San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
City we lovingly remember waits to become whole again
This may be the strangest summer in the history of San Francisco, a summer to remember. Or maybe one to forget.
The city — and the region — is just coming back from the big shutdown produced by the coronavirus pandemic. Only a few weeks ago, everything was shut tight, and how it looks as if San Francisco is coming back to life.
The San Francisco we all knew and remembered is about half there. The sun still shines and the fog still rolls in every June afternoon, and you can still get a good meal. The city looks much the same. It’s mostly as pretty as ever, but quieter, less lively. It’s nice, but it’s not San Francisco.
I made an unscientific tour of the city at midweek, visiting some of my favorite places: North Beach, the heart of the old city, Union Square, one of the centers of city life. I drove through the Mission and walked to Glen Park, one of the best of the city’s small neighborhoods. One of my agents went out to the Sunset and reported that things were all quiet on the western front. I didn’t go to Golden Gate Park to see the toppled monuments to the past. I wanted to be upbeat. I wanted to see the present. Washington Square was awash in sunlight at noontime. The guardians of the park had drawn little circles 6 feet apart, looking like landing markers for small spaceships. People were basking in the sun, sometimes alone, sometimes in little groups.
The Liguria Bakery was closed, having sold that day’s production of focaccia bread, but Mama’s, a neighborhood favorite, was open. The
North Beach Restaurant, famous for being open every day of the year, was not only closed but boarded up.
I went around the corner to Green Street to Gino and Carlo, a classic North Beach bar. It was dark as a cave inside, The long bar is under repair or being remodeled or something; the bartender was just inside the door. You order inside, but you have to drink outside at a sidewalk table in the sun. It was a historic occasion: my first drink in a bar in three months.
It was historic in another way. There were four or five of us at the sidewalk table, and listening to the talk we realized we were all native San Franciscans, a rarity in this polyglot city.
Most of us hadn’t seen a tourist in weeks. That’s another side effect of the virus; tourism has stopped cold, so the city has been turned back to the locals.
This is really obvious in Union Square, where the streets are mostly empty. In midFebruary I’d gone to a retirement party for Tom Sweeney, the famous doorman at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. He was wearing his red Beefeaters uniform, maybe for the last time. He’d just retired after 43 years. Now the main entrance to the Sir Francis Drake is covered with plywood painted with flowers. Maybe Sweeney knew what was coming,
There’s not a single cab in front of the St. Francis Hotel. The revolving door is locked. Plywood covers the door at the Grand Hyatt. If there are no travelers, who needs hotels?
The famous flower stands are closed. There are no tour buses and no cable cars. There is a big plastic heart on the Stockton Street corner of Union Square, but there’s a fence around it.
Tiffany’s opens at noon most days, and there is a small crowd around the Apple store. But Maiden Lane is empty, the shops boarded up.
I walked over to Belden Place, that nifty street of outdoor cafes. About half the places were open. One of them was the outdoor cafe portion of Sam’s Grill, founded in 1867. The restaurant portion is not open yet, and neither is the tavern next door.
The waiters in black tuxedos are on furlough, and the place is only open three days a week, but Peter Quartaroli, the managing partner, was on hand, masked like a bandit, but as affable and optimistic as ever. He says business is only about 10% of what it was, and he is cautious about the future. “I think we’ll be OK,” he said, “but …” But nobody knows.
You hear that a lot. Nobody knows when people can dine inside again, or whether the new health rules will allow restaurants and bars to survive financially. And this is important to a city like San Francisco where eating and drinking were a big part of life.
I went last to Glen Park on the south side of town. Things are a bit slow there with the usual complexities; only a few people at a time are allowed in shops, and the sidewalks are too narrow for outdoor dining. But business is better than ever at the Bird & Beckett bookstore on Chenery Street. Eric Whittington, the owner, managed to keep open during the lockeddown days. “I could hardly keep up with the business,’’ he said “When people had to stay inside they seemed to want something good to read.”
When the schools shut down, he said, some parents got the middle school reading lists and bought 28 books, then passed them around up and down the block, sharing books the way they would do in small village. Glen Park, in fact, prides itself on being a village. Maybe it takes a village to save a city in tough times.