Grab Bag #029

A brief moment of honor for See’s Candies on Clement Street and 9th Avenue, the last of the San Francisco olds:

The store appears exactly the same as when I was a child. The workers are still clad in white and black, looking like puritan parlor maids and old-timey gas station attendants.

In 1959, there were 15 See’s locations in the city, from the Mission to West Portal, the Financial District to the Sunset. Now its stores are mostly in suburbs and tucked inside malls. San Francisco has three spots left: Clement Street, the Flatiron Building downtown on Market Street, and at the Stonestown Galleria. Online business is probably the cash cow.

I still get a box of nuts and chews from someone at Christmas each year, the red-paper-wrapped rectangle as recognizable to me as a line of Sunset stucco homes.

Candy stores, sweet shops, and ice cream parlors used to be very localized, mom-and-pop-run places until See’s got all Starbucksy and “disrupted” the industry in the 1930s.

Places like Mitchell’s on San Jose Avenue, St. Francis Fountain on 24th Street, and Polly Ann’s on Noriega Street are beloved hold-overs of the independent sweet shop days. (Shaw’s on West Portal Avenue did go as far as opening a second store on the peninsula.)

Indies are returning though. Over the past 20 years new hip ice cream stores and “artisanal” chocolate stands have opened in places like Hayes Valley and the Inner Sunset. We old-schoolers may enjoy the new, but we cling to our See’s, a San Francisco original.

Except the sad secret about See’s Candies? It’s a Los Angeles transplant!

My world is rocked, but I’ll still welcome that box of nuts and chews in December, thank you.

Everything Must Go

The last Grab Bag mentioned a runaway house that got loose from some movers on Broadway. I probably think about houses being moved more than I should. Here is another being relocated to get out of the way of the Bayshore Freeway 75 years ago.

It looks like the home is headed up the hill on Vermont Street, which surprises me. A quick scan of the street today didn’t give me any immediate suspects, so maybe it traveled a few more blocks. If one of these school kids is reading, let me know.

Assuming you could acquire a landing spot and were of an opportunistic nature, getting one of these freeway-moved cottages was a pretty good deal. Here’s an ad from 1948:

One of these is described as “very modern.”  How many people built their houses and were told ten years later they had to sell out to make room for a new freeway?

A five-room house for $850 sounds pretty good. That’s roughly equivalent to the purchasing power of $11,000 in 2024. All you had to do was buy yourself a parcel, pay for the move, and get everything reconnected and tied down at the new site.

Voila, a home for something like three or four grand…

And if you were a bargain hunter, you could hold out for a year and get a couple of flats for just $165!

Plaza Candy Store

Back to sweet shops, let’s scoop up some Blue Ribbon ice cream in honor of the Plaza Candy Store, which once operated on Union Street just off Washington Square in North Beach. (You can get a treat from Gelato Classico almost in the same place today.)

Proprietor Charles Lista died in 1926 and the beat-up old store was demolished the next year to make way for the handsome three-story building at 1621 Stockton Street (maybe you’ve had a pizza at Acquolina on the corner).

That driveway at right (with a couple of earthquake refugee shacks used by the Phoebe A. Hearst Kindergarten) was gobbled up in the new construction.

It was rough living in North Beach back then. When this photo was taken, the building was less than 20 years old!

Belated RIP to Benkyodo

Writing about candy made me think of last year’s closing of Benkyodo in Japantown. Here’s the founder, Suyeichi Okamura, with a couple of partners in front of his original store on the 1500 block of Geary street:

I had my first mochi at Benkyodo as a teenager on a date. (At least I thought it was a date. It turned out the girl from St. Rose high school had a different opinion.)

The Benkyodo owners, Ricky and Bobby Okamura, have retired. The business exited on its own terms, a triumph considering how tough times and the United States government tried very hard to squash the city’s Japanese community over Benkyodo’s 115-year history.

Anti-Asian movements of the early 20th century usually had San Francisco mayor-and-later-U.S.-senator James Phelan at the forefront. His “Keep California White” campaigns focused primarily on Japanese exclusion.

The Immigration Act of 1924 expressly shut out all Asians from the country to preserve “U.S. homogeneity.”

Then World War II brought internment and relocation, with American-born citizens deprived of their civil rights and put in concentration camps because of their ancestry.

Many from the Japanese community returned to the Western Addition after the war and started over. Through rocky years of redevelopment disruption, high crime, and alternating waves of neighborhood neglect and gentrification, Benkyodo anchored a corner of a reborn Japantown.

Now it is gone, the storefront still empty...

Benkyodo, I’ve just decided, represents the essential theme of my San Francisco Story project. A historic business is background for a teenage moment of pretense, of acting worldly and sophisticated on a failed date, while I am oblivious to the real and important story of immigrant entrepreneurship, a country’s betrayal, resilience, and rebirth.

After the book closes, I scramble to write down what I was too dull to appreciate. You read it. Perhaps we all wonder what we’re missing now in our single-focused march through each day.

Sound right?

Sweet Shop Weirdness

Remember last Grab Bag when I mentioned the 1910s push to build a Fillmore Street tunnel through Pacific Heights? It never happened, but at least this ridiculous cake did. Charles Loesch’s California Baking Company was at Eddy and Fillmore Streets.

History is not History

Amanda Bartlett wrote a very good article on the struggles of San Francisco’s history-focused nonprofits, including the one I helm, San Francisco Heritage.

Perspective is a perk of working in history. Time is not experienced as a straight line, but more as a wave of ups and downs.

Students of this boom-and-bust city know the deal. Folks who grew up here, like me, have ridden the roller coaster a couple of times.

How people remember, evaluate, and value knowledge of the past shifts with each generation, but the desire to know it does not. History work will go on. San Francisco Heritage is resilient. With our great community of supporters, we will adapt, change, and be here to greet the next wave of people in love with this city who want to understand its past.

Woody Beer and Coffee Fund

Thanks to donations from Christian A. and Tim V., I had another full meal off my purported beverage fund, this time with star ballpark vendor and Friend of Woody, Andre B. We took a post-meal constitutional in Alamo Square. Being two old San Francisco guys, we graciously made ourselves available for questions from all the tourists.

Is it your turn? I am a bit behind on my correspondence, but I will catch up! Let’s make a date.