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Blocker: 1200 Polk
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.)