Bank Exchange was, during the 1850s and 1860s, the first stop on San Francisco’s cocktail route and, along with Barry and Patten’s nearby saloon, one of the premiere bars on the West Coast of the United States. See cocktail route. It enjoyed a second period of prominence as a beloved local institution and the home of Pisco Punch from the 1890s until Prohibition forced its closure in 1919.
The first Bank Exchange, a saloon and pool hall, was opened by Burlin Brown on Montgomery Street in the heart of the city’s commercial district in 1850; it closed a few months after his death in 1852. The second Bank Exchange opened at the end of 1853 in the new, fireproof Montgomery Block at the corner of Montgomery and Washington streets. It is unknown what, if any, connection Patrick Kilduff, its proprietor, had with Brown or Smith, but like the first one it featured large oil paintings on classical themes, or at least the ones that allowed for lightly draped female figures, and billiard tables, along with a marble floor and $1,500 mahogany bar that were carried to San Francisco around Cape Horn. John Torrence and Thomas Parker took over the bar in 1854 and ran it until Parker’s death in 1860. During those years it served as one of the main foci of the sporty, often brawling social life of the new city.
Another Parker, George, ran the saloon from 1860 until he went bankrupt in 1872; by then, the commercial center of the city had moved farther down Market Street and the area was no longer fashionable. After two years as an auction house, the bar reopened under the management of George Brown and George Perkins. In 1886 Brown brought Duncan Nicol into the business, Perkins having died two years before. Nicol (1852–1926) was a close-mouthed Glaswegian who had worked for a number of years behind the bar at the venerable Parker House Hotel, a San Francisco institution. By 1896, he was the Bank Exchange’s sole proprietor.
Under Nicol’s meticulous, conservative supervision, the Bank Exchange became famous again, this time as a precious remnant of the city’s fast-disappearing Gold Rush past. To cement that reputation, Nicol specialized in serving Pisco Punch, a drink known in the city and its surrounds since 1849 but no longer in vogue. It is unknown if Nicol inherited the drink along with the saloon or brought it with him, but Torrence and Parker had stocked and sold pisco, and the bar was known as “Pisco John’s” (whether from Torrence or from the bar’s first telephone number, “John 3246,” is also unknown).
By the 1910s, the bar had become a quiet, gentlemanly place—so gentlemanly, in fact, that ladies, too, were allowed to drink there. Despite its various bankruptcies and sales, the bar retained a great deal of memorabilia, among which Nicol held court, mixing his Pisco Punches one at a time, always with a fresh-squeezed lemon. When he closed the bar in 1919, the city was heartbroken. He died in 1926, taking his formula for the Pisco Punch with him to the grave. The Montgomery Block fell to development in the 1960s, and now the Transamerica Pyramid occupies the site.
See also Nicol, Duncan and Pisco Punch.
“His Ambition Not Dulled by Years.” San Francisco Chronicle, February 4, 1921, 9.
“In San Francisco: Splendid Paintings.” Sacramento Transcript, April 25, 1851, 3.
Jacobson, Pauline. “A Fire-Defying Landmark.” San Francisco Bulletin, May 4, 1912.
By: David Wondrich