The Downtown San Francisco I Loved Was a Holiday Wonderland

The neighborhood’s food scene isn’t doing much better. Chefs lament about how the lack of foot traffic and downtown office workers has shut down both trendy power-lunch spots (Barbacco) and beloved family-run staples (Turtle Tower). The nearby San Francisco Shopping Centre Mall is a shell of itself — about 45 percent empty after the Nordstrom closed over the summer. Even during the lunch rush, the food court often feels deserted.

The downtown I remember had shoplifters, drug users, scammers and weirdos, too — that part hasn’t changed as much as today’s news headlines might lead you to believe. But back when I worked downtown, I could spend my half-hour lunch breaks on a $2.50 slice combo at Blondie’s Pizza or splurge on a $15 roast chicken with mashed potatoes at Wolfgang Puck’s bistro in the Macy’s Cellar. Sometimes I’d have clam chowder in a sourdough bowl at Boudin; other days, I would save my pennies and meet my family for a celebratory dinner at Tad’s Steakhouse. When I was really broke, there was always the McDonald’s on Powell, where the old Filipino manongs used to hang out and watch the tourists on cable cars go past — not to mention the countless corner stores that sold bagels, coffee and sandwiches next to the Swisher Sweet cigars I used to wrap my blunts.

Most of these places are gone or relocated from where they originally stood. Even the McDonald’s are shutting down. And the Timberland store I loved so much? That’s gone as well. My engraved leather name tag and pristine-condition wheats are all that remain of that era of downtown San Francisco.

‘Make the City Better’

“No one remembers, right before the pandemic, how many restaurants were closing, how many chefs burned out, how bad business was, how bad the rent was,” says Christian Ciscle, a chef and longtime San Francisco resident who owns SF Chickenbox — a restaurant known for its perfectly golden-fried chicken, homemade hot sauces and chewy-pillowy mochi muffins. I’ve followed Ciscle’s seasoned breadcrumb trail from Little Skillet, where he served chicken and waffles to clubgoers at 330 Ritch, to Wing Wings in Lower Haight and now his new location in North Beach.

Ciscle believes the mental health crisis and crime that have always existed in San Francisco are now compounded by the constant barrage of videos that serve as fuel for conservative media outlets looking to blame progressive politicians. Experiencing even one incident first-hand is enough to make a liberal store owner switch ideologies to welcome increased police presence — an approach Ciscle believes doesn’t actually deter property crime but instead targets the most vulnerable. “There’s truth to how bad it is, but unhoused people didn’t make [downtown] bad,” he says. “What made them unhoused did.”

Downtown San Francisco has never been an ideal place for a food business, in Ciscle’s opinion: “It was always dead after 5 p.m. on weekdays and weekends. It was never a place to do business, unless you’re Tyler Florence.” And when the pandemic hit and business came to a screeching halt, he saw how vulnerable everyone was to closing down. “Nobody was bulletproof,” he says. “Everyone had to reassess their business model, their values.”

Luckily, a newly created nonprofit called SF New Deal supported food businesses by paying them to provide meals for various community orgs. It paid SF Chickenbox for 200 meals a day — a source of money Ciscle could rely on in unsteady times, enabling him to keep his business open. Earlier this year, the program evolved into Vacant to Vibrant (V2V), a new initiative that tries to activate empty office spaces to accommodate small business pop-ups.

Macalino-Calalay remembers downtown San Francisco as the place her family squeezed into on weekends, patronizing the fresh Filipino food at Aling Mary’s Unimart, relishing her lola’s home cooking, and enjoying meals from the McDonald’s on Bryant, where her father worked as a manager with an all-Filipino staff. Community orgs like West Bay, Soma Pilipinas and United Playaz helped her as a young girl, and Macalino-Calalay is seeing a resurgence of these kinds of resources that she hopes will continue.

When asked if things are better or worse today, she pauses. “From someone who didn’t grow up in SF, ‘worse’ is very subjective. Things being worse just looks like us not being there,” she says about her family of SF locals, who are now scattered throughout the East Bay and Outer Mission. Some are still in the SoMa, where her jewelry is now being shown in a special exhibit at SFMOMA with artist Pacita Abad. It’s a full-circle moment for a Frisco girl, who used to see parts of the museum being painted below the front steps of her family home on Langton Street.

Meanwhile, Whack Donuts owner Vandor Hill, a born-and-raised San Franciscan, opened his own temporary pop-up shop through the V2V program. who sells delectable-looking peach cobbler doughnuts and Donkey Kong bread doughnuts, alongside trendy flavors like Thai tea and horchata. While he has appreciated the opportunity, He believes first-time business owners in San Francisco need even more support from City Hall — and actual follow-through from local politicians. “Like the Bobby Byrd song, ‘Saying It and Doing It Are Two Different Things.’ The mayor along with the Board of Supervisors have been saying a lot in terms of enforcing law and the homeless situation, but have yet to really make any lasting moves for improving these topics,” he says.

Ciscle, for his part, believes pandemic-era programs like SF New Deal and Vacant to Vibrant are proof that money is out there for local food business owners: “There’s billionaires blocks away from us right now that could literally fund some shit and make it better — not that they should be running the city,” he says. “There’s money to fund programs out there, not just locking people up. To feed people, put people in houses. Make the city better.”

“People are more concerned with seeing [the unhoused] on the street,” Ciscle says. “They’re gonna put a planter on the sidewalk there so they can’t sleep and then be mad it gets knocked over or graffiti-ed up. And now we have two problems.”

For now, Sucka Flea is occupying some of these empty spaces and providing small business owners with shared foot traffic and community. It can’t fix all of the problems facing downtown San Francisco, but it’s a start. After all, creating a family-friendly space that attracts folks from all over the Bay Area to shop downtown is no small feat — and spending holiday shopping dollars with local vendors seems more sustainable than throwing it away on chain restaurants and national department stores that never felt connected to community residents anyway. In a small way, the flea market has brought back some of that old holiday spirit I remember from my own time working in the neighborhood.

At the last flea market we attended, my son found a vintage button-down Ben Davis — another Frisco workwear staple — to go with the Timbs that he has yet to receive. Though I don’t consider my own pair vintage, I guess you can say those boots have walked many hills and seen a lot of change. Hopefully they’ll last long enough to live through a revitalization of downtown SF that is truly for the people who built it.

Sucka Flea’s pop-up holiday market will take place on Saturday, Dec. 16, 10 a.m.–4 p.m., at Howard Street and Embarcadero in San Francisco. The downtown pop-up is normally held at 332 Pine St. Its Mission District outpost will have its next event at CityStation SF (701 Valencia St.) on Jan. 14.