The Cadillac Hotel
At the corner of Eddy and Leavenworth, the historic building still stands — Renaissance Revival in its bones, with Baroque flourishes and traces of Art Nouveau worked into the stone.
Most people walk past without a second look. The Tenderloin does not slow down for sentiment. But if you stop long enough, you begin to see something in that building — something time has not managed to take.
The Cadillac Hotel rose from the rubble of the 1906 earthquake and fire, part of San Francisco’s long climb back to its feet. The city was rebuilding its skyline and remaking its identity, and the Cadillac went up in that spirit — a proper hotel in a neighborhood that was still figuring out what it wanted to be.
For nearly two decades, it was a part of the welcoming committee and was a resting site for visitors from all over the world.
A world class hotel in a world class city.
Then, in 1924, a ballroom on the premises found a different calling.
James Julius Taussig — “Moose” to everyone who knew him — and William J. “Paddy” Ryan opened a boxing gym inside that ballroom and called it Taussig & Ryan’s.
Neither man could have known what they were getting themselves into.
What started as a local fight club became, over the next six decades, one of the most storied boxing gymnasiums in the country, and beyond.
Moose Taussig had the eye. That particular gift — seeing a fighter before the fighter knows he is one — cannot be taught, and Taussig had it in full. He built a boxing club, gave local pugilists a place to call home, then pushed further, matching his stable against rivals at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium on Grove Street.
His first star was pugilist Willie Meehan, a durable heavyweight from San Francisco who carried one of the great footnotes in the history of the sport: Meehan defeated Jack Dempsey — the Manassa Mauler — twice in five fights. Those victories put both fighter and gym on the national map, and the reputation built steadily from there.
By the mid-1930s, Hawaii came calling and Taussig answered, taking on roles as promoter, matchmaker, and cornerman across the Pacific. Late in his career he traveled even further — serving as public relations man to Dempsey and Yujiro Watanabe, considered the father of Western boxing in Japan. The world, it turned out, was not too large for a man from Eddy and Leavenworth.
Paddy Ryan was the other half of the equation, and in many ways the more lasting one.
Before he ever taped a fighter’s hands, Ryan had already lived more than most men dream of. He joined the United States Navy at sixteen and served thirty years.
During the Spanish-American War and the Battle of Manila Bay, he acted with such extraordinary bravery that the government awarded him the Congressional Medal of Honor. I shall take liberties in repeating that— Congressional Medal of Honor— a true-to-life hero.
When that chapter finally closed, Ryan carried those same qualities into the fight game — the steadiness, the discipline, the quiet authority of a man who had already been tested by something far more serious than boxing.
When Taussig left for Hawaii, Ryan stayed on. The gym was in his blood by then. He managed, trained, advised — and for more than a few young men from difficult circumstances, functioned as something close to a father. Those who knew him remembered a stillness in the corner and a feel for the game that went bone-deep.
In 1942, Ryan sold the gym to Joe Herman and Billy Newman, two fight men who had been around long enough to know exactly what they were buying,
not just a gym but a piece of living history with its very own orbit.
Ryan died that same year — January 9, 1942, at sixty-one. The loss was felt across the Bay Area boxing community in a way that lingered.
The name on the sign changed.
The place did not.
What Taussig and Ryan built inside that ballroom on Eddy and Leavenworth was something rarer than a boxing gym.
It was a room where the sport’s hard knowledge accumulated year by year, passed from trainer to fighter to the next man through the door.
Cities of the fight game have their own versions of the fight club — Broughton’s Amphitheatre in eighteenth-century London, Gleason’s and Stillman’s both in New York, the Wild Card in Los Angeles. San Francisco had the Cadillac Hotel.
Years later, the city made it official in 2009. The Cadillac Hotel, at 366–394 Eddy Street and 300–324 Leavenworth Street, became San Francisco Landmark No. 176, became a recognized part of the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District.
Stand at the corner of Eddy and Leavenworth long enough, and something stirs — ghosts of leather and sweat that refuse to go quiet.
Newman’s Gym once lived inside those walls.
Stop into the Tenderloin Museum and see for yourself.
Sources, References, Acknowledgements:
- This article contains selected excerpts, quotations, images, and archival references used under the Fair Use provisions of Section 107 of the United States Copyright Act. These materials are presented for educational, scholarly, and cultural preservation purposes.
- Every effort has been made to properly attribute sources and limit use to what is necessary to honor the historical and cultural narrative.