Thursday's Bourbon Street, San Francisco

In a July 19th article in the San Francisco Examiner titled, "Outdoor booze ‘entertainment zones’ spread across The City," the newspaper exclaims how the city is taking a bold new approach to bring back a nightlife that never really existed, but what did exist was decimated by the pandemic.

At the center of this social and civic experiment is a one-block stretch of Valencia Street in the Mission District.   Once the working-class home to mom-and-pop business and cool thrift stores, today it is ground-zero for the influx of high-end tech workers.  Long before the pandemic, the Tech Boom replaced the hardware stores and laundromats on Valencia Street with juice bars and unaffordable restaurants serving food designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

When the Corona Virus hit Valencia Street businesses were already a popular destination for the new tech money but struggled when everything was forced back to "normal."  We went from a nation of foodies and date-nights, to binge-watching and Door-Dashing overnight, never leaving our homes for a year.   It's a difficult battleship to turnaround and get used to putting on pants again to eat, but that is the challenge all bars and restaurants face: How to encourage people to eat out again.

In a noble attempt to bring barflies back to the bars, the city is experimenting with "entertainment zones," like drinking on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, or Fremont Street in Las Vegas.  Within the specially designated "entertainment zones," bar and restaurant patrons will be allowed to take their drinks outside.

John's Grill

While attending the Norther California Concierge Association trade show this past spring, I ran into John Konstin, one of the owners of historic John's Grill.  He shared with me that they were in the process of expanding the hours of their bar and live music, one of the few restaurants which offers live jazz music by the way.  The plan is to extend the hours of the bar until 2:00am, which could become an entertainment zone on the one-block stretch of Ellis Street, where the restaurant has resided since 1908.

I was surprised to learn that there are 22 of these proposed entertainment zones peppered throughout the city, including the one block of Castro Street in front of the Art-Deco classic Castro Theater.  I am not opposed to the run-it-up-the-flagpole approach to get heads-in-beds and butts-on-barstools, but I have heard very little about the infrastructure around it: late-night dining, public transportation, etc.   

Our new mayor Daniel Lurie has a vision: to make San Francisco a destination for late night excursions.  However, even before the pandemic, San Francisco was notorious for rolling up the sidewalks by 10:00pm in the best of times.

After 2020, it was a near ghost town, even in what would pass as a late-night neighborhood like North Beach.  Good luck finding a bar open past 10:00pm, let alone by midnight.

When plays end in our Theater District, and theatergoers file out into the street, their only dining options are a 7-11, a Jack-In-The-Box, and any hot dog carts that happen to be there.  That’s it!   Denny’s was the last of the restaurants in San Francisco open 24 hours a day and seven days a week, and they shut down in 2024.  As far as I can tell, San Francisco is the largest city in the United States that has no restaurants or supermarkets open 24/7.

It also doesn’t help that the MUNI Metro (our local subway system), BART (our regional subway system) and most transit lines shut down before the bars close, so they should probably look at that before trying to sell ourselves as Las Vegas-lite.  Destinations like Las Vegas and New Orleans may allow late-night public drinking, but they have an infrastructure to support that policy.  San Francisco is venturing into uncharted bureaucratic waters but has not presented a plan to address those concerns.

Once the street partiers have put down their beer mugs and shot glasses at last call, they will still need a place to eat and a way to get home. 

That must be Phase II of the plan.

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