I often describe San Francisco as a 92 year old once beautiful woman who spends two hours a day putting on her make-up. When she was young she was a commie and has never paid any attention to the world. She hates children and learns everything she knows from her hair dresser and manicurist.
Herb Caen was the perfect partner for the perennial old lady. In the fifteen years when San Francisco was in elegant bloom with the hippies, music, color, vitality… Caen never noticed it, never mentioned it once in his daily column.
Now we have part of San Francisco, a formerly...
Now we have part of San Francisco, a formerly very interesting and important part, on life support, probably terminal. North Beach is near death. Businesses close and nothing re-opens; grocery stores, hardware stores, book stores, night clubs, high quality restaurants and more, all gone for good. Gangs roam the streets after 10 pm.
The reason is clear. Lefty ideology confronts numbers.
The Lefties have banned chain stores in North Beach and much of the city. There is no logic behind it, their arguments fail after one sentence replies, but they don’t think or learn. (Lefty two-digit-IQ ideology: ‘Starbucks kills local coffee shops’…obvious rebuttal: ’Since Starbucks came to San Francisco the number of coffee shops has increased five fold.’)
There are other numbers that matter; orders of magnitude of importance. Roughly 12 million tourists per year come to San Francisco and a similar number of regional shoppers. About one out of ten goes through North Beach on their way from Chinatown to Fisherman’s Wharf. For Regional shoppers and tourists that comes to 2.4 million people passing through North Beach.
Nearly all those people are middle class ordinary people. These are
the people who make Starbucks, McDonalds and Victoria’s Secret
successful. Nine out of ten people who go through North Beach are
ordinary middle-class people. Possibly one out of twenty of these
people are looking for the authentic Italian North Beach of the
Beatniks and Hippies that disappeared twenty-five years ago.
It looks to me like less than half a percent of the potential people
coming to San Francisco want something resembling an authentic North
Beach. The remaining 99.5% are ordinary middle-class people.
Middle-class people like to be in familiar surroundings, which is why
very few go to our gay Castro District. Middle-class people want to
feel safe, know where there is a clean bathroom. Middle-class people
want to be near a Starbucks and a McDonalds, a chain hardware store, a
cell phone store, a FedEx, a Gap and many more familiars. North Beach
is alien
territory to that 99.5%. Proof? The most consistently
successful restaurants in North Beach are simple middle-class pizza and
pasta joints.
Lefty ideology creates a hostile environment for the 99.5% of people who might want to visit North Beach and for nearly all the 9.5% who do visit. It takes years for word to get out about a feeling….the feeling that North Beach is not a comfortable place. But the word is out and it’ll be a long time before customers comes back, if they ever do.