Bayview, amid rebirth, remains true to roots
Most San Franciscans don’t give much thought to the Bayview neighborhood, a largely African American district on the edge of the city, south of South of Market, and out of sight and out of mind.
The neighborhood had a bad reputation: High crime and low expectations. But things have changed. The Bayview Merchants Association calls it “the renaissance.” The Bayview is worth a new look. You’d be surprised.
First is a long-standing black community blended into a new San Francisco mix — a diverse population with a fresh kind of energy. They distill whiskey in the Bayview, make pasta, brew beer, build furniture, deliver artisan groceries. There is a soul food catering company, a winery based in a garage, a chocolate company, a coffee roastery, and two breweries around the corner from Circa of America, the largest belt and leather goods manufacturing plant in the United States.
The Bayview has an opera house and will soon have a chicken processing plant.
Some parts of the neighborhood are residential, and others are lined with warehouses and metal works. Big trucks rumble down the streets, and there are rusty railroad tracks. The industrial area, on the flatland south of Hunters Point, looks a bit like South of Market before it became SoMa.
The Bayview is also the home of old-school San Francisco products. Molinari salami is made in a plant on Yosemite Avenue near the edge of the bay.
Then there is the new school of San Francisco. “We do all these different things — make sake, make furniture, make beautiful glass pieces — and we are all friends,” said Nate Watson, executive director of Public Glass, a glass-working nonprofit operation on Armstrong Avenue just off Third Street. “We all collaborate with each other, and we have fallen in love with the neighborhood.”
Public Glass is a studio, a manufacturing plant and a school for artists in glass. It’s in a big warehouse and has studios where glassblowers work on fineglass pieces.
“Everybody finds something they are passionate about,” Watson said. “For me, it is fine-glass work.”
Not far away, across Third Street, is a section of Egbert Avenue that used to be lined with metal shops and small manufacturing outfits. Now the buildings are painted in bright murals. Industry and art combined.
Two beer places — Laughing Monk Brewing Co. and Seven Stills Brewery & Distillery — are side by side here. Laughing Monk makes Belgian-style beer, and Seven Stills makes craft beer and distills seven varieties of whiskey.
It sounds like cuttingedge stuff. One of the whiskeys is Tomahawp, a product distilled from dry-hopped beer, producing “a whiskey with candied pear flavors layered with breakfast porridge and hints of vanilla and mint.” This is a collaborative effort with San Francisco’s Alvarado Street Brewery.
And why not? The spirit of innovation is one of the reasons Tim Obert and Clint Potter, the Seven Stills founders, opened their business in San Francisco. “The people here like new things and are willing to experiment,” Potter said.
Obert and Potter, old college friends, got started in the beer-and-whiskey business when they were 24. Five years later, they have a big plant, a tasting room lined with barrels, big coppery stills and enthusiasm.
Like Watson, at Public Glass, they believe in cooperation. They distill grappa from grapes supplied by Barbara Gratta, who owns Gratta Winery and has a tasting room on Third Street near Underwood Avenue in Bayview. A wine tasting room in the Bayview? You’d be surprised.
“Cooperation and cross-pollination of ideas is one reason all this works now,” said Earl Shaddix, executive director of Economic Development on Third, or Edot. Shaddix helps coordinate new and older businesses in the Bayview.
“Younger people are moving out here,” he said. “The neighborhood is diverse.”
And, he said, the neighborhood’s African American community continues to be vibrant.
In other parts of San Francisco, new young people and boutique businesses have added up to one thing: gentrification. That’s what happened in the Fillmore and SoMa.
“Not here,” Shaddix said. “We know what gentrification looks like, and we’ll fight it.” What he sees is a new kind of San Francisco mix out in the Bayview.
One of the community leaders is April Spears, a native San Franciscan, who owns Auntie April’s, a soul food catering business. Her goal, she told The Chronicle last year “is to build community and preserve African American legacy businesses.”
To that end, Merchants of Butchertown, a business group she co-founded, is helping to organize an African American Cultural District. The first meeting is on March 21 at the Bayview Opera House.