written on that typewriter was a letter to his publisher, dated mid-September, and return-addressed to 891 Post Street. The next item in the archive is a letter from NYC, written on a different typewriter and dated mid-October, 1929. Whatever happened to that original “Holy Grail” typewriter is unknown.

The paint scraping progressed rapidly during a period of unemployment in 1994, but then my enthusiasm waned, until the building owners instituted a seismic upgrade program. That program involved pulling up the wall-to-wall carpets, cutting into the hardwood floors, bolting the floor joists to the brick walls, replacing the wood flooring with plywood, and then laying down the same old carpets. Since it was my objective to restore the place to what it must have looked like in 1928, the flooring had to be saved. That involved pulling up many of the floor boards, numbering and stacking them, and then laying them back down after the seismic work was done. Of course, putting the flooring back down was much more challenging than pulling it up. When that was finally achieved, momentum was lost and work ceased.

In mid-2004, I was contacted by Julie Rivet and Richard Layman about the upcoming celebration of the 75^th anniversary of the publication of The Maltese Falcon. Julie Rivet is Hammett’s granddaughter. Rick Layman wrote an early biography of Hammett, Shadow Man (1981), and has since published a number of valuable Hammett resource books. Both Rick and Julie had been involved in many Hammett events taking place in San Francisco over the years, and I was happy to help any way that I could. Their effort was nation-wide, but the epicenter of the celebration would naturally take place in San Francisco. Sally Reed, Executive Director of Friends of Libraries, USA, was on board to have 891 Post Street designated a National Literary Landmark, complete with bronze plaque. It must be rare that a famous author and his most famous character both lived in a location occupied by someone crazy enough to be restoring a rental unit. There were to be library displays coast-to-coast, speaking engagements, and panel discussions. Rick had contacted Senator Dianne Feinstein, who sponsored a resolution in the US Senate, honoring the anniversary.

What all this meant to me personally was that I was going to have to get back in gear on the restoration of the apartment. I finally got serious about that work several months ahead of the plaque event. I myself had suggested the date of March 19^th, because I knew Jo Hammett was going to be in town for a speaking engagement that weekend. I wanted to save her a trip up from her home in southern California, so I had only myself to blame for the deadline.

Almost all the paint had been scraped from the woodwork, but it still had to be sanded and stained. I had found an original wood-and-glass door in the basement to hang between the corridor and living room/bedroom, but it had to be finished, re-glazed, and hung. I had an armchair and a table, and a period padded rocker, but I still had no sofa or rug. I went diligently to work against this mountain of things to do, knowing that I could never finish on time, hopeful that I could get enough done for a respectable showing.

Into this breach stepped Joe Hagan. Joe lives around the corner from me, at Sutter and Leavenworth Streets, and we’ve been close friends for nearly twenty years. Joe was enjoying the benefits of unemployment, and for reasons I will never fully understand but for which I am eternally thankful, was anxious to jump in and help make this all happen. After much begging and pleading, I was able to wrangle an extra set of keys out of the building management. For weeks leading up to the deadline, Joe would come into my apartment and work while I was at the office. I came home each night to the sound of power tools, the smell of sawdust, and the site of all my possessions piled into the middle of the room.

Joe stood shoulder to shoulder with me as we planned and executed enough of the restoration to make a very respectable showing of the apartment on the day of the event. That plaque event featured an open house in my apartment. The night before, Joe, my mom (who had come out from Peoria for this), friend Barbara Vaughn and I were up very late with the final touches. The apartment was vacuumed and scrubbed. Pictures were hung in the passageway, the rug was laid and the plastic was pulled off the sofa. The plaque had just been mounted on the building that afternoon. I got to bed around 5:00 AM, with the tinny alarm clock set for 8:00.

That next morning I rose with a groan, and after getting dressed and talking to mom on the phone in her hotel down the street, I thought I could get in a cup of coffee and a croissant before the open house guests began arriving at ten. No such luck. In the building lobby I ran into an early arrival at half past nine—a pleasant lady in red. My first guest was none other than Sally Reed, Executive Director of FOLUSA.

The event was a great success. My apartment looked so much like a museum that several guests questioned if anyone actually lived there. About sixty people visited my rooms in shifts that morning, and all the Hammetts came up for pictures. I am especially proud that I was able to get Jo Hammett up in the elevator. When she visited in 1994 she had been trapped in that elevator for upwards of twenty minutes. After the open house and the unveiling of the plaque, there was a lovely luncheon sponsored by John Konstin of John’s Grill. That restaurant had been similarly designated a Literary Landmark years before. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade eats dinner there. John’s Grill has had a major role in every San Francisco Dashiell Hammett event, and John Konstin is always the consummate host. At the luncheon, the Hammett’s awarded me a rare photograph of Dashiell. I was moved almost beyond words.

After the luncheon, a core group of us spent the rest of the afternoon and evening tearing a celebratory streak through San Francisco. After returning my mother to her hotel for the night, Joe Hagan and I returned to my apartment. Some gloating was in order, and we did it with verve. But after some of that, we began to plan the completion of the restoration. Wish us luck.