Today, the intersection of Fourth and Howard streets is an upscale spot where the Moscone Convention Center, Metreon and Yerba Buena Gardens draw thousands of visitors daily. It’s hard to imagine it was once ground zero for one of San Francisco’s most fascinating and least-known populations: hobos.

For decades, thousands of hobos called San Francisco their part-time home. Living in cheap hotels and rooming houses south of Market or in the Tenderloin, these itinerant workers came and went with the seasons, sometimes returning to the same hotels for 50 years. They kept a low profile, and when they disappeared after the Great Depression, few people noticed. But they made up a significant part of the city’s working class. And their descendants are still present today.

Hobos were rootless or semi-rootless single men who worked seasonally, going where the jobs were, usually by jumping trains. From the late 19th century until World War II, the hobo was a fixture on the American landscape. In 1917, it was estimated that at any given time, 500,000 hobos were riding the rails around the country.

San Francisco was the most popular city for hobos on the West Coast, but they were found in most American cities. In rural areas they picked fruit or harvested grain, or they worked on the railroads, in mines or in logging camps. In cities they dug ditches, worked in factories, erected buildings and did casual labor. They lived in “hobo jungles” on the outskirts of town, and in cheap hotels or rooming houses in cities.

The hobo lifestyle may appear romantic: There was a freedom to it and a certain dignity. But it was a difficult, lonely and dangerous existence. From 1901 to 1905 alone, about 24,000 hobos were killed while jumping trains. Untold numbers of others died of disease. Few men chose to become migratory laborers without a permanent address or a family. They were the products of an economic system that exploited those at the bottom of the labor force.

Hobos were not the same as tramps or bums. In “Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States,” Paul Groth cites a saying that summed up the differences: “A hobo works and wanders. A tramp dreams and wanders. A bum drinks and wanders.”

As Groth writes, “All three groups of men appeared unattached to a family; they had few possessions, enjoyed recreational drinking, worked intermittently, and traveled often.” Bums and tramps gave casual laborers a bad name, but during the heyday of migratory labor, there were far more hobos than the other two groups.

Hobos were in San Francisco by the early 1870s. In “Factories in the Fields,” the social critic Carey McWilliams notes that in 1871 the economist and editor Henry George observed migrant workers in the wheat fields who, after the harvest, in McWilliams’ words, “disappeared — into the flophouses of San Francisco — to come back next season like so many ragged crows.” While walking across California, another observer witnessed “runaway sailors, reformed horse thieves, bankrupt German scene painters (and) old soldiers ... all looking for jobs.”

The national Long Depression of 1873-1879 threw a million men out of work, increasing the hobo ranks, as did the Panic of 1893, which triggered a four-year depression. That year many unemployed workers left San Francisco to seek work as “fruit tramps” — seasonal migratory workers who picked fruit.

Significant numbers of hobos were living south of Market by the 1870s, a fact demonstrated by the transience of the neighborhood’s residents. As Alvin Averbach notes in a 1973 article in the California Historical Quarterly titled, “San Francisco’s South of Market District 1850-1960: The Emergence of a Skid Row,” in each five-year period between 1870 and 1900, only 21 percent of residents remained at the same address.

As Averbach notes, hobos were drawn to San Francisco because it had the cheapest rooms on the West Coast, established if often unethical employment agencies, and “a city lax in its morals.” By the early 20th century, one part of South of Market had become what sociologist and former hobo Nels Anderson called a “hobohemia” — a neighborhood where hobos, bums, tramps and other marginally or irregularly employed men lived and socialized.

By its nature this population ebbed and flowed, but it was sizable. Carleton Parker, an expert in migratory labor, estimated that 40,000 men were lying up in “pseudo-hibernation” in San Francisco during the winter of the 1913-14 depression.

Trivia time The previous trivia question: What year did the first container ship sail through the Golden Gate? Answer: 1958. This week’s trivia question: Which four cities did most Italian immigrants to San Francisco come from? Editor’s note Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday.

Read More

So many poor men poured into San Francisco during the winter that police took special measures to deal with the situation. In October 1922, Police Chief Daniel O’Brien issued “winter orders” calling for a “cleanup of all suspicious characters and undesirables in pool halls, dance halls, cheap hotels and lodging houses throughout the city as a measure of precaution against the winter crime wave when the floating troublesome element flock into the larger cities and commit crimes because of being without money.”

Fourth and Howard was the heart of hobohemia. As Averbach writes, “Here grew up the hoboes’ institutions: the hotels and lodging houses whose proprietors acted as bankers so that men spending their regular off-seasons in San Francisco had safekeeping for their money and would not spend it on a single spree; saloons which fed their patrons smorgasbord lunches for ten or fifteen cents and sometimes doubled as informal employment agencies; and pawnshops on Third, lower Market and the Embarcadero where a hobo might put up a tool or some clothing to pay for food, drink or shelter when he could not stretch his winter’s ‘stake’ far enough.”

Other institutions in hobohemia included no fewer than 51 secondhand stores, with 21 in 1920 on the single block of Howard between Third and Fourth. On that same block were seven employment agencies, mostly offering out-of-town work. There were several barber colleges on Fourth between Mission and Howard, where men could get free haircuts from apprentice barbers. Pool halls and movie theaters offered cheap entertainment.

The community around Fourth and Howard was a functioning if ragged one. But larger societal forces would soon sweep it away. The decline and fall of San Francisco’s hobohemia will be the subject of the next Portals.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go tosfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com