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. 36: Mason St. in North Beach

We’re well off Broadway — actually, we’re just off Lombard — in the toppermost reaches of North Beach. In fact, we’re not far from where the old neighborhood abuts the landfilled tourist stronghold that stole North Beach’s shore years ago.

It’s OK — we’re safe here from Crazy Shirts etc., although there’s a Bay Quackers vessel rolling by a few steps away over on Columbus. A moment later, an artist — shirtless, but sleeved — emerges for a smoke from Tattoo City at Mason and Lombard on this pleasant spring afternoon. He spots the amphibious truck carting visitors up North Beach’s diagonal commercial drag and can’t disguise a mild scoff. San Francisco loves its visitors from Cincinnati and beyond; it just gets a bit hrumphy when groups of them venture south of Bay St. in bright yellow military transport vehicles dating from World War II. Perhaps it’s not such an unfair reaction.

But today, that debate’s beyond our scope and interest. We’ve landed on this residential block around the corner from Joe DiMaggio North Beach Playground and Pool, and we’re totally looking for action on a sunny Saturday. We find it: live music, street retail, plenty of pedestrian traffic, even a preening housepet.

Walking slowly along the west side of Mason as it leads away from Lombard, we’re struck by how the three-story flats along this block are painted in such agreeable tones. Sometimes there’s at least one color-deviant home on any given block in town, but the hey-look-at-me pastels, salmons, and purples seem to have given this one a miss. In other news, every structure here bellies up all the way to the sidewalk...except that at 2141-2145, which hides down a surprisingly long driveway. It’s a complete oddity here, and we wonder if it’s simply a rear entrance to a place on tiny Newell St. a half-block west, complete with cheater Mason St. address.

Down near the corner at Chestnut, a man strums an acoustic guitar in the shade of his building’s front stoop. A woman sits a few steps down from him, and they chat as a father and (very) young son stop to listen for a few moments. Although the guitarist surely isn’t rocking anything by the Sippy Cups today, the two-year-old boy is nonetheless enchanted briefly by the plucked notes that fill the warm air. Soon enough, however, the urge to toddle northward becomes too great for him to ignore, and the musician’s audience is soon reduced from three to its original one.

Plenty of Speed Queens are at work inside Wash This! on the opposite corner, but we’ve got our eyes on the garage sale going down at 2150 just up the way. A teen boy in a tie-dye shirt helps his mother with several aspects of the one-day street business, from marketing (product placement) to sales (taking money) to warehouse liquidation (loading a futon into a buyer’s truck); when there’s a lull in business, the industrious kid crashes onto another futon for sale and blows into his didgeridoo.

But the house chihuahua is clearly the star of this work-party. Remarkably calm and unyippy for his breed, he makes pals with every customer who stops in, absorbing pats on the head and back with particularly erect posture. There’s no price tag attached to its ear or tail, however, so we instead rifle through the few mugs and CDs on hand, soon deciding that we don’t really need yet another beverage container — or any Prong albums.

Given its flat gradient and proximity to popular area retailers like Trader Joe’s and Taqueria San Jose – we see people carrying bags from each — this block gets a fair amount of walk-throughs, making it an ideal spot for a garage sale. Judging by the dearth of items on hand in and around 2150’s carport, business has been brisk today, surely thanks to the infamous early birds who often storm the gates of weekend home-commerce at the crack of dawn. You know, it can’t be street fairs and Italy winning the World Cup every day up here. Sometimes you just want to have a lazy Saturday, play your guitar or Aboriginal woodwind, and sell an old subwoofer.

(Photos by the author.)