San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How lockdown changed city — good and bad
I don’t know what happened in your neighborhood, but at 7 p.m. Tuesday, the people on my block on Winfield Street came out on their porches and front steps and gave a long round of applause for the health care workers and others who helped through the pandemic. It was the night most of the restrictions ended, and the clapping rippled up and down the street, like a curtain call at the end of a performance.
Tuesday night’s applause was a reprise of a nifty event that happened every evening during the depth of the lockdown. In Mill Valley, the citizens let out a howl every night at 8. The neighborhood dogs joined in, even the coyotes from the hills. In Bernal Heights and Noe Valley, people started clapping or shouting at 7. I don’t know what people did anywhere else. We had pulled up the drawbridge, like they did in an ancient castle under siege. We were sheltering in place. After a few weeks, the practice had run its course, like the sound of one hand clapping.
But it was fun while it lasted. It brought us together — neighbors on the street, cheering nurses, researchers, bus drivers, medical technicians, the UPS guy, the mail carrier. The pandemic, it turns out, helped build a sense of community. It was one of the good things to come out of the COVID emergency.
There should be no mistake: COVID19 is a tragedy. It has killed millions of people around the world and more than 600,000 in the United States. It was unlike anything we had seen in our lifetimes. We all had to stay home. Wear a mask, stay 6 feet apart. We were all in this together, as the slogan went.
The Bay Area escaped the worst of it, but for a while it looked pretty bad. I remember walking down Valencia Street in March 2020. You remember 2020? The year that never was. Valencia Street was empty that day, stores not only closed but boarded up. I went downtown later that week. Nobody there, not even a beggar. The trash blowing in the wind down Montgomery Street, the soaring glass towers South of Market, glittering in the afternoon sun, like monuments in some lost city.
The city will never be the same. I heard that a lot. Sometimes it sounded like an epitaph. One summer Saturday, I walked from Kearny and Sutter, downtown heading north. There are lots of gray buildings on Kearny, and all the storefronts seemed to be for rent. RETAIL SPACE AVAILABLE, the signs said.
The people I passed on the street were all masked, heads down, gloomy. But a few blocks on, where I headed up Columbus Avenue, I heard a band playing just off the big street: an accordion, a horn, a guy on drums. People were dancing in the street. A man rolled down from Telegraph Hill, parked his bike, found a lady in the crowd and the two danced together, a masked street ball. He got on his bike and rode away. She stayed and the band played on. Wow, I thought. Hold the obituary for San Francisco.
One of the surprises of the pandemic in the city was the way the restaurants moved into the streets. At first, restaurants could offer only meals to go, a service that was something less than a success, but by summertime the city allowed restaurants to serve meals in existing or brand new sidewalk parklets.
It was a big shift: “It’s like having to reinvent your business overnight,” said Josey White, one of the owners of the Front Porch on 29th Street near Mission Street.
Now the city is sprinkled with parklet restaurants: Hayes Valley, Chestnut Street, Cortland Avenue in Bernal Heights, Divisadero Street. Some of them are plain, some elaborate. Two on Castro Street stand out: One looks like a little gray house, somehow parked on the street. Another is rigged up with dozens of hanging plants, like dining in a garden, right in the street.
Having an early dinner last Friday at Original Joe’s on Washington Square, I noticed two things: It’s fun to eat outside, and having a parklet doubles the capacity of a popular restaurant.
But not every restaurant can have a parklet: building one calls for a capital investment — a tough decision after 15 months of lockdowns. And sometimes the location won’t work. One possible victim of the lockdown is the Old Clam House on Bayshore Boulevard and Oakdale Avenue. This place dates from 1861 and is one of the oldest restaurants in the country. It began when Bayshore was the main road heading south, and the restaurant was on the very edge of the bay. The place flourished, faded, flourished again. Jerry Dal Bozzo and his wife, Jennifer, bought it 10 years ago and spent a lot of money restoring it. It had charm, it had class, and it served a glass of clam juice with every meal. But it never seemed to catch on; the corner of Bayshore and Oakdale might have been too far off the beaten path. The Clam House closed on the day the city shut down 15 months ago and never reopened. Now, Dal Bozzo and Dante Serafini, his current partner, want to sell. The partners also own the Stinking Rose, where garlic is king. It’s for sale, too.
So the year of the virus brought some new things to San Francisco, and at the same time may cost the city some of its best old establishments. It’s curious, isn’t it? Nothing is ever all bad or all good.