Origins of the Naglee Parke Hat Party Tradition

Two inmates of one of Naglee Parke's most elegant brothels, Amber Lynn's Chicken Coop, and their customers, pause for refreshments during a planning meeting for the annual Hat Party, August 1899.



Photo courtesy TM Wright Memorial Library and Research Centre







Until it was brutally suppressed last year by the Naglee Parke Police Department's Fashion Fellonies Division, the annual Hat Party was an important event on the social calendar for many residents of the community. The event's origins go back well over one hundred years to the wild days when Naglee Parke was known as Nagleeville and the area was a notorious center for sin and degradation in all their many charming forms. According to legend, the Hat Party was invented by two inmates of Miss Bertha's Chicken Coop, a boarding house for fallen women and tarnished angels that occupied a structure in the middle of the 200 block of South 14th Street, Fifi Latour and Travesty Blaze.

"We're not prone to argue," was the motto of the Coop, where the girls were often prone but never argued. As you can see from the photograph above, the girls liked to dress up when they were dressed at all, and hats were their crowning glory. Men came from far and wide to admire these hats and the girls who wore them and it didn't take long for the girls to compete for the attentions of the visitors. Here are Fifi and Travesty showing off for two gents just off the streetcar, tired and dusty but ready for some refreshments, liquid and social, and happy to share with their new friends.

The Chicken Coop was famous for its Friday evening fashion show -- called Phridae Phollies -- and free refreshments, and of course the menu featured poultry in many forms. The girls appeared promptly at 6pm, always attired in a fancy hat of some kind, but sometimes nothing else, carrying large platters of freshly fried chicken, each calling out, "Breasts! Thighs! Everything's delicious! What'll you have, boys?"

The Legend of William ("Dead End") Street, the Man and His Park

William D. E. Street, legendary early member of the Street family, in his 137th and final booking photograph made twenty minutes before a lynch mob strung him up from an oak tree in the park that now bears his name and contains his mortal carcass. (Photo courtesy of the Naglee Parke Police Department archives)

Few residents of Naglee Parke today have any notion of the formative role played by the Street family in the early years of Santa Clara County, but this huge family has left its mark on the community in many ways and in many places. And notorious among this huge family was William "Dead End" Street, born in a crude adobe not far from the banks of the wide Coyote Creek on February 30th 1843, and destined to become a legendary character in the chronicles of the town. Here is his tragic story:

Before the gold rush, the whole area between what is now downtown San Jose and Coyote Creek on the east, and between Hedding on the north and Story on the south was the vast rancho of the Facil family. Don Credito Facil, the patriarch of the clan, had married a pretty dusky Indian maiden named Una Via in June of 1830, and the two of them began breeding like rabbits, pumping out descendants at the rate of one every nine months plus a day or two. One of these, pretty little Calle, grew into an extremely hot tamale and at an early age was wooed and won by a gallant American pioneer and explorer, Edward Street, known to his associates as Easy for his friendly demeanor and generous ways, particularly when drunk.

After they were married, Don Credito presented Easy and Calle with a charming two-story adobe that still stands at the corner of South 11th and Reed, at the time the only house within half a mile, and even then the place was festooned with bright blue tarps to keep off the rain. Calle, true to her heritage, was pregnant early and often, and within a few years had produced Margaret, Reed, Taylor, Hedding, Jackson, James, Julian, Antonio, Carlos, Salvador, Fernando, Orvis, William, Alameda, Camino, and Clara.

While a good many of these children were destined to take orders in the Catholic church and attain sainthood, son William was another story entirely. By age fifteen, William had a reputation as a horse-thief, barroom brawler, two-bit gambler, pimp for cheap whores, drunk, disorderly, jailbird, forger, burglar, con-man, and murderer. He never bathed, told puns, had breath that would stop a clock, and was notorious for ending sentences with prepositions, a habit that got his poetic license lifted for the third and last time in November 1880. At left is his booking photograph for his last arrest, shortly before he was hung at age thirty-seven.

Residents of Nagleeville (as the place was then known) favored a more direct approach to maintaining a civil society than is accepted practice today. They had enough of William's evil ways, poorly constructed writing, and hideous grammar, so a mob of citizens busted William out of the Nagleeville Municipal Clink on the night of November 20th, 1880, and took him down to the banks of Coyote Creek. Then as now, there were big oak trees with sturdy branches suitable for lynchings, a popular amusement at the time. The largest of these was selected, a lariat thrown over one massive branch, and its loop adjusted to William's grimy size 13 1/2-inch neck.

"Do you have any last words? And if ya do, be mighty keerful what you do with them prepositions, and no word-play from ya, neither!" Hank Naglee said as the crowd tensed before the awful moment.

"That's a mighty fine rope to do a pun-ishment with," William said, and with that the mob took hold of the rope and William took to the air.

They buried him in a shallow unmarked grave beneath that same great tree. The tree is still there, and so are the mortal remains of William D. E. Street, who wasn't worth much in life and whose major contribution was to provide a bit of nutrition to a mighty California oak that survives today, if you know where to look.

During the 1890s, Una and the other Street women continued to populate Santa Clara County just as fast as they could, and that was pretty fast. After a while, they concluded that all the regular names had already been taken. Unlike today when people just make up names out of thin air, traditions at that time were different so new children were assigned a number as a name at birth, a system that worked remarkably well even if it was a bit novel.

When civilized influences finally displaced the rough and tumble society of old Nagleeville and the place was renamed Naglee Parke in 1905, the entire area was laid out by surveyors, complete with lots and roads and respectability. Since the family had such a profound influence on the area, both good and bad, a decision was made to name all these new roads after the Street family, and that's how we have come to know each of these roads by the name of an early pioneer from that one large family. Although there was some talk about omitting William from the names for these new roads, he was included just the same, perhaps as an example to youth of what happens when a person decides to follow the wrong Street.

The same general attitude prevailed when it was time to formally name the little patch of open ground where William played as a child, engaged in fights as a young man, and where he was strung up by the mob and died. Since he was parked here for eternity, the place will be known forever as William Street Park.




SPIRITS OF THE PAST, nuggets of Naglee Parke history and heritage are brought to you by the TM Wright Memorial Library and Research Centre, where history is written the way it should be, not the way it was, and sponsored in part by a generous donation from the Henry M. Naglee Trust for Revisionist History and also by Naglee Brandy & Distilled Spirits Corporation, promoting better spirituality one drink at a time.

The TM Wright Research Centre, in cooperation with the Mt.Charley 1850 Chapter of E Clampus Vitus, provides detailed historic reports on all aspects of the Naglee Parke area of Santa Clara County for anyone who wants to know more about the past. Reports are guaranteed more or less accurate or your money cheerfully refunded.

Welcome to the Naglee Parke Archives -- Home of History as it Should Have Been

(Henry Naglee Jr. & friends at Amber Lynn's Chicken Coop Bar, Grill & Brothel, corner of South 13th and San Fernando Streets, May 11th, 1895)

As the director and curator of the T. M. Wright Memorial Library & Centre for Revisionist History here in the very heart of Naglee Parke, I thought it was time to make the vast resources of the institution more available to local residents, and so begins this series of reports, white papers, dissertations, and essays.

As some of you probably know, I have been writing books on all sorts of topics since the mid-1980s. There are about sixty-five of these titles now, and all of them are generally considered non-fiction, and for the most part that's true. But, let me tell you, honey, coming up with enough factual information to stuff a 80,000-word manuscript takes a hell of a lot of work, and I am a lazy guy. It is so much easier to make things up, and often more interesting, too -- as you may remember from school, history can be incredibly dull, and I have found that it really pays to make things up as you go along.

Take Naglee Parke, for example. Most history books, if they mention Naglee Parke at all, consign it to a very boring footnote worth no more than a line or two -- a place where not much happened in the past and where not much will happen in the future. Who wants to live in a place like that? Not me, and probably not you, either. So our archive is dedicated to documenting the odd men and women who have called Naglee Parke home, at least when they were not in jail, and the sordid, depraved, illegal, flagrant, and outrageous activities of these forebearers who made Naglee Parke what is today, for better or worse.

Now, most of the current residents of Naglee Parke today are quiet, somewhat respectable, occasionally law-abiding persons who may have an outstanding warrant or two someplace, but who have kept a low profile for years while hoping that the statue of limitations will expire on any old charges. That's one reason the existing history of Naglee Parke is so dull -- the record has been systematically purged of all its notorious past and wayward residents in the hopes that law enforcement agencies -- local, state, federal, and INTERPOL, as far as that goes -- will look the other way. And, thanks to a tendency of local residents to bribe officers of the law at every opportunity, this campaign has been quite successful till now.

The archives of the T. M. Wright Memorial Library & Centre for Revisionist History are a rich treasure trove of little-known stories from the past 150 years and more -- stories that are virtually unknown to residents of the place today, but that continue to shape the community in subtle ways.

So stay tuned for occasional tales from the past, brought to you thanks to a generous grant from the Henry M. Naglee Brandy & Spirits Corporation, promoting spiritual matters one glass at a time.