The Coast Guard only had two steam cutters to patrol the central California coast, which one state senator called a “smuggler’s paradise.” Most booze came down from Vancouver, though in his book Rum War at Sea, Coast Guard Commander Malcolm Willoughby wrote of a British steamer from Scotland loaded with 25,000 cases of Scotch that anchored outside Half Moon Bay for seven months while contact boats hauled liquor off and supplies back on. South Bay mobster Sam Termini considered San Mateo County the most corrupt in the state. The 18th Amendment, which in 1919 outlawed the manufacture, sale, or transportation of liquors, turned these sleepy communities into playgrounds of vice as rumrunners and bootleggers exploited the isolation and hidden coves along the coast for clandestine deliveries of alcohol while entrepreneurs took advantage of the handy supply of smuggled booze and opened beachside speakeasies. Plans to turn beachside Half Moon Bay areas into resorts petered out when a coastline railway project was canned, leaving city-dwellers some 30 miles away with only the precarious Pedro Mountain Road as a direct link. There were, however, many other crimes committed in the area during the roaring ’20s, when small-time racketeers became criminal syndicates and the Moss Beach Distillery was the cat’s pajamas of local roadhouses known then as Frank’s Place.īefore Prohibition, San Mateo County (San Francisco’s southern peninsula) was a rural stretch of wild coast scattered with artichoke and Brussel sprout farms while pines and sequoias were lumbered in the mountains above. There are several versions of her story, all of which take place during Prohibition and involve a love triangle between her, a piano player, and her husband, and ends in the flapper’s violent death.Ĭrimes of passion make for good tales, although there is no historical record of such a murder at Moss Beach. The Blue Lady is a local personality featured in stacks of newsprint and television, most notably a 1992 Unsolved Mysteries episode hosted by Robert Stack, renowned for his portrayal of Elliot Ness, Chicago’s “untouchable” whiskey barrel-smashing G-man. The place is laid-back panache, a legendary northern California bar and grill that doesn’t need a ghost to put it on the map, but has one all the same. Then there’s the intimate art deco bar and its tuck ’n’ roll swivel stools occupied by chatty locals in flannel shirts and hoodies, and the curious ceiling fresco of a matador spiking a bull. The kitchen offers a well-executed northern California surf ’n’ turf of fried artichokes, fish tacos, seafood sliders, pastas and more that put other local eateries to shame. The cliffside view alone is worth the 50-mile drive from Santa Cruz, a seaside city not lacking in inspiring vistas. It is not the celebrity ghost that brings us up to the Moss Beach Distillery near Half Moon Bay.
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