By Nora Sawyer, Sausalito Historical Society
Recently, the Valhalla compound on Sausalito’s waterfront once again made headlines when it hit the market for $11.8 million. First built as a German Biergarten in 1893, the property is accustomed to the spotlight. In its original incarnation, as the Walhalla, it served as a bar, restaurant and dance hall until 1919. Billed as a “Soft Drink Parlor” during Prohibition, the restaurant’s mild moniker cloaked a less-than sober interior. A 1921 raid netted 478 quarts of illegal spirits, and in 1932, Lester Joseph Gillis (more commonly known as Baby Face Nelson) tended bar.
When prohibition ended, the Walhalla once again became a legitimate bar, now with inexpensive rooms that were rented out to artists. In 1947, it played a cameo role in Orson Wells’ Lady from Shanghai. Then, in 1948, it was purchased by one Sally Stanford of San Francisco.
A bust of Sally Stanford joined Historical Society members during Sausalito’s 125th anniversary celebration
Of course, the restaurant was not Sally Stanford’s first business venture. As the Sausalito News noted in 1948 (the first time Stanford’s name appeared the Sausalito paper) Stanford was “frequently in the toils of the law in San Francisco for operating ‘colorful’ establishments.” Put more plainly, she was one of San Francisco’s most notorious madams.
After years at the forefront of San Francisco’s more scandalous social scenes, Stanford was ready for a change. In her autobiography The Lady of the House, she writes, “I knew what I wanted to be: an ex-madam.” Long keen on starting her own “smart restaurant,” and familiar with fine food and drink, she soon found an ideal location, as detailed in her autobiography, The Lady of the House:
A few minutes across the Golden Gate Bridge, strung along the hillsides of a beautiful cove, is a little town called Sausalito. It hangs over the water like pleasant picturesque scenes from the French Riviera. At the end of a dead-end street, hanging over a huge pier with a view of the Bay and San Francisco, was a small barnlike building with a tattered sign Valhalla. It looked good to me so I bought it. This would be my new home, a new Sally’s.
There was plenty of work to be done. One of the first things Stanford did was buy a large antique safe for the restaurant. Filled with cash (her preferred way of paying for the renovations), it had just been placed in the restaurant’s main hall when “without warning, the safe crashed through the floor and settled in the ooze at the bottom of the Bay.”
Within a few days, the safe was hauled up and placed on more solid ground. Stanford was not amused by the “two starfish, the few barnacles and the amorous leopard shark that came up with it,” but was relieved to find its contents intact and unharmed.
Renovations continued, until finally the restaurant was rebuilt and ready to open. On March 24th, 1950, the Valhalla first opened its doors to the public, bringing out crowds that included, as Sally would later recall, “everything but nuns and nudes.”
Well-wishers, evil wishers, delighted friends, envious enemies, natives from down the street and some who’d come all the way from Los Angeles and Seattle. . . There were morbid curiosity seekers, San Francisco police brass, true food fans, celebrity collectors, and celebrities — middle-size, I suppose.
Decked out in “Victorian and post-Victorian” grandeur, including “a famous piece of plumbing Queen Marie of Roumainia carried with her on all her travels,” and grillwork made from “ornate, highly polished bedsteads retired from service,” the restaurant’s interior was, in Sally’s estimation, “a real conversation-maker.”
The press certainly found plenty of things to discuss. Herb Caen wrote in the Examiner that “Sally Stanford, S. F.’s long-reigning madam queen, opened her newest venture…over in Souseliito [pun intended], Friday night. And I’ll bet the lady had no idea there was so much money to be made legitimately.”
The Chronicle reported that, “in the background the glasses tinkled merrily and musically in opening night concert. The place was packed. Outside the police were busy hustling parked cars out of the red-painted zones. ‘My place is enriched by red paint. It makes it rough on parking but it sure marks the place off well,’ Miss Stanford said.”
The San Francisco News described Stanford’s “first co-educational institution, built on a Sausalito wharf. Inside it’s decorated in a rowdy, honky-tonk manner, and outside the Bay water slaps at its bottom. The opening was a sensational success and the joint was jammed with two types of people: old friends and women who came saying, ‘I want to see Sally’.”
Both the Valhalla and Sally Stanford would go on to become Sausalito institutions, with Sally eventually serving on the city council and as Sausalito’s mayor, and vice mayor. Though both she and the Valhalla are gone, visitors can still “enjoy a drink on Sally” at her memorial drinking fountain by the ferry landing.