San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Searching for fall as summer fog lingers
Something’s in the air in San Francisco this fall. The usual glorious autumn weather has deserted us. Instead we’ve had fog nearly every day since the last weeks of September, or about the time a scientific study appeared that said that fog was disappearing. And yet the fog is back, even in October.
San Francisco is a city that looks better in blue than in gray, and I began to wonder. Maybe the change in the weather means yet another change in the city. Has the old San Francisco vanished as well?
I had some errands to run last week, so I took a look. I rode Muni around — eight different Muni lines in three days. I didn’t go west of Twin Peaks. Too foggy, but I got a fair look at a lot of the city.
It didn’t begin well. My first ride was on the 14-Mission Rapid from 30th and Mission to 16th Street to transfer to the 22-Fillmore. The ride from 24th to 16th along Mission provided a view of the mess there: dirt, graffiti, men sprawled on the sidewalk. At 16th, they were digging up one side of the BART station plaza, displacing some of the drug dealers that frequent this corner.
I got a good seat on the 22 bus through a corner of the Mission, the edge of the Lower Haight, up Fillmore to Sacramento Street. My destination was an appointment with the eye doctor at Clay and Webster streets. Familiar territory. I was born just around the corner, and so was my brother, my sister and one of my two daughters. I hear O.J. Simpson was born in the same hospital. They ought to put up a plaque.
I had a couple of hours to kill, so I walked in Jackson Street east to Van Ness Avenue, past parks and grand old mansions. Is it fair to compare Pacific Heights to a depressed part of Mission Street? No. But they are both parts of the same city.
At Van Ness and Jackson, I caught the 27-Bryant bus, along Polk Street for a bit, a zigzag on the slope of Nob Hill, a dip into the Tenderloin, south of Market and the Mission. I got off at Cesar Chavez and Folsom streets then up the hill for a delicious quick lunch at Los Yaquis, a little Mexican restaurant just off Precita Park. I’d never been there before. A discovery.
Next day, out again, this time to North Beach, via the J streetcar and the 30-Stockton bus. I’ve always been fascinated with a ride up Stockton Street through Chinatown. It’s like a trip through an Asian market street. The bus goes on through the Marina, along Chestnut Street, which is totally different.
I got off before that stretch at Columbus Avenue and headed up Green Street. I stopped at Gino & Carlo for a glass of wine and shot of authentic San Francisco. It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon, lots of room in the Italian restaurants and parklets that line Green Street, where Calabrese grilled octopus, crab chowder and branzino are on the menu. Also pizza, and a European ambiance with a San Francisco flavor. Even a panhandler.
I’d come to North Beach a couple of days too late, Marco Rossi, the bartender and one of the owners at Gino & Carlo, told me. “You should have been here Sunday for the parade,” he said. It was Italian Heritage Day, and Paul Miyamoto, the sheriff, was there on a horse, the police chief was there, so was the fire chief and thousands of people.
“Every place was packed, every bar, every restaurant, just full of people, Rossi said. “People all came out. They were tired of staying home. They want to have a good time.”
And when they did, they came to North Beach, drawn by the restaurants, the scene, the narrow side alleys, the history, the old San Francisco feel of the place.
I had a drink that Wednesday with a friend and then walked up the hill a bit, passed Upper Grant Avenue with its memories of the Beat Generation, for lunch at American Bites, which serves Italian food. It’s a white tablecloth place now, connected to Maykadeh, a Persian restaurant next door.
The two are run by Mahmoud Khossoussi, born in Iran and trained in the restaurant business at the Tuscan-style North Beach restaurant on Stockton Street just off Washington Square.
American Bites and the Maykadeh are on the site of the Old Spaghetti Factory, once a pasta factory converted into a restaurant in the 1950s. In the Beat era it was celebrated as a hangout for poets and writers — “an incubator and magnet for local talent,” according to a city landmark report.
Now it has evolved again, a new adaptation of a part of old San Francisco. In the North Beach tradition, the gray cat who occasionally greets customers at American Bites has an Italian name: Marco.