Prof. Jacob Londella: Tattooer of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown
Researched & Written by Carmen Nyssen
At the turn of the century in San Francisco’s old Chinatown (c. 1899-1906), a visitor seeking the thrill of a tattoo wouldn’t have to look far for Prof. Jacob Londella’s tattoo studio. It sat at the heart of the district, on the notorious 400 Dupont Street block, amidst a fusion of Chinese cultural fare, drinking dens, brothels, and shooting galleries, mere steps uphill from the southern Bush Street entrance. Many a day-tripping tourist, seafaring sailor, and saloon-scouring scoundrel chasing the lore of old Chinatown began their adventure on this incline, and by Londella’s word, the gamut of them had their limbs etched with his designs. Within such lurid surroundings, even the untattooed hoi polloi could have hardly passed by his tattooing quarters without some romantic musings on the nature of his profession.
Yet, while Chinatown’s exotic and nefarious essence may have been an inherent business attractant, “J. Londella, Expert Tattooist,” didn’t simply blend into the scene. He was a dynamic part of its allure. One lavish 1903 advertisement, published in an Orpheum Theatre program, beckoned uptown customers to his 430 Dupont Street tattoo studio with a photo of his handsome, well-groomed profile and a list of his impressive credentials—from his artistic ability to his modern electric tattooing, as well as his offerings of assorted ink colors and the latest European and Japanese tattoo designs.
Londella’s hustle extended beyond just tattooing proficiency, too. He promised “no amateurs to work on you—all artists,” as though he had a talented, sizeable crew on hand. But the “assisted by J. Voehl, artist and designer” line in his ad was actually an advertising ploy—Voehl wasn’t a different tattoo artist; Londella’s real name was Voehl! The other extra touch he added, providing a “private room for ladies,” both opened the door to a broader range of business and offset the scandal of less-savory brothel activities near his tattoo shop.
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Not only did Londella’s polished professionalism set him above as a tattooer, it set him apart from Dupont Street’s dodgy establishments—all while still aligning him with the greater scene. As with other rough-and-tumble districts that hosted tattooers, San Francisco’s old Chinatown was definable by a unique and diverse interplay of people and events. It was at once a treasure of Chinese cultural wonders and a frenzied, debaucherous sector with many facets. The sacred Chinese traditions that ruled within its confines contrasted starkly with its darker side consisting of opium dens, slave prostitution, gambling, and highbinder vigilante justice. The numerous ‘Wild West’ style saloons and shooting galleries carried-over from Gold Rush days, and the decades of global influences introduced by seafarers from ports around the world, added all the more dimension to the mix.
In a 1900 interview, Londella said he tattooed “upon the limbs, not long ago [Pre-1899], of Mrs. Frank Caldwell, the actress: Snake, horses, peacock, butterflies, flowers, anchor, parrots, cockatoo, checkered stockings, necklace, eagles, stars, flag, hearts, shields, leaves and fan.” San Francisco Examiner. May 13, 1900. Pg. 24.
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As for Londella, having started his career with dime museums and circuses, he had mastered the art of flamboyant self-promotion in his tattoo advertising, and juxtaposed it against Chinatown’s seedy backdrop. But he didn’t substitute glitz for grit. Working his needle upon the motley ranks required some measure of hardiness, and given his 1894 fine for public fighting in Galveston, Texas, he was clearly capable of handling that side of business. With its high-brow veneer in a low-brow scene, his tattoo operation resonated with the district’s ever-converging diversities and effectively catered to its varied clientele.
Londella’s A-Class Tattoo Shopfront
Photographer Arnold Genthe, who was awed by Chinatown’s Asian culture, spent years candidly documenting it with his camera. In trying to capture the spirit of Chinese tradition, Genthe usually cropped-out any hints of Western culture from his photos. However, two c.1899-1906 images depicting the mostly Westernized businesses on the 400 block of Dupont Street, show Londella’s standout No. 430 shopfront, with the neat, bold lettering “Londella” on the sign above the entrance and the word “Tattooer” painted down the lefthand side of the doorway. (Also note the shooting gallery target emblems on the buildings along the block).
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Chinatown Tattoo Sophisticates
Despite the dangers lurking in old Chinatown, women were no stranger to its streets or Londella’s tattooing establishment. In fact, according to a May 13, 1900 San Francisco Examiner feature, his business brought him into contact with all sorts of men, women and children—some were motivated by London, England’s high-society ‘tattoo trend,’ and others simply stepped into his shop on a whim.
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As noted in an August 31, 1902 San Francisco Examiner article, entitled “The New Rage for Tattooing,” Londella had once been visited by a sightseeing couple who were curious about his practices, but the husband wouldn’t allow his wife to get tattooed; later on, she returned to have her skin-etching done without his approval. The same article goes on to mention a number of curious customers, freemasons, and famous people with tattoos. (Note the stylus-like electric tattoo machine in the below illustration).
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Chinatown Tattoo Scalawags
Of all Londella’s patrons, the regular scalawags haunting Dupont Street were undoubtedly the real boon to business, and probably the reason behind his specialty of removing backfired gun powder marks—often these tell-tale “tattoos” resulted from illicit gunslinging.
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Each night in the seedy line-up of drinking dives, brothels, and shooting galleries—along the stretch between Pine Street, to the north, and Bush Street, to the south—there was at least one, usually murderous, shoot-out. As reported in countless newspaper reports, in the aftermath of such turmoil, the guilty party wasn’t always identified right away, or at all. Sometimes one only had to cover up evidence of a misdeed (i.e. gun powder marks) to outwit justice, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Londella was the keeper of a secret or two.
The wild element that sprang to life at night dominated the Dupont Street scene in the businesses near Londella’s shop. To either side of his tattoo studio sat one raucous joint or another that would have supplied a steady customer stream in the form of old salts, gamblers, gangsters, and general riff raff:
- No. 406: The Klondike saloon and shooting gallery
- No. 416: Adolph Oppenheim’s shooting gallery
- No. 424: May Burke’s brothel
- No. 432: The Gaiety Saloon
- No. 436: Deals shooting gallery
The most ill-reputed dive of them all was Billy Abbott’s combination saloon-gambling den-brothel, which was a few doors away from Londella’s place at No. 414-416. It was such a magnet for lawlessness, the police force nicknamed the 400 block of Dupont Street the “Billy Abbott block.”
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The photo below depicts a deceptively calm daytime scene at the corner of Bush and Dupont Street, looking north towards Prof. Londella’s No. 430 tattoo studio. Note the lettering on Abbott’s notorious drinking den (roof) and on the Klondike’s Wild West style building (on the side) just below it.
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Chinatown Tattoo Studio Ablaze
Like so many tattooers throughout history who forged through sordid settings with ingenuity and fortitude, Prof. Jacob Londella conducted a respectable business in old Chinatown for seven years, marking an array of customers with his creative compositions. But on April 18, 1906, this era of the legendary sector came to an end, when a massive earthquake toppled buildings and ignited huge blazes of fire that burned almost all of San Francisco to the ground.
As a Chancellor Commander of the Knights of Pythias, Londella remained in San Francisco a while longer, and helped with emergency fundraising and other rescue efforts before moving on. Afterward, he quit tattooing, at least in any real capacity. According to family stories passed down to his nephew, all of his worldly possessions and his tattoo equipment were destroyed in the fires—it was most certainly a disheartening loss, compounded by the passing of old Chinatown’s lively and debauched Dupont Street, which had defined the greater part of his career.
Londella’s Post-Tattooing Years
In following years, Londella discarded his alias and returned to using his birth name Jacob Voehl; except for when he adopted the moniker “Rags Londella” for his clown act, or “J. Voehl Barnold,” when he was managing Charles Barnold’s trained dogs. Around 1912-1913, he married a vaudeville actress and occasionally performed on stage. But eventually, he gave up show business and settled in San Lorenzo, California, where he operated a farm and worked for the local water department. He died there November 25, 1933, at the age of 62.
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A Chinatown Tattooer via Genthe & Irwin
Jacob Londella’s tattoo work and other effects may not have survived for posterity, but writer, Will Irwin, and photographer, Arnold Genthe, both Bohemian Club members, are responsible for preserving some remnants of his history. The Bohemian Club was an eclectic bunch of artists, authors, and adventurers, who immersed themselves in the zeitgeist of the era. Irwin and Genthe, two San Francisco transplants, were particularly drawn to Chinatown’s mystique, and through their individual talents and works created a romanticized portrayal of its culture. It’s not clear how aware they were of Londella’s role in the mixt Chinatown scene, but it seems they had encountered him or his tattoo studio in some regard.
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Arnold Genthe, of course, had photographed Londella’s shopfront sometime between 1899 to 1906. In roughly the same period, in 1904, Will Irwin had published a compilation of fictional short stories, The Picaroons, based on the adventures of “a band of San Francisco down-and-outers,” co-authored with Gelett Burgess. One of the tales, “The Story of the Dermograph Artist,” about an unnamed San Francisco waterfront tattooer who styled himself a true artist, was possibly inspired by Londella.
“You see, this ain’t my regular job. I’m working here because my profession is played out in San Francisco. I’m a dermograph artist. What’s that? Oh, it’s what most people call a tattooer. But don’t you think we’ve got as much right to be called artists as the fellows that slap paint on cloth with the brush?”
“The Dermograph Artist,” The Picaroons. Will Irwin & Gelett Burgess
In March of 1905, the story was printed in nationwide newspapers, and by June of that year, it had been repurposed for another nationally published story, “Told to Uncle Eb at Coney.” This time the tattooer “Fondella,” was given a name, and the story’s premise was that he had relocated from San Francisco to Coney Island.
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As a related aside, several years beforehand, on August 31, 1902, Londella had earned a flattering full-page spread in the San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday edition American Weekly Magazine. The piece divulged that Genthe and Irwin’s good friend and writer, Frank Norris, had tattoos, as well as fellow Bohemian Club members, Nathaniel Jones Brittan and Arthur Spear. It didn’t specify, however, as to whether Londella, or another tattooer, had executed them.
Read more about the tattoo escapades of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club members and their connection to tattoo artist “Apache Harry,” and their myriad other threads of influence, at Buzzworthy Tattoo History research composition: The Loryeas: A Jewish Immigrant Family’s Curious Connections with Tattooing
Old Chinatown Eulogies
In historical commentary, writers and photographers, such as Genthe and Irwin, have been criticized for their idealized portrayals of Chinatown. But for tattoo history’s purpose, at least, their vivid verbal and visual works, even if exaggerated, powerfully illustrate the hardcore scene a tattooer had to navigate to make a living, as well as, pave the way for future generations.
[Pre-Earthquake] …it was a “bit of the mystic, suggestive East, so modified by the West, that it was neither Oriental nor yet Occidental—but just Chinatown.”
[Post-Earthquake] “Where the vivid carouse and romance of Dupont and Kearny streets had been, a black hollow, mysterious, awful, as though the Pit had taken Hell’s Half Acre back to itself…”
Will Irwin’s commentary for Arnold Genthe’s 1908 Old Chinatown pictorial book.
“The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone from heaven was scarcely more complete than the devastation of Chinatown and the Barbary Coast by fire and earthquake from, perhaps, the same source.”
The Barbary Coast. Herbert Asbury. 1933.
Old Chinatown-Tattoo Notes:
Jacob Londella (1871-1933) wasn’t the only ‘turn of the century’ era tattooer in San Francisco. Hugo Spitzer had settled there in the 1890s and remained for a good number of years; Walter M. Lyons was there during the 1906 earthquake; and Japanese tattoo artists, such as Hori Toyo and F. Suhso, had passed through during the same era. But Londella was the mainstay tattooer in old Chinatown from 1899-1906.
Dupont Street, now Grant Street and still known as “Du Pon Gai” to locals, was established in 1835, as Calle de la Fundacion. By the late 1840s Gold Rush era, it had become the starting point for the Chinatown enclave.
Arnold Genthe’s pre-Earthquake photos of old Chinatown only survived the fires, because they were in a fireproof bank vault. They are the only known photos of the district’s Chinese culture from this era in existence. See: Genthe Collection, Library of Congress.
Billy Abbott (1862-1932), more infamously known as “King of the Tenderloin,” was a notorious character among the slum districts of San Francisco. Herbert Asbury mentions some of Abbott’s exploits in his book The Barbary Coast, pg. 264. Asbury, coincidentally, was a prolific documenter of big city underworld’s and wrote several books to this end, including The Gangs of New York, which mentions a gang-related incident connected to New York City’s famous 1800s tattooer, Martin Hildrebrandt. See Buzzworthy Tattoo History research article: Saloon-Tattoo Shops of New York City’s 4th Ward.
Portland, Oregon’s Hugo V. Fritz, bartender-manager at the tattoo artist friendly Erickson’s Saloon, had moved from San Francisco just prior to the earthquake. In the aftermath of the earthquake, he and proprietor Gus Erickson, held fundraisers at the saloon to assist victims. For more on Erickson’s and the Portland tattoo scene, see Buzzworthy Tattoo History research feature: Portland Oregon’s Early Tattoo Traditions
Aussie-American tattooer, Walter M. Lyons, relayed his San Francisco earthquake story in interviews. Read about it in the Buzzworthy Tattoo History biographical overview: Walter Lyons bio.
Also see Buzzworthy Tattoo History study: The Case of an Obscure Tattooer: Prof. J.L. Hayes
Published: 03/21/2019
Questions or Comments? Email:
carmennyssen@buzzworthytattoo.com
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