While Downtown Flounders, This San Francisco Neighborhood Is Thriving

The succulent-adorned parklet outside of Hook Fish was filled on a recent Friday afternoon with customers enjoying a late lunch of $17 burritos with carrot hot sauce. Shoppers perused the racks at Mollusk Surf Shop and enjoyed coffee in the newly renovated backyard of the Black Bird Bookstore. Others wandered farther down Irving Street, littered with children’s scooters and discarded helmets, to walk along the shoreline.

It could have been Venice Beach, save for the fog lingering just off the coast. This is San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood.

“I love it,” said Cathy Huang, 45, who moved to the neighborhood two years ago. “It’s very residential, but at the same time you’ve got access to really great restaurants and bars. It’s a very walkable, very friendly neighborhood.”

On the western edge of the city, between Golden Gate Park and the San Francisco Zoo, the Outer Sunset has flourished while downtown San Francisco has struggled to rebound after the Covid-19 pandemic.

The city’s business center is contending with a number of seemingly intractable problems: the economic fallout from the disappearance of tech workers, open-air drug dealing and a large unhoused population. But the Outer Sunset, which stretches along the Pacific Ocean and is one of the city’s foggiest sections, feels far from the bustle of city life. On Irving Street, a main artery in the neighborhood of roughly 50,000 people, Marge Heard has perched by the window of the Last Straw, her jewelry store, overseeing neighborhood goings-on since 1975.

“It was almost nothing,” she said of what the neighborhood was like when she first moved here 48 years ago. “It’s just become pretty lovely.”

Young families have gravitated to the Outer Sunset as remote work has negated the need for long commutes, said Kathryn Grantham, who owns Black Bird Bookstore on Irving Street. The neighborhood’s success reflects the way cities have evolved during the pandemic, with people spending more time enjoying and spending money in their communities. In March 2021, The San Francisco Chronicle published an article titled “If San Francisco is dying, they forgot to tell the Outer Sunset.”

“It has the energy of folks who are interested in investing in the neighborhood and building community out here,” Grantham said. “Being part of the network of entrepreneurs out here running small businesses is exciting.”

One of those small businesses is Hook Fish, a local seafood store and restaurant that opened in 2017 after operating as a pop-up business since 2014. Christian Morabito, one of the founders, said he was attracted to the Outer Sunset because of its relatively low rents and the fact that it was an outpost for artists, musicians, surfers and other outdoor enthusiasts — people that Morabito could get along with and live alongside, but also work with.

The result was a storefront that captured the vibe of its neighborhood — the local artist Jay Nelson helped design the shop and also sourced the interior wall paneling from reclaimed redwood timber that had been used as cribbing material during the construction of the Bay Bridge.

“We just tried to keep everything having a story and kind of special and unique,” Morabito said. “I feel like there’s definitely a big focus on that in the Outer Sunset.”

Another big focus of the neighborhood is the newly pedestrianized Great Highway, which runs along Ocean Beach. Closed to cars during the pandemic, the Great Highway is now permanently open to only pedestrians on weekends, after San Francisco residents voted by a wide margin against allowing cars back on the road. That has made the neighborhood even more walkable, and has drawn people from other parts of town.

“There’s a lot of really cute cafes and restaurants and stores,” said Matt Jagedao, 23, who lives downtown and was joining a co-worker for a walk along the Great Highway. “SoMa doesn’t really have that. It’s a little more laid-back, which I think is really nice.”

Claire Fahy is an editorial assistant for The New York Times who covers breaking news and general assignment stories. She grew up in San Francisco.

If you read one story, make it this

Liberal prosecutors are revisiting police killings, but so far they have charged few officers.

Where we’re traveling

Today’s tip comes from Clarice Stasz, who lives in Petaluma:

“With summer upon us, I look forward to a concert at the Green Music Center, located on the Sonoma State University campus. Inspired by Tanglewood, the hall’s back wall opens so attendees can sit on the sloped lawn while picnicking, drinking local wines and even dancing. A large screen provides a close-up of the performers onstage. Those preferring less nature sit inside to enjoy the exceptional acoustics.

The programming appeals to the diversity of the North Bay. This season includes Buddy Guy, Nickel Creek and Los Huracanes del Norte. I’m excited about music from all nine Star Wars movies, played by the resident Santa Rosa Symphony. Encouraged to come dressed in character, I expect to join a bevy of Princess Leias with cinnamon-bun hair additions. The regular season features similar variety, from singer-songwriters to Renée Fleming and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Since the Green Center opened, I no longer go to The City (SF) for musical excellence. There is culture in the ’burbs!”

Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to [email protected]. We’ll be sharing more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.

Tell us

We’re almost halfway through 2023! What are the best things that have happened to you so far this year? What have been your wins? Or your unexpected joys, big or small?

Tell me at [email protected]. Please include your full name and the city where you live.

And before you go, some good news

What’s hiding in your Notes app?

My colleagues recently asked readers to share the chaotic, beautiful mess stored in the notepads on their iPhones, inspired by a TikTok trend in which users share their Notes app screenshots to reveal more peculiar, less shielded versions of themselves than what they’d typically post on Twitter or Instagram.

I’ll let my colleague Madeline Malone Kircher tell you what we learned:

Notes is mostly an unstructured brain dump, a destination for the random thoughts we offload while we’re in the middle of something else.

A reader named Hillary shared a list of nonsense words overheard at a conference, including “forethoughtful,” “planfully” and “applicationize.” In his Notes app, Mark wrote a sentence to illustrate the meaning of the word “fugacious” (adj. tending to disappear): “I had a fugacious look at that bird before it dove into thick brush, never to be seen again by me.”

Even the most mundane stuff in Notes can be a kind of time capsule. One of the most touching notes we got was from Janet, who sent her play-by-play for Thanksgiving in 2020. She had tomato bisque and a salad with a pepper jelly vinaigrette (yum!) before 5:30 cocktails and a family Zoom. The big turkey dinner, which was just for two, still took days of preparation: She made the pie crusts on Tuesday, the bisque on Wednesday and the stuffing on Thursday.

Barbara found a note from six years ago with the title “REMEMBER.” The listed items were “Whole order 40, Bus 6402” and “Be happy be nice be grateful.” She said she did not have any idea why she wrote the first two. But the last one, at least, is not such a bad thing for all of us to try to remember.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back on Monday.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword.

Soumya Karlamangla, Briana Scalia, Maia Coleman and Bernard Mokam contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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