The Mayor of Broadway

San Francisco's Father of Topless, press agent "Big" Davey Rosenberg

As San Francisco’s North Beach shimmied into the ’60s, press agent “Big” Davey Rosenberg worked overtime to grow clubs like the Condor and stars like Carol Doda.

This article excerpt runs with permission from Alta Online.

It’s always refreshing, and increasingly rare, to be reminded of how fun San Francisco used to be.

That’s what I found myself thinking as the lights came up after a screening of Carol Doda Topless at the Condor at the Roxie Theater. Made by directors Jonathan Parker and Marlo McKenzie, the documentary tracks the life of Carol Doda, widely credited as America’s first topless dancer, as her career skyrocketed from North Beach waitress to international icon.

The audience, mostly in their 20s and 30s and unlikely to have firsthand memories of the once-omnipresent Doda, laughed at every corny breast joke, of which there are many, often cracked by the striking Doda herself.

As I watched the vintage clips of frisky old-school San Francisco, a peculiar character occasionally popped in and out of the story: a press agent named “Big” Davey Rosenberg, who worked tirelessly to promote Doda’s career.

As the film explained, it was Rosenberg’s suggestion that Doda dance topless in the first place. Big Davey did all the heavy lifting. He staged publicity photos, engineered press appearances, represented nightclubs, and then seemingly disappeared.

From the glimpses of him in the film, he was a self-invented character from another era. Often in dress shirts and slacks, Rosenberg appeared sweaty, a big cigar clamped between smirking lips, his 400-pound girth stealing the focus in every photo. Strange as it sounds, even though Doda was the film’s attention-grabbing lead, I wanted to know more about Rosenberg, the guy behind the most famous topless dancer of all time. 

By the early-’60s, North Beach was popping. Coltrane, Monk, and Cannonball at the Jazz Workshop on Broadway. Basin Street West featured acts like Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. The hungry i booked Barbra Streisand, Tom Lehrer, and Lenny Bruce. The Purple Onion hosted Woody Allen, the Smothers Brothers, the Kingston Trio, Bob Newhart, Phyllis Diller, and a young calypso singer named Maya Angelou. Finocchio’s packed them in with female-impersonator shows. The Committee, a counterculture improv group featuring a pre-sitcom Howard Hesseman, also known as Don Sturdy, had their own theater on Broadway.

And in the popular music clubs, go-go girls frugged, swam, and peppermint twisted onstage. Go-go would prove short-lived, but in that time period, in North Beach, it was a full-tilt happening. George & Teddy, two musicians from Detroit, landed a raucous R&B residency at the Condor, a bar on the corner of Columbus and Broadway, eventually recording a live album of soul covers there. The Condor was just another joint for conventioneers, tourists, and locals looking for a good time, but a few years later, it would become ground zero for America’s full-body swing into the ’60s.

To become that, though, it needed something big. Huge.

To read the complete story, follow this link to Alta Online:

https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a60900452/the-mayor-of-broadway/