San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F. dead? The Outer Sunset will give you a different view
Christopher Donnelly is a longtime San Franciscan, a lawyer who has offices in a skyscraper in what until a year ago was the heart of San Francisco. Now downtown is a ghost town, but many of the city’s neighborhoods are thriving. Neighborhoods, Donnelly thinks, are the heart of the city, especially now.
“If you are looking for life in the city, you have to look in the neighborhoods,” he says.
Some of the city’s neighborhoods are famous: Chinatown, North Beach, Nob Hill, Telegraph Hill, Pacific Heights. But a lot are overlooked. Among them is the Outer Sunset, roughly the area between Golden Gate Park south to Sloat Boulevard, and from 19th Avenue west to the ocean. It’s the foggiest neighborhood in the city, at least in the summer, and the most blandlooking, rows and rows of lookalike houses marching toward the Pacific.
There are lots of old San Francisco families in the Outer Sunset, and lots of newer ones. A lot of immigrant families. The Outer Sunset has streets with Spanish names, Chinese restaurants, Irish pubs and a surfer fringe, just inland from the beach. The city has become quieter in these pandemic times, and at night you can hear the Pacific Ocean. Very Californian.
Donnelly lives on 33rd Avenue — in one of the original homes built by developer Henry Doelger, who turned a district of sand dunes into what was then affordable housing. Donnelly wanted to show off a new and revitalized Sunset on a spring Sunday, so he took me for a walk.
The first stop was the Outer Sunset Farmers Market & Mercantile event, which happens every Sunday along three blocks of 37th Avenue. It’s part food market, part street fair, part smalltown San Francisco.
It doesn’t seem to take itself as seriously as some of the other street markets I’ve visited. Perhaps that’s because it’s new: It popped up when everything was shut down during the first stages of the pandemic.
The market has music at both ends, like bookends. We stopped at the Ortega Street end where Paul Weiss and Howard Simon were playing guitar. They are old Sunset hands and old friends. They have seen the Sunset change. Most old San Franciscans dislike change, but they welcome it. Buck Buchanan, who had come to hear the two play, said he’d worked for the PG&E in the area for years. “I know the Sunset really well,” he said. “Every block. I think it’s more lively now than it ever was. More kids, too.”
The market reflects the liveliness, with booths that offer things like fresh local seafood, including a bucket full of live crabs; a booth selling “the best hummus you will ever have”; and the Driftwood Bread Co. with an amazing claim: “all breads mixed in deafening silence.” We stopped by the Sunset Soup Project booth, where Chuck Maddox was dishing the gumbo. It’s a family business, he said, that started with a restaurant and catering business called Cajun Pacific. The lockdown killed the restaurant, and catering is impossible in a pandemic. “We had to reinvent ourselves,” Maddox said. At the end of every Sunday, he buys the leftover produce from the Outer Sunset Farmers Market to form the base of the next week’s soups. It sounds unlikely, but Maddox has been in the food business for 25 years, and it seems to work.
At the Quintara Street end of the market, the San Francisco Unified Lions Club had set up a booth. They are at the market on many Sundays. The Lions are an oldtime service organization founded in 1917, but this chapter is not quite 5 years old.
They had nothing to sell but goodwill. The other Sunday they were offering new children’s books to anyone who wanted one, Maybe it was springtime, but the Lions were full of optimism.
Carol Fung, the club president, is a native San Franciscan and embraces the community service mission of the Lions. “I always wanted to be able to be giving something back to San Francisco,” she said.
We walked on, past St. Ignatius College Prep on 37th Avenue. The school, founded on Market Street in 1855, is one of the oldest institutions in the city. It moved to the Sunset in 1969 on the site of the city’s last big sand dune.
We walked past a community garden, past A.P. Giannini Middle School, past the Ortega branch of the public library, then down to 44th and Noriega to the new and upscale Gus’s Market. The streets were clean and there was no graffiti. It’s all pretty much homegrown, too. There are no bigbox stores in the Outer Sunset, and very few chains. If San Francisco is dying, they forgot to tell the Outer Sunset.
So maybe the guy who left his heart in San Francisco left it in the wrong part of town.
Carl Nolte’s columns run on Sunday. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Carlnoltesf