Local Edition:
The golden era of newspapering, smoldering with hot lead type and awash in the cacophonous clack of typewriter platens, was grueling, torrid and thirst-inducing work.
Yet William Randolph Hearst, founder of the Hearst Corp.’s publishing, broadcast and digital empire (including The Chronicle), was not a man prone to take too many tipples.
And though opposed to Prohibition, he was even more adamantly against that era’s speakeasies, which spawned droves of over-served patrons and other, ill-mannered ilk.
So it was with delicious irony that the press baron’s great-grandson, Steve Hearst, recently welcomed guests to the tricked-out basement of the historic San Francisco Hearst Building at a soft opening for the newspaper-themed speakeasy-style bar, Local Edition. (The bar’s official grand opening was Wednesday)
“Last month I hosted the firstever screening of ‘Citizen Kane’ at Hearst Castle in the Visitors Center during the San Luis Obispo Film Festival. And tonight, I’m hosting a party in W.R.’S building at a speakeasy,” said Hearst, a Hearst Corp. vice president and Western Properties Division general manager. “But I’m sure he wouldn’t be shocked — W.R. was an incredible, perceptive human being.”
Founded by Future Bars and, now, Destination Bars business partners Brian Sheehy, 38, and Doug Dalton, 40, Local Edition is the latest joint in the partners’ mixology empire, which includes Swig, Bourbon & Branch, Rickhouse and their premium spirits emporium, Cask, on the ground floor of the Hearst Building.
Yet Local Edition is neither your great-grandfather’s speakeasy nor a blue-coverall newspaper bar, a vanishing species Steve Hearst fondly remembers.
Hearst, 55, began his career in Los Angeles as a copy boy at the old Herald Examiner, where his father, Hearst Corp. board Chairman George Hearst Jr., served as publisher. With a bit of a wince and great affection, he recalls rough-andtumble times spent nearby at Corky’s newspaper bar where headlines were sometimes crafted and lifelong friendships formed.
“I held 28 jobs at the Herex. I started at the bottom and went down: press room, stereotype, engraving, composing and mail room,” he said, with a laugh. “In San Francisco, I was management at the old Newspaper Agency. But several days a week I’d work on the trucks doing time and motions for deliveries. At the end of the day, we’d all end up in our coveralls over at Hanno’s or the M&M.”
But no coveralls were spotted on guests already lined up at Local Edition.
Accessed via a glass door on Market Street at Third, a marble staircase leads to a low-lit, subterranean den set like a swank scene from “Mad Men”: The back wall is framed by velvet swags and red-hot banquettes. Marble-topped cocktail tables and ’50s-era, white lounge chairs dot the main floor. The long, dark wood
Walkins welcome. No password necessary, but reservations are required for table and banquette seating. 691 Market St., S.F. (415) 795-1375. 5 p.m.-2 a.m. Mon.-fri., 7 p.m.-2 a.m. Sat. www.localedition sf.com plank is separated from the main room by a row of high-top tables. And a stage will soon feature nightly, early-evening live jazz.
“We’ve been successful in tying our bars to their building’s history. And the Hearst Building is one of city’s most historic,” Sheehy said. “When our guests land in the lobby, they’ll be surrounded by phenomenal American history. And some of that history was once written by a reporter in this very building.”
The 5,500-square-foot space is set in the old Hearst Examiner’s assembling room, where printed newspapers were piped up from presses below in the sub-basement and then shot out a tunnel to idling trucks and nimble newsboys on Stevenson Street.
That sedulous craftsmanship is honored in the bar’s decor, much of which the partners found on ebay, starring a riot of old newspaper equipment from typewriters, Dictaphones and linotype machines to rotating displays, corralled by historian-bartender Dan Galvin, of vintage newspapers housed in wood-frame vitrines.
But Sheehy doesn’t believe their star design concept is merely a quaint relic. Even when he knows that such nearby neighbors as city-dwelling Facebookers or Twitter team members may be his patrons.
“Whether you’re a millionaire, billionaire or unemployed, everybody can afford to read a newspaper,” Sheehy said. “But how many people actually read tweets that were sent yesterday?”
Captivated by a concept near and dear to his heart, Steve Hearst gladly loaned artifacts from his family archives, including a 1920s projector presented by Louis B. Mayer to W.R. Hearst, who developed the world’s first newsreels.
Once the projector is adapted, Hearst’s old Metrotone newsies will, once again, flicker to life.
And all the bar’s white Italian marble, piles of which had been tucked away for decades in the building’s basement, was originally purchased by W.R. Hearst and also adorns the vaulted archways, grand fireplaces and glamorous lobbies he created with architect Julia Morgan at Hearst Castle and the Hearst Building’s 1937 redesign.
The cocktail menu, printed on feather-light newsprint, features premium beer, wine and artisanally crafted creations ($9) such as the Chief or Rosebud, which cleverly wink at the bar’s Hearstian heritage.
Future Bars’ signature service will be stepped up with the addition of a tableside cocktail cart featuring crystal decanters filled with unlabeled, smallbatch Irish, Scottish and American whiskies and their attendant national waters, which guests can blend to taste.
Even in the era of patrons who constantly peek at their handheld electronic doodads, Hearst believes Sheehy and Dalton have created a space where good conversation will spark under the influence of creative cocktails and the grand newspaper tradition of telling stories longer than 140 characters.
“I think Local Edition is the most exciting bar Brian and I have created,” said Doug Dalton, whose late father and grandfather were lifelong Post newspapermen in Big Stone Gap, Va. “These old newspapers are not only a reference of time. They also pay tribute to the reporters who put themselves on the line to bring the day’s stories to light.”