One of the first things new San Franciscans find out about their adopted city is that First Street is not First Street, and Main Street is not Main Street. Market Street is the main street. And by the way, no one likes Market Street. Welcome to San Francisco. It is complicated.
There’s no better way to see the intricacies of the bay town than by strolling down Market Street on a summer day. It is the largest and widest street in San Francisco – 120 feet from sidewalk to sidewalk. It goes straight like a spire from the Ferry Building by the bay 3 miles to Castro and Twin Peaks beyond.
Market Street begins at the classic Ferry Building from 1898 and ends, for all intents and purposes, at Castro Street, where a huge and beautiful rainbow flag flies day and night. The market should be one of the main streets in the world, but it didn’t turn out that way.
It has splendor and poverty, elegant hotels and lodges, outdoor farmers’ markets on different days of the week, and outdoor drug trafficking every day of the year. It’s beautiful and ugly, an urban success on one side and a bitter failure on the other.
You can see it for yourself as you walk down Market Street. The market returned in the last month or so of the gloomy pandemic winter when everything was locked down and Market Street looked like the main street of a ghost town. Now, in summer, the street makes a comeback.
You could start, as I did, with the Ferry Building, which has been restored to its former glory with shops and restaurants. It is the centerpiece of a large open and sunny place. You can stand there and look up Market Street, the redeveloped One Market building on one side, the Hyatt Regency on the other. A vintage streetcar, sporting a small American flag, whines around the turn of Steuart Street and heads for the upscale neighborhoods. A tourist bus loads the first tourists of the season. Sounds like the start of something big.
But still look. On Spear Street, just two blocks from Market, there was a small flower stand, built to look like a small Muni bus. It was cute and busy. But he did not survive the confinement. Now it’s closed, covered in graffiti. A label says “SANFRAN PSYCHO”. The ruined flower stand is next to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco entrance at 101 Market. The California Street cable car line ends across the street.
In Market, Bush and Battery is the Mechanics Monument, figures of iron men working on a mechanical press, the work of sculptor Douglas Tilden, who was deaf but never let his disability hinder his talent. It is one of three huge monuments in Tilden erected to beautify Market Street at the turn of the 20th century.
Much of the old Market Street still survives – the golden Lotta Fountain in Market, Kearny and Geary, the Flood Building in Powell, the renovated Westfield San Francisco Center on the south side of Market, which once housed the famous Emporium Department. shop.
But the core of Market Street retail is in transition, to put it mildly. The streets have been battered by both the pandemic and the shift to internet shopping. There are open stores alongside closed stores. Forever 21 did not last forever in Stockton and Market; across the street, flags fly bravely at Old Navy. You get a pretty mixed message, like an official opening closing sale.
But there is more than one Market Street. It changes at Fifth Street. From Fifth to just beyond the Civic Center Market Street is a failure in San Francisco.
The street is gloomy and dirty. People who have a place to go walk fast like they’re late for a date. People who have nowhere to go walk slowly or sprawl out onto the sidewalk of the city’s main street.
Market Street has risen and fallen with the tides of history. No one was ever happy with the way things were, even generations ago, and plans have come and gone as the city’s best civic minds tinkered with the streets. The last big change came in 2020 when private cars were banned in much of the market. Other plans were in preparation. Then the pandemic struck. Reality is what you see now.
I walked up the difficult blocks of the market to the United Nations Plaza, dedicated to the founding of the UN in San Francisco in 1945. There is a fountain there and words are written on the sidewalk about hopes of global peace and justice.
It was a gray Tuesday and a line of hopeful people were waiting to receive free food distributed by two nuns from Fraternité Notre Dame. The line was moving slowly. It was almost festive: people lining up were in good spirits as seagulls and pigeons scurried, hoping for leftovers. “Thank you. God bless you,†a man said to one of the nuns.
Across the street is a boarded up CVS pharmacy. It opened a few years ago, bringing new hope to the corner of Seventh and Market. But it was too hard there, too many drug addicts, too much crime. There is a splendid view of the Town Hall from this corner.
I moved on. The market has changed again: new condos on the south side of the market not far from Twitter’s head office in the old Merchandise Mart. Twitter was invented in San Francisco and technology changed the world.
I walked to Van Ness Avenue and got on a streetcar painted in the colors of the old Muni – “the green torpedoes,†the ancients called them – and hiked the rest of the way to Castro Street, where I took a bus. I noticed a farmers’ market a block away on the north side of Noe and Market, and a feeling of rapid prosperity in the Upper Market. A very different world. This is Market Street for you.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Carl Nolte runs on Sundays. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @Carlnoltesf
