San Francisco Chronicle (Sunday)
To earn the right to hate on S.F., you first must love it
It is widely assumed native San Franciscans are extinct, swept away by the mighty tides of transplanted San Franciscans, people who moved to the City by the Bay for a better life, better weather, a better job or maybe to reinvent themselves.
They’re the ones who seem to be the face of a new San Francisco these days. But there are still a few natives around: London Breed, Gavin Newsom, Marc Benioff. Maybe you’ve heard of them.
I’m a native myself, and every so often I find more of us, gathered together, maybe having a summer drink in Noe Valley at the Peaks bar at 24th and Castro streets, an establishment Facebook describes as an “old-school SF hangout with an upbeat atmosphere.”
The Peaks is not to be confused with the Twin Peaks Tavern at Castro and Market, a gay bar with an international reputation. The two bars with a similar name are just over the hill from each other.
One of the first things you notice about the Peaks is that the customers look vaguely familiar, like people you’ve met around town.
“I’ll bet you 50% of our customers are native San Franciscans,” said Keli Leal, who was behind the bar the other warm Friday afternoon. She pointed down the end of the bar where a group of men were drinking beer. “Look,” she said, “He’s a native, and so is he,” pointing again, “and that one, too, and the guy next to him. All natives.”
The men were regular customers, in for a beer after work. They knew each other and had that affinity all native San Franciscans have.
“I’m a third-generation native myself,” she said. Her daughter, Shauna Leal-Markham, is a fourth-generation San Franciscan and proud of it.
The two women run the Peaks together. Keli got in the hospitality business as a young woman: “I got married, got divorced, was a single mother and needed a job with flexible hours,” Keli said. “I didn’t like restaurants or typing in some office.”
Shauna, her daughter, worked for years as a 911 dispatcher. That gave her the chance to see the city as it really is: emergencies at night, desperate people, tough work. After that, the family neighborhood bar sounded good. So did working with her mother. “I grew up here,” she said.
Noe Valley used to be an Irish neighborhood, and though bits of the past remain, like the Peaks, Noe Valley has been transformed. According to the Redfin real estate website, the median price of a Noe Valley home was $2.2 million in May, 26% more than last year.
That’s one neighborhood poster of the housing shortage in San Francisco. It’s no wonder that natives who own houses hang on.
That’s the bigger picture, but it’s the small places that make the city: neighborhood bars in the Richmond and Sunset, in North Beach, Chinatown, out in the Excelsior. The Peaks is one of them, dark inside, a pool table, a patio in back, music, worn a bit like a community living room. “A dive bar,” Keli describes it. “A local neighborhood bar.”
“It’s the kind of place you go for a quiet drink after work with your union brothers, a bluecollar place,” said Phil Mayes, who belongs to the boilermakers union.
Mayes and his pal, Julio Segura, talked a little about the city, how it’s changed and their shifting views of San Francisco. “You love it and you hate it sometimes,” Mayes said.
Sometimes he’s called out at night on emergency calls. After dark, he says you see the real problems — people stumbling around like the living dead. Are they druggies? “Like zombies,” he said. “Zombies in the street.”
That’s when he hates what he sees in his native city. Sometimes he leaves San Francisco for a while, but after a couple of weeks the pull of the city gets him: “I come back. I get homesick.”
Like a lot of native San Franciscans, he has mixed feelings about his hometown. He was reminded of the line from the film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” Jimmie, the main character, is disappointed by San Francisco. But when he hears two women on a Muni bus complaining about the city, he tells them: “You don’t get to hate it unless you love it.”