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Exploring San Francisco through the lens of city blocks, Blocker is a regular series by Charles Hodgkins. Look for it on SFist every other Wednesday, around the lunching hour (the timing of this special Tuesday episode notwithstanding).
View the map of all published Blocker episodes.
Blocker, No. 30: Polk St. in Polk Gulch / the Tenderloin
It’s the dead of San Francisco winter and 46 degrees — 46 degrees! — but that’s not stopping certain hardy residents of the sizable apartment structure at 1214 Polk from opening their windows and drying their laundry au naturale. We’re impressed. 46 degrees in San Francisco, particularly along this gusty urban corridor between Bush and Sutter, feels like autumn in the Yukon.
This is the southern edge of Polk’s transitional zone, where it emerges from the sleazy chic of “nitespots” like Vertigo and Blur and slowly crawls toward more prim territory northward up into Russian Hill. The upstairs residences on this block are decidedly ordinary, but there’s a dichotomy at work between, for example, the stained glasswork at O’Reilly’s Holy Grail and the $5 haircuts and $20 facials across the road at the International College of Cosmetology II. Of course, Polk St. has always been known as one of San Francisco’s more diverse business thoroughfares.
Across the Fern St. alley from O’Reilly’s, we poke our head into a construction site with Skates Off Haight signage out front, and a worker-man inside assumes we’re the electrician he’s waiting on. As much as we’d love to advise him on his electrical options — “110, 111, whatever it takes” — we politely retreat back onto the sidewalk, where down the block a shade, we spot a faded beer ad in a window at Discount Grocers:
The aged poster gets our cultural calculator humming and eventually prompts the rough equation Frat-level advertising + (Cheap-ass swill ÷ Homeless alcoholism) = Awkward sex in shopping carts. We consider adding the multiplier Tenderloin booby parlors to the amateurish mathematical expression, but our head’s about to explode from all the arithmetic and we’ve got work to do, so we move across the street.
On the east side of Polk, at the corner of Sutter, El Super Burrito’s tired exterior has gotten a makeover in recent months. Gone is the crusty and tattered awning; in its place is a fresh coat of paint. Shamefully, the paint is brown, which is probably the last color any beleaguered taco shop should choose to slap all over its outside walls.
Up toward Bush on the same side of street, past the smoke shop at 1216 where it’s 20% off all hookahs, Quetzal Café monopolizes four storefronts worth of commerce. Across Polk, the five-story El-Forest apartment building looks about as postwar London as anything in San Francisco, and today’s dowdy weather only adds to the stark effect.
South a few steps on that side of the street, however, it’s a bit brighter around O’Reilly’s Holy Grail. Both O’Reilly’s and the building set to house its future neighbor at 1237, McTeague’s Saloon, have retained the vertical neon signs of their predecessors. In the case of O’Reilly’s, a spacious restaurant that took over the former home of Mayes Oyster House in the mid ‘00s, the old red Mayes sign is part of the colorful show, classy art deco lettering and all. It’s unclear whether the imminent tavern next door will somehow incorporate the old Johnny Wok vertical neon into its streetfront presentation.
But if socks can dry in the breeze on a day like this, why shouldn’t an Irish bar put a defunct Chinese restaurant’s sign to use?
(Photos by the author.)
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Note: El Super Burrito's quality has gone WAY down over the last few years.
And I think Skates Off Haight has been around for quite a long time. Feels like it's been there since I moved nearby, over five years ago.
Skates Off Haight has been on that block at least five years.
Also, O’Reilly’s took over from a branch of Axum Cafe, which was open for at least 2-3 years. Mayes Oyster House has been gone for most of a decade.
A gray day in suburban Washington, DC. Blocker always makes me homesick. Le sigh. Thanks SFist.
No love for Modern Thai?
love POLK st.
back in the eighties it was only place you could get bootleg live punk cassettes & all the cool punk gear... only melrose in hollywood could match it on the west coast.
never forgot walkin w/ long gone h.s. friend as he bragged that he was the king of polk st. hustlers.
polk is next to last stop for all misfits
H.C/81
So sorry, but this travelogue strikes me as markedly superficial. Do you do minimal research? Do you speak to those in the neighborhood? El Super Burrito was once Foster's; Allen Ginsberg lived across the street because he had a crush on a boy who hung out there and he took pleasure in spying on him. Mayes was a mobster joint. When Axum took over, nothing of the interior was changed, thankfully, so one could experience the bizarre culture clash of eating superb Ethiopian cuisine (with one's bare hands, as the proprietor discouraged the use of silverware) in a dark 1940s leather booth underworld ambiance. The 100-year-old painted Wrigley's ad on the west side of Polk. Just to scratch the surface; the block is dense w/ history. Unfortunately, the guy who runs O'Reilly's, though he seems like a nice guy, has a problem w/ the venerable old name of the district, Polk Gulch, and has tried to rename it by fiat Polk Village. If you want to be welcomed into a neighborhood in which you have no previous history, please do not make a play at renaming the neighborhood.