My Favorite Corner of SF
This article is part of My Favorite Corner of SF, a feature series that pays homage to a special place in the city.
You can walk all over San Francisco for hours in search of the perfect light, and I have, but you’ll never do better than the cascading light that suffuses the Buena Vista Café, at the north end of the Hyde Street cable car line. That light and the view out over the bay feel timeless, of no era. For me, Hyde and Beach is my favorite corner of the city for the portal it provides to a time when San Francisco was weird and wild and literary enough to give us man-of-the-world newspaper columnists like Stan Delaplane and Herb Caen.
In April 1961, Caen sat in the Buena Vista with a “well-known artist” visiting from New York, watching the sunset glow over Alcatraz. “I’ve been to all the great cities of the world,” the artist told Caen, “and not one of them has what this one has — and I’m not talking about hills or water. I mean light — fantastic changes of light. I’ve never seen a city move so fast or so often from gray to white to blue to pink to gold, and then back again, and sometimes all at the same time.”
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Caen picked up the description in his own voice: “As we walked outside, the city, which, an instant before, had been the enchanted pink and white of fairy tales, softened into a dusty mauve, pierced at random by the first emerging lights of evening,” he wrote. “Innocence and wonderment, tinged with a slight disbelief — he was experiencing the heady intoxication we all felt once when our eyes were new and we felt the special kinship of the specially blessed.”
For me, I’ll always associate the Buena Vista with the night in February 1997 when thousands took to the streets of San Francisco to mourn the death of Caen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who loved and celebrated his city as few ever have, anywhere. Caen was a man about town in the best sense, a raconteur and a great listener, who coined the term “beatnik” as a good-natured putdown. He invented three-dot journalism, which makes him the forefather of the tweet, and his city mourned him with style — a long procession wending through town and, for many of us, winding up with toasts to Herb, my former neighbor in the Chronicle offices, at the Buena Vista.
Robin Williams, still around then, remembered his friend Caen with a gentle rip or two. “Being a famous journalist is like being the best-dressed woman on radio,” he’d said earlier. Closing, he rightly described Caen as “an amazing combination of elegance and funk,” and said, “I’m sorry you had to leave, man, but you’re still here.” That’s how it feels for me even now at the Buena Vista—Herb’s still there, Stan, Robin, and so many others who loved San Francisco style and made it their own.
The Buena Vista opened in 1916 when an enterprising boardinghouse owner decided to turn the first floor into a saloon. It was here in 1952 that Delaplane concocted an American version of the Irish coffee he’d first tasted as a World War II correspondent stopping off at Shannon Airport. He and then-owner Jack Koeppler kept mixing up drinks until they got it right.
Since then, the Buena Vista has reportedly served more than 30 million Irish coffees, including — takeout only — during the coronavirus shutdown. On weekends, the bar has sold as many as 500 to-go Irish coffees. I highly recommend stopping by, grabbing one or several, and then taking in the view with a bracing beverage.
“We’re still doing takeout, and our most popular item is the Irish coffee,” manager Larry Silva told me by phone. “Most of the customers are locals—our neighbors mostly, and our fans. They’ve been coming in just to keep us going. It feels good to get them some sustenance to help them get by and make them happy.”
Silva barely had time to talk to me. He’s working long hours without much help. “We’re like 90% down — I have 90% of my staff furloughed,” he said in a pained voice. “It’s kind of surreal: Everybody wearing a mask, and people waiting in line six feet apart, and being able to interact with them for 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes.”
For a bar famous for its Irish coffee, St. Patrick’s Day is the holiday around which the entire year pivots, but not this spring. This March, the pandemic on the move, the staff put up their decorations in vain.
“We look forward to eventually opening,” Silva told me. “We couldn’t do St. Paddy’s Day, so we left the decorations up and are going to leave them up until we can open again and celebrate together then.”
