San Fran Voice

San Francisco is a city which leaves its impressions upon people.  In honor of that, writers and artists, comedians and actors, and visitors from across the globe have made mention of San Francisco in print and in voice.  Quotes about San Francisco vary as much as the people who make up this city.  Each morning, San Fran Voice gives you one to think about as you wander through the city streets, letting it leave its mark on you. Check the archives for others.Today’s San Francisco quote is … from an Epinions.com piece on the city and is about the neighborhoods here.

“The neighborhoods of San Francisco are practices in diversity, and greatly lend to the overall charm of the whole city. There is Pacific Heights - with its grand houses and staggering views, the tenderloin - where you would visit on a dare, Noe Valley - with its familial charm, Richmond - with its dog walkers and young rich tenants, the Haight - with its parkside location and runaway children on every corner, Chinatown - where the ducks hang upside down in the windows (really) and the store signs are in a different language, the Mission - where everyone’s a tough guy, and the Castro - where the whole world is rainbow colored.”

There is a funny thing about neighborhoods in San Francisco.  On the one hand, they are very distinct from one another.  North Beach and Chinatown lie side by side but you can tell almost exactly when you’ve crossed from one to the other.  And even the new-to-SF can tell the subtle differences between a place like commercial North Beach and its more residential neighbor, Telegraph Hill.  But then there are all of these little pockets and smaller divisions within neighborhoods that kind of blend together and make it hard to tell what’s what and where is where.

It’s kind of like with music subgenres.  Let me digress for just a moment.  There was a time when the people who listened to “metal” all kinds of fell in to the same category.  But if you try to define a metal band today, you need to know if the band is hardcore or thrash, metalcore or progressive.  You need to know that thrash metal includes black metal and death metal which are distinct from one another and that doom metal came before goth metal which is NOT the same thing.  If you get more in-depth in your research, you’ll learn about mathcore and folk metal.  But if you know all of these things and you try to explain them to someone who doesn’t, you end up having to fall back on the general label of “metal” for your explanation.

This is what it’s like with some of the neighborhoods in San Francisco.  People who once lived in the “bad part” of Nob Hill have now long been living in “The Tenderloin”.  Between these two spots, which are only blocks apart, you’ve got Lower Nob Hill and The Tendernob.  And then there are various other names for certain streets depending on whether you’re talking to your skeezy friend who lives there or your real estate agent trying to get you to live there.  And so, you have certain streets that are parts of one or more neighborhoods but which become something of a neighborhood on their own.  And so you’ve got Polk Gulch.

Polk Gulch (controversially renamed Polk Village) is that section of San Francisco which is made up of Polk Street where it runs between approximately Geary Street and Union Street.  Oh, but get anyone to agree to that border!  Many sources will tell you that Polk Gulch doesn’t go as far as Geary but rather stops heading south at California Street, leaving off what is arguably the sketchier part of the Polk Street area locating in (or near, depending on your source) The Tenderloin.

But, Polk Street is undeniably slightly different from the rest of the area which it traverses.  Sure, you can see something a little seedier in the southern end of this stretch that what you’ll see as you head up towards the Russian Hill neighborhood, but there’s a semblance of similarity among the different spots all along the street that kind of serves to make it seem like its own little place.  Although plenty of people live here (and the streets are frequently filled with plenty of people who don’t live – specifically – anywhere), Polk Gulch is primarily a commercial area.  There are stores which range from the corner convenience stop to the lower end boutiques of the city, restaurants which go from grab-a-slice to dress-spicy-and-sit-down and bars which are mostly divey but have some college-esque feeling as well.

In all honesty, I tend to spend more time at the southern end of the stretch than the northern end myself.  Live music at Hemlock Tavern happens almost every night of the week.  Venues for dancing and drinking in the nearby area include the divey “gay saloon”, The Cinch, and the college-pick Vertigo.  And for nights when something different is on the menu, the tranny strip club at Polk and Post (Divas) always offers an eyeful of entertainment.  But heading further north, you do have Red Devil Lounge and you start getting in to the shopping so there’s no reason to avoid trekking up there either.

It may kind of blend in with some of the other neighborhoods that surround it, but Polk Street is a virtual neighborhood all its own so if you’re looking to see some San Francisco local flavor, it’s one of the spots to add to your list.

When I first moved here, a new friend was trying to give me directions to somewhere or other in San Francisco and I was completely baffled by his instructions, so finally he laughed and said, “Just meet me at Union Square and I’ll take you over there”.  When I said, “um, okay, where’s Union Square?” he just about dropped the phone because he thought that he had given me one of the most obvious landmarks in the city to make the plan easier for me.  We laugh about that now because the idea that I didn’t know Union Square is strange and yet makes sense.

You see, the main reason that you would go to Union Square, especially as a tourist which is more or less what I still was at the time of the conversation, is for the shopping.  You go there because they have the multiple story Macy’s and the Loehmann’s discounted brand name store and the Victoria’s Secret with the terrific window displays and the trendy clothing at H&M.  They have all of the brand name stores that you see in magazines and don’t get to experience if you don’t live in a city, stores like FCUK, Armani Exchange, and Jessica McClintock, stores that are familiar if you’re a shopper.  But I’m not much of a shopper and I’m much more likely to end up hitting thrift stores in The Haight or The Mission than purchasing anything from Louis Vuitton so it makes sense that I had only a vague idea of where San Francisco’s major shopping area was located.

At the same time, it’s strange that I couldn’t identify where Union Square was located since it’s close enough to so many of the things I was living close to at the time.  Union Square itself is an urban park which is home to the Theatre Bay Area half-price tickets booth and the See’s Candies that I’ve never even stopped at.  It is bordered on one side by Stockton, just south of the Stockton Tunnel, so I pass by it every time I take the 30 MUNI bus from North Beach down to Market Street.  It is bordered on another side by Powell Street which is the street that my Mason-Powell cable car heads down to get to the cable car turnaround at Market.  So basically, if I was taking any form of transportation that I knew at the time, I’d pass Union Square and probably should’ve known where it was.

Now that I’ve lived in the city for long enough to have explored the ins and outs of it, I obviously don’t have to think twice about where Union Square is.  In fact, I’ve amassed quite a list of positive memories within the geographically small neighborhood.  I’ve ridden up the elevator of the Westin St. Francis to enjoy a stunning view of the bay with a new friend.  I’ve had the best midnight Thai food ever at a small place I stumbled upon on the way home from the underground MUNI station one night.  I’ve had very pricey but amazingly good frozen amaretto sours at Gold Dust Lounge, an older-crowd bar I never would’ve thought I’d have reason to stop in to.  I’ve been to art gallery openings and bookstore readings and small theatre plays.

In short, I’ve discovered that there is actually a lot more to Union Square than just the shopping, even though that’s the big draw that it has for many people.  You have to do some searching to find the non-tourist things in this neighborhood.  It would be really easy to get over-priced food and watered-down beverages in the area, to pay high covers for VIP sections of clubs that aren’t worth their cost and to get lost in the urge to spend too much on shopping.  But it’s just as easy to get cheap slices of pizza at Blondie’s and buy inexpensive trinkets from street vendors and enjoy the entertainment of neighborhood characters like the San Francisco Twins.  Union Square is the kind of neighborhood that is great for those who are just passing through and better for those who are in-the-know.

If asked to name the main street in San Francisco, a number of people would offer the automatic reply that it’s Market Street.  This isn’t entirely true but that’s only because San Francisco is a city filled with such distinct neighborhoods that there are multiple “main streets” in different sections of town.  Insofar as there can be a street that everyone kind of ends up at on a regular basis, Market Street is that street.

That Market is a main street is due in large part to the fact that it is the hub of much of the city’s transportation.  The BART trains and the MUNI lines which run underground are most easily accessible by heading to Market Street and picking one of the stations which are really only blocks apart.  The city’s famous F-line runs along Market Street.  The cable cars make their turnaround at the intersection of Market Street and Powell Street.  Numerous buses that lead towards all different areas of the city make stops along Market.  And taxis are easy to grab here.  And depending on where you’re coming from, if you’re planning to leave the city, you usually end up taking Market or crossing Market to get there.  It is the main vein that runs through the city in terms of transportation.

But Market Street is a street with many different personalities.  It passes through so much of the city, through so many different neighborhoods, that it is home to the craziest of characters, the most famous of local government officials and the plain janes that are taking care of their daily business.  Starting not too far from the Ferry Building on the bay, Market Street passes through the towering buildings of the Financial District and wends its way through a great deal of shopping.  You’ll pass some big stores including Old Navy and Ross, the multi-level Virgin Records, the name-brand bigger boutiques, and the Apple computer store which has the glass-like staircase and people parked at every gadget for trials.

Moving further towards the Pacific Ocean, Market Street will take you up towards the Civic Center, which is San Francisco’s government hub.  You’ll move past famous theaters and in to an area where strip clubs advertise “touch the magic” and porn stores flank cheap bars.  Then you’ll move into a more neighborhood-feel kind of place where there are piano karaoke lounges (Martuni’s for example) and local record stores.  In the mid-Market area, you come across a budding artsy neighborhood which is currently being called “The Deco Ghetto”.  Moving up in to Upper Market, you start to get into more of a Castro feel for life.  After Market hits Castro, it begins to become a winding road and eventually turns into Portola, taking you through residential parts of the city that you’d rarely visit as a tourist.

Just with this quick drive along Market Street to this area, you’ve seen the edges of a number of the places which make up San Francisco as a city. It may not be a “main street” in the traditional sense of the word, but Market Street is the portal to a number of San Francisco neighborhoods and the one street you need to know if you’re going to be trying to get around the city without a car.

There is going to be some debate among people browsing through the San Fran Voice information about San Francisco neighborhoods as to whether or not Fisherman’s Wharf can really be called a “neighborhood”.  It’s a place with geographic boundaries for sure, but it’s more of a tourist attraction than a neighborhood, right?  In a sense, yes, but in terms of being a part of the city which is unique in and of itself to the area within which it is confined, I think that Fisherman’s Wharf is very much its own neighborhood.

Fisherman’s Wharf itself is the section of the city located at Pier 45.  It’s impossible to miss because it has a big sign indicating that you’re there, and if you somehow don’t see that, you can look at the strip of tourist stores, the famous Wharf restaurants like Boudin’s, the clam-chowder-in-a-bread-bowl carts and the throngs of other travelers and know that you’re there.  It offers a little bit of sensory overload and really lets you know that you’re traveling – it’s the kind of place that you think of when you think of tourist trap locations like Hollywood, Orlando, Atlantic City, the Vegas Strip and Virginia Beach.  It’s the cheesy souvenirs and the over-priced chain restaurants that you won’t find anywhere else in the city.  It’s a tourist spot.

But, I do have to say that, as a local who lives not all that far from the area, I make it down there more often than I might think that I would.  That’s due in part to the fact that there’s a strange appeal to the tourist activities sometimes.  That you can wander within your own city and see seals docked at the pier, buy fish ‘n’ chips from a street vendor and pick up ridiculous “city theme” gifts for Mom has its place.  And when the right houseguests come to town and want to splurge on expensive restaurants, the first choice might be North Beach but some of the local restaurants on the water run a close second.

My favorite thing in this neighborhood is Musee Mechanique, also known as the “old arcade game place”.  This free-to-enter, quarters-to-play museum of arcade games has a ridiculously odd selection of games which include old reenactments of foreign executions, electric ferris wheels made out of toothpicks by the former prisoners of San Quentin and eighties favorites like Ms. Pacman and Moon Patrol.  This place is fun in a not-quite-touristy-but-sorta-kinda way.

Fisherman’s Wharf has nightlife, although it’s not the place that I think of when I’m headed out on the town.  There’s a section to the west of the main intersection of the neighborhood which is home to a series of Irish bars where you can get Irish coffees and beer.  Many of these have terrific happy hours and live music, so it’s worth wandering through the neighborhood to see what catches your fancy.  However, it’s a tourist spot so you pay inflated tourist prices for most of the drinks and food in this neighborhood.  Similarly, you could choose to live in one of the homes which make up the small residential portion of this neighborhood, but you’d be paying a lot of money to live in a spot where you’ll regularly be woken early by the sounds of the tour buses passing by.  Instead, Fisherman’s Wharf is that neighborhood that you should be happy to visit and then pleased to leave.

Before I moved to San Francisco, my brother lived here in a neighborhood that was loosely defined as Lower Nob Hill which turned out to just be a pretty name for the edges of the Tenderloin neighborhood.  He told me stories about wandering a little bit too far from those edges, into the heart of the Tenderloin, and encountering shady activity that he just didn’t see throughout the rest of San Francisco.  But at the same time, he loved his neighborhood.  And now that I live here and have hung out regularly with friends who take advantage of the relatively cheap rents in the Tenderloin, I have to say that I love it a bit myself.  Like with the SoMA, there are some sketchy areas of the Tenderloin and there’s a reason that it has its bad rap, but there’s also a lot of fun to be had there if you have the right attitude about it.

The difference between the SoMA and the Tenderloin for me is that I consider the SoMA a place where you can go during all hours of the day and night; it has a pretty veneer during the day that makes it tourist-friendly and a happening nightlife that draws in locals from throughout the city.  In contrast, although I’ve had reason to be in the Tenderloin during the day, I basically consider this a nighttime neighborhood.  I suppose that’s kind of odd when you think about it; you generally want to avoid “bad” neighborhoods at night, but I guess what I like about the Tenderloin is its nightlife.  There’s an appeal to the dive bars and the slightly ghetto venues of the Tenderloin.  The moonlight makes the place look nice.

The grittiness of the Tenderloin is obvious during the day.  I’ve seen people urinating on the streets here, it’s not uncommon to find forties in paper bags in hand before noon and I once saw a needle propped up in the arm of a stranger as I passed his body on the street.  I admit, none of that is pretty.  Friends who live in the area cite prostitution, primarily but not entirely transsexual prostitution, as the biggest problem they encounter on a daily basis, although street fights and general fear of crime are up there as well.  But they live there, not because they can’t afford anywhere else but because the benefits of the low prices outweigh the annoyances of the neighborhood.

That said, The Tenderloin is a very “local” neighborhood.  There’s not really any reason for most tourists to make their way to this part of town.  If they do, it’s basically Polk Street that they probably want to linger around because this is where the nightlife is located.  Looking for the transsexual strip club?  That would be in this area.  Trying to find the anti-Castro-style gay bars?  This place is a good bet.  The streets stay active throughout the night and it’s easy to grab a cab, but you should probably know where you are and where you’re headed when you step out to enjoy the life here.