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Blocker: 3600 Balboa
Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a weekly series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist each Wednesday, around the lunching hour.
View the map of all published Blocker episodes.
Blocker, No. 14: Balboa St. in the Outer Richmond
The seaward stretch of Balboa between 37th and 38th Avenues conjures a variety of images, from some of the thickest summer fog around to the Balboa Theater’s weathered sign. The block’s numerous Asian restaurants also merit consideration.
Add hockey to the list, sort of. More on that in a bit.
Unless you’re an Outer Richmond local and you buy your nuts and washers at Crown Hardware on Balboa’s south side, odds are strong that you know this block best for the Balboa Theater, where the scent of butter-slathered popcorn wafts outside day and night. The circa-1926 moving picture house endures as the only one of its kind remaining in this part of town, and it seems to do well showing new releases. One reason for its success may be the fact that, as its sidewalk sandwich board announces, No private picnics (are) allowed in the auditorium. Ask anyone on this side of town what killed the Alexandria or the Coronet in recent years, and they’ll surely tell you: private picnics in the auditorium.
3600 Balboa isn’t much of a residential block. There’s a brand-new, three-unit building down at the west end, and some homes above MD Salon and Zephyr Espresso Caffe and Art Gallery that actually have 38th Ave. addresses. Other than that, affairs here are pretty much all business, as the movie, hardware, restaurant/cafe, beauty, floral, banking, mental health, grocery, and drinking industries each stake claims along the block.
With its three locations along the short stretch between the theater and 38th Ave., Richmond Area Multi-Services, Inc. (RAMS) is a quiet force on Balboa. The psychological agency boasts as many properties along this block as there are Chinese restaurants here – no mean feat. Across the street, studious-looking Zephyr competes with stalwart Simple Pleasures a few blocks to the east for the area’s café clientele.
Of course, it’s local tavern Hockey Haven that walks away with our Best Business Name trophy. If those few blocks of Larkin St. in the Tenderloin can bill itself as Little Saigon, can we petition to rename this block Little Winnipeg? It’s a terrific idea until we realize this world class dive of a bar features preciously little in the way of hockey memorabilia. No Gordie Howe jerseys. No Eddie Shore skates. Just one hell of a musty, smoky odor (not scent - odor) spilling out the open door and practically into the Balboa Theater across the street. Of course, Hockey Haven’s a bar – cheap drinks, pool table, the works - and it’s supposed to smell like Trees Lounge, not a French bakery.
Our favorite Hockey Haven moment, however, is the tiny “n” some local genius has scrawled on the front sign between the “o” and “c.” Somewhere out there, Grant Fuhr is in on the sign-vandal’s rad joke.
Down at the corner of Balboa and 37th, a small crowd waits for the 38-Geary or the 31-Balboa - whichever bus decides to show up first. An elderly woman, her head wrapped in a light scarf, picks through the produce at a market down the block. A really grouchy-looking guy in crooked sunglasses talks animatedly on the pay phone outside Crown Hardware, slams the receiver down, then hrumphs his way across the street. Although his outburst seems out of character for such a relatively mellow neighborhood, most people on the sidewalk are too preoccupied with MUNI’s apparently delayed arrival to notice. Mold may be a perennial issue out here, less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean, near the northwestern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula. Public displays of ire are surely not.
