Loren -
The Lick House, where he moved after his travels abroad, was a bit fancier than the nearby Occidental Hotel. Both gone-gone after the big quake and fire or before. I led a walk at the time of the ATA conference here in 2011, with any info I could find at the time. I know nothing about another abode, but Telegraph Hill is just up the street. I think he lived at Lick House until he left town forever in 1866, and it's where he completed Jumping Frog and Innocents Abroad, signed and posted them to NYC for publishing. The most notorious Chinese sex slave area was close by. Now the area next door is a historic preservation zone called The Barbary Coast.
If you haven't visited TWAIN LANE, in the shadow of the TransAmerica Pyramid at the foot of Columbus Avenue (which was not there in the 1860s), within what was named the Montgomery Block, and the original U.S. Mint site nearby (facade and a small pioneer museum inside on Pacific Avenue - not the 5th Street & Mission Mint Building built later, that is now empty). I'll be glad to walk you to those spots, and to the short alley that was for a time named Twain Alley, on Market Street. That one got its old name back, Annie Alley, and
may be the spot where the disputed "friend" Tom Sawyer later opened a liquor, "spirits & wine" store called The Original Tom Sawyer. And there is a Mark Twain Hotel not far away, with some items on display.
Several short streets up and down Columbus are now named for writers who were influential in SF, a project begun by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Bookstore sits on Broadway by Kerouac Alley, where we all settled for brews after the walk. The far end of Columbus is a nice small square named for Joseph Conrad (Korzeniowski), who never lived there, but might have visited. The road (and train) to the Cliff House are no longer, but Geary Boulevard, which replaced the former toll road to the ocean, will get you there by car or autobus.
One of the past editors at the MT Papers curated a display about Twain's SF for the Bank of America downtown in the 1990s, but I never saw it and don't know if it was archived in any manner. Will try to find out. And the Wells Fargo Museum nearby usually has some mention of Twain, if not documents.
Bernard DeVoto wrote, in his Twain bio: "All the rest of Mark Twain's books are embryonic in what he had written by December 1866, when he went east." So your trip wouldn't be complete without setting foot here.
Richard R, responding to:
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> From: Loren Ghiglione <[log in to unmask]>
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>Subject: Twain's residences in San Francisco
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>I read somewhere that Twain lived on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. If t=
>hat is true, does anyone have an address or addresses? A residence other t=
>han the Occidental Hotel?
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