Growing Up in San Francisco

by Frank Dunnigan

  Many places that I enjoyed as a child and as a teen are no longer there—particularly Sutro’s (I’ve seen the ruins many times—no need to revisit), Playland and Candlestick Park.

  I still have fond memories of the WPA-inspired zoo, and there have been many improvements there over the years, including more animals in natural habitats, a much larger aviary and insect collection and some improved visitor amenities. Still, I miss Monkey Island, the Pachyderm House with elephants and the Little Puffer engine in the Children’s Playground area.

  Local artists Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher led the creation of the 163 mosaic panels that were applied in 2005 to an existing public stairway just off 16th Avenue in the Sunset District. Similar installations are being added throughout the city. Photograph by Mark Roller.

  Fleishhacker Pool is now a paved parking lot for the zoo, which charges ten dollars, over and above the zoo’s nineteen-dollar adult admission fee. The late Messrs. Fleishhacker are probably rolling over to think that this once-free amenity is now such a costly excursion for most families.

  So what do returning natives want to see? First, I want the age-old experience of riding a streetcar down Market Street to see what is new there—and there is plenty.

  Taking the L-Taraval and then switching to the newer F-line at Market and Castro will take you all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf—whisking you past trendy new retailers, new apartments and condos on the many corners that were once occupied by gas stations and parking lots, plus providing an up-close look at the pedestrians who make up the city of today. The old Central Freeway from the 1950s is gone, though the new boulevard on Octavia seemed to be as crowded as 19th Avenue during rush hour.

  Once in the downtown area, you will see familiar sights such as the façade of the old Emporium, essentially unchanged since before the earthquake and fire of 1906, but that’s where the similarity ends—behind that wall is a dizzying array of eateries, with the refurbished dome now hidden from the street level and placed above an upper floor of the complex. On the opposite side of the street, Woolworth’s and its popcorn-candy-pizza aromas are long gone, with a clothing retailer now occupying the space. Across the street at 1 Powell Street, home to Bank of America’s day and night branch and its substantial travelers’ cheque department, is another ground-floor retailer, with sleek apartments occupying the upper floors where I worked as a claims adjuster back in the 1970s.

  As the streetcar ride continues, it’s easy to see that the Financial District, once centered on Montgomery Street, has spread its high-rise influence well south of Market and all the way to the waters of the bay. A few years ago, I could still name every skyscraper, but I’d be hard-pressed to do so now—and there are several dozen more on the drawing boards for construction later in this decade.

  The ride along the Embarcadero still reminds us that this was once a town whose history was based on navigation, but the only clue the day I was there was a sign that a large passenger ship would be arriving the following week. The scenery is much lighter and brighter now that the Embarcadero Freeway is gone—one of the most positive outcomes of the Loma Prieta earthquake more than twenty-five years ago. Many of the old piers have been converted into restaurant or retail outlets, and from Pier 39, all the way through Fisherman’s Wharf almost to Van Ness Avenue, is a no-man’s land of T-shirt shops, cell phone stores and the same restaurants that might be found in Duluth, Tacoma, Cincinnati or Syracuse. Dear old Sabella’s, with fond memories of prom-night dinners and some spectacular wedding receptions, now houses an Applebee’s—what can I say?

  With my MUNI day pass, I meander around town, silently pleased that so many lines now intersect with others in a way that helps me get to Golden Gate Park and meet a friend in record time. Bypassing the expensive admission to the new de Young Museum, we take an elevator to the rooftop deck for a spectacular 360-degree view of the San Francisco panorama—everything from downtown high-rises to the “timeless twin towers of St. Ignatius” (a Herb Caen phrase) to the park’s green swath through the middle of town and some gathering fog all the way out at Ocean Beach.

  New (de Young Museum, left, built in 2005) meets old (Francis Scott Key monument, right, dedicated in 1888) in Golden Gate Park. Photograph by Alvis Hendley.

  We then take the bus and transfer at Geary for a ride out to the Cliff House for a bite to eat. The new Lands End Visitor Center, now several years old, is a nice contrast to some of the old souvenir shops that once dispensed nothing more than cable car key chains and ceramic ashtrays emblazoned with “Souvenir of San Francisco.” I actually find myself doing some holiday shopping there—a great assortment of paperback books on local history, along with educational toys for kids, vintage art posters and the ubiquitous coffee mugs.

  The tower of St. Ignatius Church in 1968. The landmark on the city skyline turned one hundred years old in 2014. Photograph by Keith Forner.

  Throughout San Francisco’s forty-nine square miles, there are hundreds of significant structures, many of them city-designated landmarks, that can make passersby drink in their iconic “only-in-San-Francisco” style. The images in this chapter represent just a few of the places that I see on every single trip “home.”

  Sutro Tower, constructed in 1972–73, initially faced stiff community opposition. Today it is widely regarded as a civic landmark. Photograph by P. Eric Dausman.

  As I meander around town on any of my visits, many voices from the past are triggered in my mind by the sight of something familiar along the way. Sometimes it’s the one-time home of an old friend or relative, sometimes a repurposed building that once housed a Catholic girls’ high school in the 1960s. The ghosts from long-gone businesses still call out, reminders of the times when they were in the forefront of everyone’s thoughts. Often, I arrive at my eventual destination still thinking and replaying scenarios from a well-remembered past. The following phrases have resounded with me more than once on my travels:

  Nana knew that family from when she went to Presentation.

  That man used to work with Grandpa downtown.

  I took the streetcar (never “the train” or “the Metro”) downtown to meet him for lunch the other day.

  She graduated from the old Commerce High School on Van Ness and then walked across the street, got a job at city hall and has been there ever since.

  The magnificent Beaux-Arts city hall has been the focal point of the civic center since 1915. Courtesy of Bigwol.com.

  Daddy always sat with them on Friday nights at temple, and they talked about the old days and the Ukraine Bakery.

  We always go to Midnight Mass at St. Ignatius for Christmas and Easter.

  They became the next-door neighbors of Grandma’s parents right after the Fire.

  Your aunt used to date a boy from St. Ignatius.

  I miss having a See’s Candy store on West Portal (gone since the late 1950s).

  Two bits isn’t enough for even a few minutes on the parking meter nowadays.

  It feels like earthquake weather…

  I can still hear calliope music when I drive down Great Highway past the old Playland.

  Originally sold only at Playland, where it was invented in 1928, this treat is now widely available in many supermarkets. It is pure pleasure in every bite of rich simplicity—a combination of vanilla ice cream, two oatmeal cookies and chocolate coating. Author’s collection.

  I sure do miss the Star Bakery on Church Street for Irish soda bread.

  She lives right down the block from where the Taraval Post Office used to be (moved to new location in 1963).

  Now the Cliff House is just full of tourists—we go to Louis’s up the street.

  On Easter Sunday, we used to go for a walk through the tulip garden at the Dutch Windmill or to the Conservatory of Flowers in the park.

  They said the fog should clear to near the coast this afternoon.

  The Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park opened to the public in 1878. Author’s collection.

  D
idn’t they have a daughter who went to St. Rose (closed in 1990)?

  Save those City of Paris and Emporium gift boxes.

  We can see the lighted Mount Davidson Cross from our house.

  We walked to one of those free concerts at the Conservatory of Music.

  We always had Herb’s meatball sandwiches on Thursdays.

  Someone said they have the recipe for Herman’s potato salad.

  Really? I have one for the enchilada sauce from the Hot House.

  And I have one for Blum’s caramel crunch cake.

  Let’s just go to Joe’s of Westlake and have an early dinner.

  Mrs. Conroy sent us a loaf of homemade Irish bread for St. Patrick’s Day.

  Gather up all the leavened items before Passover and we’ll send them next door to Mrs. Murphy.

  Let’s send all these chocolate Easter eggs next door to the Goldmans now that Easter is over.

  It’s too early to put up the Christmas tree—not until after December 1.

  Built before World War II as the San Francisco Infant Shelter, the classic building at 19th Avenue and Moraga Street in the Sunset District later housed the Conservatory of Music for decades. It is now a French-language day school. Photograph by Alvis Hendley.

  And it stays up until after Epiphany on January 6 (notwithstanding the Catholic Church’s revised liturgical calendar).

  The wise men cannot be in front of the Nativity scene until January 6.

  Now that the children are grown, we celebrate only the first night of Hanukkah.

  Any shopping trip downtown in December included looking at the windows of the Emporium, walking through the lighted floral displays inside Podesta-Baldocchi and seeing the tree under the dome at the City of Paris.

  Put out the big tablecloth that Grandma bought in the Basement of the Emporium.

  We only have a few of Mom’s wineglasses from Nathan-Dohrmann left.

  Every December, we used to stop at Lindley Meadow in the park and watch the live Nativity scene, and then we’d drive around, looking at the Christmas lights on Sylvan Drive, on 18th Avenue, in St. Francis Wood and along Marina Boulevard.

  The Hibernia Bank building at 1 Jones Street. The bank ended more than 130 years of operations after being acquired in a 1988 merger, but the grand structure remained, growing derelict over time. It has recently been restored and will soon operate as an event venue. Photograph by Alvis Hendley.

  One of San Francisco’s most iconic monuments is the Ferry Building’s clock tower, modeled after the Giralda Tower in Seville, Spain. Other than interruptions from an occasional earthquake, the clock has been marking the passage of time for San Franciscans since 1898. Photograph by Michael Fraley.

  We know them—they’re the cousins of one of Grandma’s first cousins on the other side.

  Remember how we used to go into the old Hibernia Bank and look up at the stained-glass skylight (building was vacated by the defunct bank in 1985) whenever Grandma went in to cash a check?

  We always park in my aunt’s driveway on 2nd Avenue whenever we go to a 49er game at Kezar.

  Who’s going to drive all the way down to Santa Clara to see them play now?

  The neighbors were fighting so loudly, you could hear them down at the ferry.

  I called to make a reservation for lunch at Caesar’s the other day and found out that they went out of business in 2012.

  We parked where the El Capitan Theatre used to be when we went to dinner at Bruno’s on Mission Street.

  We always used to go to four o’clock Mass at St. Edward’s on California Street and then out to dinner at the Red Roof down the street (gone since 1998 and 1975, respectively).

  She was in the hospital at Presbyterian and then they moved her to Children’s and now to Hahnemann for rehab. [Today, all of these hospitals have been merged into a new entity known as California Pacific Medical Center, abbreviated as CPMC.]

  This thirty-eight-foot-tall granite and stainless-steel sculpture by artist Benny Bufano stood on the main road leading into San Francisco International Airport in the 1950s. It has since been relocated to Brotherhood Way. Photograph by Michael Fraley.

  I wanted something nice to wear to my daughter’s wedding and went to Nordstrom—it was okay, but it’s not I. Magnin.

  The neighbor’s son got caught drinking at the Circle on Saturday night and ended up in Juvi.

  Remember when there was a Bufano statue at the entrance to the airport, and everyone used to ask, “What time is blast-off?”

  The boys at St. Ignatius (actually coed for more than twenty-five years now) always climb Strawberry Hill to celebrate graduation, but students at Lowell are much more creative—such as the time they planted a full-grown redwood tree on the fifty-yard line of the school’s football field.

  I sure do miss the produce and meat departments at Petrini’s.

  I need to pick up a birthday card and a spool of thread at the dime store.

  It always takes two people to buy focaccia at Liguria Bakery in North Beach—one to go in and the other to drive around the block a couple of times.

  They had a nice spread at the house after the funeral, including a whole roast turkey sent by the undertaker (Duggan’s).

  Back in the 1940s, a fun night out was ice skating and hot chocolate at Sutro’s.

  The longest streetcar ride was the old 40 line from the Ferry Building to the cemeteries in Colma.

  The most beautiful streetcar ride was the section of the old 1-California line that ran from 32nd Avenue, along a private right-of-way overlooking the Golden Gate (gone since the tracks washed out back in 1925) to El Camino del Mar and Point Lobos Avenue.

  Whenever you were near Herman’s Delicatessen on Geary near 7th Avenue, you knew what a delicatessen should smell like.

  You could find any kind of food or household item at the Crystal Palace located at 8th and Market (gone since 1959, and so is its replacement, the Del Webb Motor Lodge).

  We love MUNI’s new senior fare of just a nickel (introduced around 1970 and since raised many times).

  Grison’s is gone, but at least there is still the House of Prime Rib.

  Sometimes we’d just stop in at the de Young Museum to rest after a day in the park—after all, it was free back then.

  Juvenile delinquents were always putting dishwashing liquid into public fountains—one of the more serious “crimes” of the 1950s.

  This street fountain at the intersection of St. Francis Boulevard and Santa Ana Way was built as part of the World War I–era residence park known as St. Francis Wood. Courtesy of a private collector.

  Frequently cited as one of the world’s most recognizable icons, the Golden Gate Bridge stands tall above the afternoon fog. Photograph by John A. Martini.

  Whenever your kids needed a gift for a birthday party, there were three choices: the Emporium’s toy department at the back of the fourth floor on Market Street, King Norman’s on Clement Street or Toy Village on West Portal Avenue.

  We went all out for our daughter’s tenth birthday this year—spent almost twenty dollars on the party for a dozen of her little friends.

  Everybody went to a place like Sabella’s at Fisherman’s Wharf for dinner before the junior or senior prom, then to the Tonga Room at the Fairmont afterward and then to Zim’s at 19th and Taraval to wrap up the night (or perhaps a stop at the Palace of the Legion of Honor parking lot to “watch the submarine races”).

  One of these days, we have to visit Mission Dolores, go to the top of Coit Tower and walk across the Golden Gate Bridge.

  After three days of a heat wave, our natural air conditioning always kicks in, right on schedule.

  Our family will ALWAYS live in San Francisco…

  19

  A TIMELINE OF CHANGE

  Change does not take place overnight. In small ways and in large ways, the following dots on the timeline of history have impacted the lives of San Franciscans. Like a tapestry that is woven from thousands of tiny threads, so, too, has the S
an Francisco of today been formed in countless ways by the history that has preceded us.

  A friend once said to me that I was lucky to have had relatives living in San Francisco so long ago. My response was that it was only because life became unbearable in Ireland before it became that bad in many other parts of the world. I have often speculated—out of four sets of my own great-grandparents, are the ones who arrived in 1907 really any different from my other great-grandparents who arrived in 1860, 1875 or in 1890? I think not.

  Yet while most change is a gradual thing, sometimes there are a few specific dates that stand out as clear demarcation points when any of us tell stories involving then and now.

  By anyone’s standards, April 18, 1906, represents a massive turning point in the history of the city of San Francisco, as well as the Bay Area as a region—but there are other watershed events that also marked the beginnings of massive change.

  Some longtime residents still remember what they were doing on that ill-fated Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, when their lives and the history of the world began to change forever. Mom always recalled coming home from mass at St. James Church on Guerrero Street to find her parents sitting at the breakfast table listening intently to the kitchen radio, as her father exclaimed, “My God—Pearl Harbor’s been bombed!”

  Those of us in younger generations remember where we were and what we were doing on the morning of Friday, November 22, 1963. For this writer, it was sitting in the first row of my sixth grade classroom at St. Cecilia School at 18th and Vicente, working on an addition problem in an arithmetic test. The school’s public address system came on, with a garbled radio broadcast that was quickly tuned in. The day went downhill from there, and many of us, as we gather for our fifty-year reunion from elementary school, recall this as a major dividing line between “the good old days” and now.