Frank's Place: The Bar That Could Not Be Raided

There is a building on the edge of a cliff just south of here with a view of a cove where, on foggy nights during the nineteen twenties, small boats arrived from the north carrying Canadian whiskey. The building is the Moss Beach Distillery. In its first life it was called Frank's Place, and its owner was a man named Frank Torres who built it in nineteen twenty-seven with what appears to have been an excellent understanding of how law enforcement worked on the San Mateo coast.

Torres's formula was simple: invite the right people. The San Mateo County Sheriff was a regular. The Prohibition enforcement officer assigned to this stretch of coastline was also a patron. William Randolph Hearst came up from San Simeon. Charlie Chaplin came down from San Francisco. The mystery writer Dashiell Hammett used the place as a setting. None of this was coincidental. A roadhouse whose best customers included the sheriff and the federal prohibition agent was a roadhouse that was not going to be raided, and Frank's Place was never raided.

Below the building, Canadian whiskey was beached in the cove, dragged up the cliff, and loaded into vehicles bound inland. The fog that made this coast beautiful to painters and poets made it operationally ideal for importers of contraband. The arrangement ran from nineteen twenty-seven through nineteen thirty-three, when Prohibition ended and Torres simply changed the sign.

The building is a restaurant today, and the ghost the staff claims haunts the upstairs rooms is a woman in blue, not a bootlegger. The view of the cove has not changed.