Transamerica Pyramid

To summarize first Sophie's general report on the Montgomery Block, which combines both publicly-available information, supposition triggered by our previous investigations, and SANDMAN records on why the Transamerica Pyramid was built:

• yes, it was a magnet for dreamers, artists, poets, and madmen during San Francisco's boom years leading right up to the earthquake in '06 and had proportionally more of this type than you might expect, even for a "Little Bohemia" in a North American city at the time

• yes, SANDMAN students of occult architecture firmly believe that Army engineer, land speculator, California founding father and Civil War general (!!!) Henry Wager Halleck, a.k.a. "Old Brains" built the building to be "futuristic," a fire- and earthquake-proof building that would be a prototype for keeping San Francisco safe from future calamities (and it worked!)

• maybe Halleck was either directly or indirectly inspired by History B to build the Block to harness madness/artistic energy; either way the results were clear, with the resulting suicides/suspicious deaths we've talked about before (Jack London, Nora May French, George Sterling)

• yes, with the movement of the financial center of SF to the area, the Block became a "free port" for both the fathers of San Francisco establishment and artists to mix and mingle; Sophie's not sure who this served: the forces of History B ("lunaticks, lovers, and poets") or the forces of History A (the almighty Grey Pyramid: finance, patriarchy, Western logic). One theory Sophie has is that Montgomery Block was meant to be a Casablanca where these two groups could rub shoulders freely. Out of this, of course, grew the infamous Bohemian Club/Bohemian Grove.

Now getting into Pisco Punch specifically:

• the recipe, devised by Duncan Nicol, and served at the Bank Exchange and Billiard Saloon, which was a haven for just those bankers and financiers and real estate magnates on the corner of the otherwise Bohemian block, was lost for a good long time; however a historian for the CHS, William Bronson, is trying to resurrect it at the express request of the owners of the Transamerica Pyramid. It's a great marketing ploy: resurrect the long-lost cocktail that made San Francisco's cocktail scene famous worldwide!

• Sophie thinks that the cocktail itself might have had ... qualities. No less a personage than Rudyard Kipling said, "I have a theory it is compounded of the shavings of cherubs’ wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and fragments of lost epics by dead masters." Cherubs? Lost epics? Those set off MAJOR History B alarm bells. It's clear from other first-person accounts that the drink made some people more aggressive than mere alcohol: while pisco, the Peruvian fortified wine that anchors the drink is quite potent, it's not going to give people visions or superhuman strength or any of the other things that the punch purported to do. Sophie thinks it may have had some kind of secret ingredient—the one Bronson thinks is mere gum arabic—that acted like a mild hallucinogen or other narcotic.

It is Archie's considered conclusion that the new-fangled recipe being resurrected by Bronson for the benefit of Transamerica's PR team is not dangerous, but the original one could be. In addition, bowdlerizing the original formula and promoting it at the Transamerica Pyramid bar might be a good way to memetically defuse its mythic power. As long as the new plaque doesn't mention any secret ingredients and as a result get the hoi polloi curious, the plaque could be used to SANDMAN's benefit, even if it indirectly evokes the Montgomery Block.

But, as always, there is more possibly to investigate here. This Montgomery Block business is downright fractal.