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.

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Blocker, No. 35: West Portal Ave. in West Portal

Certain San Francisco neighborhoods portray themselves as having captured a small-town feel amidst the big city bustle. But almost as often, closer inspection reveals these marketing pitches to be all arm without enough follow-through.

Laurel Heights? Sure, it’s leafy and quiet, but since when does Smallville, USA have more salons, antique home furnishing retailers, and high-end fashion boutiques as it does grocers? Bernal Heights? Potrero Hill? We’re getting warmer, but the former’s brimming progressivism and the latter’s choice perch above downtown’s high-rises don’t align with what you get in genuinely small California towns such as Chester or Bishop.

West Portal, however, boasts real follow-through – the retro Space Age streetcar station notwithstanding, of course.

We’re here on business to prowl the block of West Portal Ave. between Ulloa and Vicente, but we’d be remiss to neglect West Portal Station across Ulloa. Anyway, it’s impossible to ignore. The bluer-than-blue panels that curve symmetrically — yet still appear scattershot — over its boarding platforms scream “Tomorrowland!” and “The future is in soft plastics!”; we can’t help but half-expect to see Elroy Jetson come swooping out of the MUNI tunnel in a kid-sized flying saucer. The fact that the station was built in the 1970s as some sort of architectural throwback to 1961 just adds to all the confusion. We react by turning to explore the business district in our midst.

Both West Portal Ave.’s auto corridor and sidewalks are surprisingly sparse for a weekday afternoon in spring, but all the better opportunity for us to do a bit of window shopping. There’s some classy ladies footwear and a sharp-looking men’s coat in the display window at Goodwill, where shiny brasswork frames the thrift shop’s doors and windows. It’s an effort to coax in a slightly more upmarket set of customers than fools like us who enjoy browsing Goodwill shelves in search of little more than the perfect ironic mug (e.g. “Cowpokes Do It Best,” “Metamucil: A Smooth Move,” etc. etc.).

There’s quite little irony on the sandwich board outside Supercuts, which answers its own query as to “What’s hot” with simply, “color.” Clearly, Mexican restaurant El Toreador across the street is in on the bright joke, its lustrous pink brickwork framing a front facade heavy on primary colors and light on visual subtlety. Immediately next door sits Irish pub Joxer Daly’s and its garden-variety forest green and red brick. The two establishments’ exteriors make for a striking juxtaposition, even before we take into account the wooden parrots perched in El Toreador’s window versus the smoking punters outside Joxer Daly’s.

Judging by several of the men we see on our visit here, one thing’s achingly clear: Beards are in as a male fashion accessory this season in West Portal. Two older, hirsute men sit separately inside Mozzarella di Bufala Pizzeria, gnawing on thin-crust slices. A 40-something gentleman emerges from Barbagelata Real Estate sporting clean-cut facial foliage. Across the street, a pair of young coffee-drinkers lounge on a stone bench outside Washington Mutual and, beards intact, chuckle as they toss Cheez-Its at a handful of pigeons scurrying around the sidewalk.

An ethical dilemma ensues: Do we immediately get on the horn and report these scofflaws as violators of Section 486 of San Francisco’s Municipal Police Code – a.k.a. the Pigeon Law? No, mainly because we’re too busy wondering if yet another bearded man, more unkempt than all the others, is following us around. He finds his way into our photos outside both movie theater Cinearts at the Empire and newly plain-empty retailer Plain Jane’s. Good grief, he nearly jumps into the frame as we shoot West Portal Station across Ulloa. Has our regular SFist feature enjoyed enough success in the last ten months to have acquired an official Blocker Stalker? And what’s really going on with all these beards here?

Walking past The Music Store — which bills itself the “Best record store on West Portal, 1998-2007,” although we’re pretty sure it’s been the only record store on West Portal, 1998-2007 — the sound of a youthfully earnest Bono Hewson warns us, “This is not a rebel song...this is ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’” We stop to check the discs on offer in the shop’s display window: a John Legend album; photos of Janet Jackson’s latest hairstyle for sale, complete with complimentary music CD; some Dylan and Pink Floyd reissues; and, as is surely available at every used record store across the land, Guns ‘N’ Roses’ 1991 bloated co-opus, Use Your Illusion II.

Nothing speaks to small business as national endangered species as eloquently these days as a neighborhood record store. But along with other West Portal Ave. small businesses like Tibor’s Fine Jewelry, West Portal Shoe Repair, and Sloane Square, this humble shop with the artfully simple name and loyal local following helps this block to maintain an elusive small-town vibe. It’s a story that’s been told before — only this time, the Castro is two stops down the line through the strangest-looking train station around.

(Photos by the author.)