I’VE NEVER understood the thrill of Lombard Street. To me it’s like a dumb blond—all curves, no character. For romance and history and fun—all I love about San Francisco—I head for Columbus Avenue every time. “Columbus is a passeggiata,” says my new friend Alessandro Baccari, who loves the neighborhood so much that he made a museum of it, the North Beach Museum, right on the mezzanine of EurekaBank. Passeggiata, Al explains, means a very slow walk. “It’s the kind of street where you promenade and browse and philosophize about life.”
Columbus even stands out on the map, a great diagonal slash across the city grid, splitting square blocks into triangles. From the Cannery near Fisherman’s Wharf, it plows a border between bohemian North Beach and the marbled town houses of Russian Hill, nipping a corner off Washington Square, then plunging alongside Chinatown until it stops—stops dead—at the corner of Washington and Montgomery Streets.
To understand why it does that, you have to know how nature shaped the city, first by gold and then by fire. Before 1848, North Beach was a beach, San Francisco was sleepy Spanish Yerba Buena, and Columbus Avenue wasn’t anything at all. In the frenzy of the gold rush, the cove was filled in, miners built shacks and saloons upon it, and Columbus became a demarcation line between the infamous Barbary Coast and the fast-growing town. Except that it wasn’t Columbus at all. It was just Montgomery Avenue then.
Then came the Great Fire of 1906—only nonnatives call it the earthquake; the natives who survived it were much more worried about their houses burning down. The Italians, many of whom had saved their homes by spreading red-wine-soaked sheets across their roofs, were the immigrants who could rebuild the rest of the city. And they did, even though they’d endured much prejudice, and would continue to do so even after. For their brave, hard work, the city fathers renamed Montgomery Avenue after the Italian to whom they all felt indebted for being there in the first place.
Columbus, even before it was Columbus, was the Italians’ market street, lined with simple Victorian-style two- or three-story wood-frame houses whose owners ran shops on the main floors and lived above. At the foot of it was the cannery, where fifteen hundred workers canned peaches. Now the Cannery is a shopping mall, where I started my most recent walk by buying socks patterned with watermelons. On the top floor is the Museum of the City of San Francisco, complete with newspaper headlines from 1906 declaring STARVING DOGS ARE DEVOURING SCORES OF BODIES and with remnants of Hearst’s folly, a thirteenth-century Spanish palace ceiling brought from Europe.
From the Cannery I browsed past North Beach Leather, where at least two generations of aspiring cool people bought their first suede mini or black leather jacket. Then up the avenue’s slight rise, past the extremely high hills on my right where the San Francisco Art Institute lies, past the Gap, which began in San Francisco, past the playground’s high ivy walls that hide the fact that old men play boccie all day as always. The Italian presence in North Beach is still a major force, though the Chinese are gaining, there being more Chinese and fewer Italians in this world.
I passed Bimbo’s, which you’d think was filled with bimbos but instead is a hip club where the latest fashion in avant-garde theater seems to be a group called the Broun Fellinis, so popular in an underground kind of way that society debs pick up art students waiting in line to get in at night and everyone in their twenties knows which Broun Fellini is which.
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Urged on by visions of the Victorian pastry baseball cookies that I knew lay just beyond, I passed right by Washington Square, which isn’t a square at all (it has five sides) and has a statue of Benjamin Franklin (not Washington) but is the happy center of life in North Beach. I always think of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, because they had their wedding pictures taken outside that great Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church, even though they weren’t allowed to get married inside because the Church objects to divorce. Out front is a small park with a green lawn where elderly Chinese do tai chi on weekend mornings, enchanting a city that feels jaded about most everything else.
On another corner is an adorable place called Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store that probably was a cigar store but has been a luncheonette (dinnerette, too) since any of my friends can remember. My film editor friend Nancy told me, “I love sitting there. It’s just like the forties, looking out at that little park, eating great sandwiches—it’s really my favorite place in the whole city.”
“Every place in San Francisco is like the forties, practically,” I pointed out. For to me, at least, most of San Francisco seems like a backdrop for some great World War II movie where sailors and nurses fell in love and life was pure and innocent and pretty girls wore hats, stockings, and cute little suits with trim waistlines.
Farther along, I came to my favorite part of Columbus, the massive Italian pastry section where I first found out about cannoli. This time I met a girlfriend at the Stinking Rose, a newish garlic restaurant that isn’t bad for a tourist trap. You have to salute a place that celebrates the concept of putting garlic where its mouth is so devoutly that it even makes garlic ice cream.
After lunch, I strolled up to City Lights Books, which is almost exactly as I remember it from the fifties, when my parents took me to San Francisco to hear Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” and the truly shocking part, for me, was that a grown man wore sandals. Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac (who at one point lived right behind, on Grant Avenue) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso and the many beatniks who came along with them—mostly from Greenwich Village, so that the Italian pastry shops and espresso bars of North Beach seemed like home—brought nightlife to this part of Columbus. They also carved a place in history for City Lights, which opened in 1953 and still probably has more alternative publications and books than there are alternative people. For now, I passed it by and walked to the avenue’s end, to the building that I think is the most adorable in the world.
A wedding cake of a place, the Sentinel Building was one of the city’s first “sky-scrapers,” complete with elevator, and one of the few buildings that withstood the quake of 1906—even though it was still under construction at the time—because no expense had been spared in its structural design. Unfortunately, those expenses were mostly graft money, and Abraham “Boss” Ruef, who hoped to locate his offices there, was temporarily unable to finish the job because of an eight-year stay in San Quentin. He did finish it, however, and today his legacy is proudly occupied by Francis Ford Coppola, whom I hoped to catch a glimpse of if I was lucky.
On the seventh of eight floors I found Tom Luddy, who’s a staff producer for Coppola—he worked on The Secret Garden and Wind. It was getting on to midday, and talk turned, as it naturally would, to lunch. “I often think I’ll go somewhere Italian,” Tom mused, “but if I feel I’m getting a cold, I always go to the Chinese restaurant Brandy Ho’s and order the smoked ham in garlic cloves, because it’s so powerful it can cure anything.”
I said goodbye to Tom, but as I was waiting for the elevator on the seventh floor, Francis Coppola himself emerged and offered to take me up to his office on the eighth-floor penthouse, where the view was the best. In fact, Francis’s office is the most beautiful room in San Francisco and probably the world. “This is the one place in my entire life I’ve never let be photographed,” he said, mysteriously. All around were extraordinary inlaid-wood murals designed by Dean Tavoularis, his favorite production designer, depicting scenes from film history.
I had last seen Coppola in the early seventies, when he was starting on Apocalypse Now. I remembered a sloppy guy in horrible khaki shirts and work pants. Now he wore a suit of brushed charcoal gray silk, with the most beautiful rose silk shirt, and he gave off this glow of good health and good cheer. Thank God for us all that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a hit and that Zoetrope can continue and Coppola doesn’t have to move to L.A. and hustle. At least not yet, anyway.
I spent the afternoon back at the Phoenix Hotel, lying around the pool with all the cute and young but surprisingly quiet rock-and-rollers who stay there—it’s my favorite hotel in San Francisco—but went that evening to Tosca, everyone’s favorite Columbus Avenue bar, which is just a block from the Zoetrope office and right across the street from City Lights Books. It was once a café and still serves “corrected” cappuccino with brandy, a throwback to Prohibition days. It has walls the warm brown shade of a Leonardo da Vinci drawing and one of those great long bars you see from days gone by.
Jeannette Etheredge, the owner, agreed to talk to me even though all I did was introduce myself and say I was a friend of Tom Luddy’s. The walls, she said, “got like this through years of smoke. They used to be white in 1919 when it opened, and so were the lampshades on the chandeliers. Now the walls are dark, and the shades have turned dark red. Nothing has been changed—it’s all exactly like it was.”
Thirteen years ago, when the original owners of Tosca decided to close the place, Etheredge bought it with the express intention of keeping it just as it was. She even kept the jukebox exactly the same. “Everyone on that jukebox is dead except Frank Sinatra,” she pointed out. Then she took me into her private office off the bar and showed me the photographs of her with Lauren Hutton, Sam Shepard, Dennis Quaid, Matt Dillon, Ginger Rogers, and Nicolas Cage. Many stars come here still; the bar was even used for a scene in Basic Instinct.
Outside, the passeggiata was in full swing—people talking, kissing, ambling along, dropping in at the Italian pastry shops for after-dinner slides into creamy bliss. Here, it seemed to me, was the essential San Francisco: a city of lights, a city of radiant beings, a city of taxis and tourists and back alleys, a city of crazily shaped enterprises, of too-high hills and too much romance from long ago, where the past and the present blur into each other, so that whatever happened once might happen again if you could turn the right corner and find the right little entrance at just the right time.
Chances were you’d find it somewhere on Columbus.
Condé Nast Traveler
April 1994