San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Dreams, nightmares mingle on Market Street
One of the first things new San Franciscans discover about their adopted city is that First Street isn’t the first street, and Main Street isn’t the main street. Market Street is the main street. And by the way, nobody likes Market Street. Welcome to San Francisco. It’s complicated.
There’s no better way to see the complexities of the city by the bay than by taking a walk up Market Street on a summer’s day. It’s San Francisco’s biggest and widest street — 120 feet from curb to curb. It runs straight as an arrow from the Ferry Building at the edge of the bay 3 miles to the Castro and Twin Peaks beyond.
Market Street begins at the classic 1898 Ferry Building and ends, for all practical purposes, at Castro Street, where a huge beautiful rainbow flag flies day and night. Market should be one of the great streets of the world but it has not turned out that way.
It has splendor and squalor, elegant hotels and flophouses, outdoor farmers’ markets on different days of the week and openair drug dealing every day of the year. It is beautiful and ugly, an urban success on one block and abject failure on another.
You can see it for yourself with a walk up Market Street. Market has come back in the past month or so from the dark winter of the pandemic when everything was locked down and Market Street looked like the main street of a ghost town. Now, in summer, the street is making a comeback.
You could start, as I did, at the Ferry Building, which has been restored to its former glory with shops and restaurants. It is the centerpiece of a big, open, sunswept plaza. You can stand there and look right up Market Street, the repurposed One Market building on one side, the Hyatt Regency on the other. A vintage streetcar, flying a small American flag, squeals around the turn at Steuart Street and heads uptown. A sightseeing bus loads the first tourists of the season. It looks like the beginning of something big.
But look again. At Spear Street, just two blocks up Market, there was a little flower stand, built to resemble a small Muni bus. It used to be cute and busy. But it did not survive the lockdown. Now it is closed, covered with graffiti. One tag says “SANFRAN PSYCHO.” The ruined flower stand is next to the entrance to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco at 101 Market. The California Street cable car line ends across the street. At Market, Bush and Battery is the Mechanics Monument, figures of iron men working a mechanical press, the work of the sculptor Douglas Tilden, who was deaf but never let his disability hamper his talent. It is one of three huge Tilden monuments erected to beautify Market Street at the turn of the 20th century.
A lot of the old Market Street still survives — at the golden Lotta’s Fountain at Market, Kearny and Geary, at the Flood Building at Powell, at the refurbished Westfield San Francisco Centre on the south side of Market, which once housed the celebrated Emporium department store.
But the retail core of Market Street is in transition, to put it gently. The street has been battered by both the pandemic and the shift to shopping on the internet. There are open stores next to closed ones. Forever 21 did not last forever at Stockton and Market; across the street the flags flutter bravely at Old Navy. You get kind of a mixed message like a Grand Opening Going Out of Business Sale.
But there is more than one Market Street. It changes at Fifth Street. From Fifth to just beyond the Civic Center Market Street is a San Francisco failure.
The street is dismal and dirty. People who have someplace to go walk quickly as if late for an appointment. The people with nowhere to go walk slowly, or sprawl on the sidewalk of the city’s main street.
Market Street has risen and fallen with the tides of history. No one was ever happy with the way things were, even generations ago, and plans have come and gone as the city’s best civic minds tinkered with the street. The last big change came in 2020 when private cars were banned on much of Market. More plans were in the works. Then the pandemic hit. The reality is what you see now.
I walked up the tough blocks of Market to United Nations Plaza, dedicated to the founding of the U.N. in San Francisco in 1945. There is a fountain there, and words are inscribed in the pavement about hopes for world peace and justice.
It was a gray Tuesday, and a line of hopeful people was waiting to get free food being handed out by two nuns from the Fraternité Notre Dame. The line moved slowly. It was almost festive: The people in line were in a good mood as seagulls and pigeons swooped around, hoping for leftovers. “Thank you. May God bless you,” a man told one of the nuns.
Across the street is a boardedup CVS drug store. It opened a couple of years ago, bringing new hope to the corner of Seventh and Market. But it was too rough there, too many drug addicts, too much crime. There is a splendid view of City Hall from that corner.
I moved on. Market changed again: newish condos on the south side of Market not far from the headquarters of Twitter in the former Merchandise Mart. Twitter was invented in San Francisco, and the technology changed the world.
I walked as far as Van Ness Avenue and got on a streetcar painted the old Muni colors — “green torpedoes,” the oldtimers called them — and rode the rest of the way up to Castro Street, where I transferred to a bus. I noticed a blocklong farmers’ market on the north side of Noe and Market, and a sense of brisk Upper Market prosperity. A very different world. That’s Market Street for you.