Beach Chalet a rugged relic of city’s good times and bad
People will tell you that San Francisco isn’t what it used to be, and maybe they are right. In some ways, the city is better.
We were at the Beach Chalet, out where Golden Gate Park meets the ocean, for a small family birthday brunch the other Sunday morning. The place was full. It seemed as if a representative of every San Francisco tribe was there: young, old, every race, surfer dudes to old men wearing their worn Sunday best. The food was good, the sun was shining, the Pacific Ocean was out the window.
“I’m glad we thought of this place,” somebody said. “This is nice.”
“It wasn’t always like this,” said one of the women. “When I was younger, they had a bar here that was full of bikers. Bad guys, real losers . ... It was so tough I was even afraid to drive by. The Beach Chalet was a dump.”
That would have been in the 1970s or a bit later. Tough times in the city: A lot of San Franciscans had moved to the suburbs, the port was fading, there was a lot of crime, a lot of upheaval.
Those days are remembered through a haze of nostalgia, but the reality was different. There were good reasons thousands of San Franciscans moved out.
The dry rot extended from the bay to the breakers. The Ferry Building was gray and empty, cut off from the city by a freeway that looked like a prison wall. Out at Ocean Beach, Playland had folded, the old Sutro Baths had burned down, and the Beach Chalet was in such bad shape the city considered tearing it down.
You should see it now. The lower floor has been turned into a visitors center, the lively and colorful murals have been restored, the second floor has a bar and a restaurant. An outdoor beer garden called the Park Chalet is in the back, on the land side of the building.
The Ferry Building and the Beach Chalet are like bookends, two San Francisco landmarks at opposite sides of the city that have been refurbished.
The Beach Chalet, owned by the city, was designed in 1925 by Willis Polk, one of San Francisco’s greatest architects. The building had changing rooms for beachgoers on the first floor, a restaurant, and a tea room run by the Mooser sisters, Hattie and Minnie.
In 1936, the federal Works Progress Administration commissioned murals on the chalet’s walls by Lucien Labaudt, an artist so famous that a merchant ship was named for him.
The murals show life in Depression-era San Francisco, from the ocean to the bay, in living color. In its heyday, the Beach Chalet was a showpiece and so was the Ocean Beach, which was like a seaside resort. You could skate, dine, dance, drink and bathe in an indoor pool.
The good times lasted a long time. In 1947, the city leased the Beach Chalet to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. It was a sweetheart deal. The VFW paid only $50 a month rent. There was a bar and a meeting hall.
But it turned out badly, and by 1979 that part of the beach was in decline and the Beach Chalet was a mess. The VFW moved out, the place needed a ton of repairs and the city could not find another tenant.
The building was locked and boarded up, the home of stray cats and homeless people. It was vacant for years, a white elephant, beautiful but useless.
But the city lucked out. One day in 1993, a senior at San Francisco State University named Gar Truppelli rode by on his mountain bike. He was a business major, and his term project was to craft a business and marketing plan for a new enterprise. He enlisted his wife, Lara, in the project and it became the blueprint for a repurposed Beach Chalet. She was 25, he was 24.
They had met at a pizza parlor in San Luis Obispo and dreamed of opening a restaurant someday.
They lined up financing with a New York bank, partnered with Wynkoop Brewing Co. of Denver for a bar concept. “They specialized in reviving historic buildings as brewpubs,” Lara said.
The timing was just right. The nonprofit Friends of Recreation and Park, created by the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy, raised $6.7 million in public and private funds for the project, including a $1.5 million matching grant from the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund.
The beautiful murals were restored, the building was rehabbed, and the Truppellis won the lease.
“We opened New Year’s Day 1997,” Lara said. “It’s our 20-year anniversary.”
Nothing succeeds like success, and the Truppellis opened the Park Chalet, a “kind of little sister,” Lara said.
In 2009, the Truppellis bid on a 1901 classic Oakland building that had been a pumping station on Lake Merritt and turned it into the Lake Chalet.
Their latest enterprise is the Honor Kitchen and Cocktails, an Emeryville gastropub.
How did Gar fare with his San Francisco State professors? “I think he got an A-plus,” Lara said.