San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
After year of pandemic exile, sleepy city eager to roar back
These days, I often think of the old story of Rip Van Winkle, who lived in upstate New York. Out for a walk one day, he fell asleep in a mountain hollow not far from his house. When he awoke 20 years later, the whole world had changed.
Time moves faster these days, but San Francisco and the Bay Area are waking up from the long lost year of the COVID lockdown.
It’s the glorious month of May, when the Bay Area is at its best. The days are longer, and the weather is warmer. The hills are turning brown as they do every year in late spring. We had lunch with friends the other day on the deck at Sam’s in Tiburon, a spring ritual. San Francisco glittered across the blue bay, as beautiful as always.
Everything looked the same. And yet it wasn’t. It was toward the end of some of the pandemic restrictions, and we had to stand in a long line to get in, even on a weekday. They checked for masks, squirted sanitizer on everyone’s hands, took extra care to seat people apart. That sort of thing is going away, but nothing will ever be quite the same.
In San Francisco, restaurant owner Don Dial says of his hometown, “It’s a new city.” He ought to know; his family has been in the restaurant business in San Francisco for 80 years. Now he’s the man behind Rocco’s Cafe, an Italian restaurant on Folsom Street. He calls it a bit of North Beach in South Beach. His place survived the lockdown, but barely. He’s both optimistic and cautious. People’s habits, he says, have changed — and maybe for good.
You don’t need a tour guide to see it for yourself. Because the city’s workforce is working at home, downtown and the Financial District are empty. At the same time, a lot of the city’s neighborhoods seem to be thriving — the Mission District’s Valencia Street, the Sunset, the Marina, North Beach.
But neighborhood boom is a bit of an illusion. On a recent spring night. I was out for pizza and beer in North Beach. We were in a sidewalk parklet, with bright lights, good company, baseball on television. I even scored a taxi to take me home to Bernal Heights. It drove south on Stockton Street, and crossing Broadway into Chinatown was like crossing from West Berlin into the east during the Cold War. The streets of Chinatown were empty, gray, deserted. Driving through downtown was worse. This part of the city is ghostly at night. It’s hurting. It’s nothing like it was.
A couple of days later, I had an appointment at Market Street and Van Ness Avenue. I took BART to Civic Center Station to get there. I wasn’t keen on riding a Muni bus.
Civic Center Station is like some kind of urban frontier. Edgy. I walked up Market to Van Ness, saw a drug deal on the way, noticed a woman talking to herself, a man sprawled on the sidewalk as if dead. I’m a city boy, wary. I didn’t like the looks of Van Ness and Market either, so I walked quickly a block away to Franklin Street into another world.
I ducked into a little spot called RT Rotisserie at Oak and Franklin The place looked inviting, and since my appointment had been delayed I thought I’d stop for lunch. Business was brisk. Many of the customers seemed to know each other. Nobody paid cash. There were a lot of takeout orders. I sat inside on a long bench. The food was delicious. It was a discovery, at least for me. “You walk two blocks,” Don Dial was telling me, “and you are in a different city.”
The city is opening, but not fast enough for Dial. I had written about his restaurant in the winter when the city was locked down tight. He was unhappy then with the changing rules and the way the city handled the pandemic. “They are just killing the little guy,” he said then. He still feels the same way.
Early last year, times were good. “I had the best February ever,” he said. “I did $180,000 that month.” Things looked good and in March, Rocco’s had 250 pounds of corned beef for St. Patrick’s Day. But that day, everything shut down tight. “My Italian family ate corned beef for months,” Dial said.
Rocco’s opened and closed, and reopened in February 2021. Things are slow, like waking from a long sleep. “It’s opening up only a little bit,” he said. “Now I do $25,000 a month,” he said. He says he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the pandemic.
I imagine hundreds of restaurants could say the same thing. Dial thinks the city is full of young people who have been cooped up for months. “There have been no nightclubs, no nothing, no dancing. Nothing to celebrate. If you’re young, under 30, you want to get out and go dancing,” he said.
He hopes, of course, that on their way to these South of Market clubs, they’ll stop by for a festive meal.
“San Francisco has always been the Paris of the United States,” he says. He said he’s done research and after the big flu epidemic of 1918, San Francisco roared back to life. “When the hotels open, the tourists come back, parades start, and the opera, and bars and clubs, and more people can go to the ballpark. It’ll be the Roaring Twenties of the 21st century.”
A lot of people are waiting for that. Otherwise it will only be a dream left from a long sleep. We’ll see.