Denny Carlin

The Carlins of West Portal ran three blue collar saloons in  San Francisco from the late 1930s through the early 60s.  There was a Denny’s Barrel House on the Embarcadero, on Dolores in the Mission, and in the rough, untamed heart of the Fillmore.  Peak drinking hours were mid-day from 11 to 3.  That was the drinking life in the era of union labor and ports and factories.  Mr. Dennis Carlin the son, now 77 resides in the house where his Irish parents raised him and his three sisters, middle aged children and young grandchildren in the main still reside in the City. 

Carlin’s father, Denny Senior, came here from a remote township in County Tyrone in 1910, and his mother came from Sligo in 1920.  “She wanted us all to be musicians” he says.  They were called “far-downs” in the SF Irish community because they did not come from Cork or Kerry.  Denny Senior and his identical twin brother did not receive any formal education growing up in Ireland, alone among all of their ten brothers and sisters.  The story is that a pair of infant twins beloved by their parents died, and another set of identical twins were born the next year.  So torn by the death of his babies, the first set of twins, was the father that he refused to part with this the second set of twins. “He was so involved with those twins that he used to take them everywhere with him, that’s why they never got an education.”    He took the little fellows everywhere with him, and they became known as ‘corner boys’, and never attended a day of school.  The corner boys were sent out on errands of mischief on market days, during the fair,  when competing farmers were driving their flocks of sheep and cows to town, the boys would go in and disperse the herds and slow the competing farmers’ progress to the market.  “They reason they were called the corner boys, is because when they would start some crap, they would run away and another one, they were exact twins, one of them would pop up on the corner."  Corner boys. 

Denny himself once visited their little house in Tyrone, “How the hell did they ever get ten children in that house?” he wonders today. 

The elder Carlin sisters Mary and Ellen left Tyrone for San Francisco and the brothers followed.  The no-education Carlin twins got here and found trades, John the other got into “dirt-moving” and became enormously successful as the largest contractor in Northern California,  moving mountains for the state’s many road and building projects. 

Denny Senior went down to Taft near Bakersfield where they were drilling oil and worked like a madman for eight years (watch Daniel Day Lewis in “There Will Be Blood” to see an exact depiction of that life).  Upon his return to San Francisco Senior bought a  placed called the Pacific Hotel downtown and opened a speakeasy and got into the bootlegging trade. 

Booze, labor, construction, hoteling, and politics, the Irish were entrenched here and free, and very entrepreneurial, and they stuck together and built construction companies, bars, housing, progressive labor unions, they had huge Irish picnics in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz, they went up to the river together (if you don’t know what river you don’t belong here, go home). 

Senior was a friend of Leo McCarthy’s father Daniel from Kerry by way of New Zealand, who was a successful building contractor and owned saloons including McCarthy’s on Mission;  he donated to the future California Lieutenant Governor’s first campaign

Denny’s Barrel House on the Embarcadero rented rear space facing Steuart Street to Charlie McCarthy the blacksmith.  Charlie "always had a big cigar out of his mouth”, buying anchors from the ships and clanging metal all day long.  Charlie would hang about the bar,  he had about a thousand cats.  He taught Denny how to play pool, and Denny passed along his pool shark skills to his children. 

Larry Roche his father in law was a leader in the Laborers Union, he practiced his craft out at the Marble Orchard, and he had an unfortunate pattern of getting elected to run the union and staying sober for most of his term, but falling off the wagon late in the game and having to hand the keys over so to speak, to another guy.  One of the other guys was named O’Sullivan.  The son of this O’Sullivan is named Terrence O’Sullivan, and today he heads the Laborers International Union of North America with more than 700,000 working men and women across the continent.  So there! 

Denny’s uncle John came out to San Francisco at age fifteen with his fourteen year old girlfriend in 1900.  This move demonstrated the basic enterprise of this young twin.  “ Somehow he got into the dirt business, ya know, picking up and dumping dirt”  which sounds like an extremely unpromising start in American life, but Denny continues that “he became the biggest contractor in Northern California, dirt moving, mountains you know, building roads…he used to rent the whole floor of a hotel in Redding, the governor used to come over to see him”. 

Denny senior was too small to be a longshoreman, “so they were going to see about getting him a job selling papers, but he wouldn’t have any of this bullshit, so he went down to Taft”, drilling oil for eight years.  He was called the toughest man of the crew, and he made enough money during those eight years to buy property in San Francisco when he came back to civilization.  “so he  bought the hotel and he started bootlegging, hahaha”  and he had a speakeasy in the second floor of the hotel, and he had another one up on Guerrero, Temple Grill, right across the street from the big labor temple”, the place where a lot of the labor unions where he could provide whiskey “for the laboring gentleman” .   

“It was a dying industry, the bar business started going downhill…around the 1950s”  as “there was quite an exodus you might say” of the working class out to detached homes in the Sunset and in the suburbs beyond where they would gradually leave their mid-day drinking habits behind.  “New people were coming in and they didn’t spend any time in bars, you know”. 

Other brother Patrick operated the Barrel House at Fillmore and Eddy, in the heart of the Western Addition.  “That was Jewish the... they loved him, the Jews just thought he was the greatest thing that ever happened, he used to take them all to the Irish picnics…introduce them as Fitzpatrick and Fitzgerald hahaha”.  The Irish had big picnics down on the peninsula, “they used to be great…oh, hundreds of people”. 

“I don’t think I was really geared” for running bars, “my father and myself developed a little drinking problem”, so then I quit altogether, got into the program.  “At the time I was really ashamed of it, you know, but as time went on it made such a great big difference” being sober,  “there’s no way in the world I’d be ashamed of this”. 

We had two bars and a poolroom upstair, and there was a blacksmith shop in the back, Charlie McCarthy ran it.   He had about a thousand cats, and he always had a big cigar out of his mouth…he used to rent a hotel, a whole floor, and he’d set up a kitchen in there and he got all these old decrepit seaman, he’d feed em and house em, and then they’d play cards…that was his life…and he’d go to his cats in the morning.”  

When Denny was little he used to spend time with his father at the bar.  “Even my kids, when I’d be down there working, I used to have all my kids down there, that was big thing for them, around the pool table”.  Lucky kids got a good start in life's important lessons.