Bootlegger's Steps: The Italian Who Ran Whiskey Up a Cliff

The trail up to Mori Point from the beach below carries the name Bootlegger's Steps, and the steps earned that name honestly. Stefano Mori, an Italian immigrant, bought this nineteen-acre headland in Pacifica in eighteen eighty-eight. For the first thirty years he ran it as a farm and an inn, a modest operation on a cliff above the sea. Then Prohibition arrived.

The cove below Mori Point had precisely the qualities a rum-running operation required: accessible by small boat, sheltered from the open Pacific, hidden from the road above, and surrounded by fog most mornings. Canadian whiskey arrived by sea and was hauled up the steps to the inn, which had become simultaneously a legitimate business and a distribution hub for contraband bound for San Francisco. The arrangement ran for about thirteen years, from the start of Prohibition in nineteen twenty through its repeal in nineteen thirty-three, at roughly the same time the Moss Beach Distillery a few miles south was running its own operation with its own clientele.

The Mori family left the property in nineteen sixty-five. The land sat empty for decades, too valuable for ordinary development, too coastal for easy building. By the late nineties it was under threat of residential subdivision. A coalition of land trusts mobilized, raised three point three million dollars, and purchased it at public auction around two thousand, and the land was added to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in two thousand and two.

Today the path up the bluff carries its Prohibition-era name. The fog still rolls in from the same ocean, on the same schedule, as if it has no idea what happened here.