My Favorite Corner of SF
“West Portal is good for families and old people,” I always said when explaining why I rarely hung out in my family’s neighborhood as a teenager. Now as an adult, I’ve grown a newfound appreciation for this cozy section of San Francisco that I grew up in as I reflect on how it’s somehow retained its comforting neighborhood feel in a changing city.
Out of all the places in this area that I frequented as a kid, the one I loved the most was the corner of Lenox Way and Ulloa Street, home to the West Portal Library. This can be considered the beginning or end of the neighborhood, depending on which direction you go.
Sign up for The Bold Italic newsletter to get the best of the Bay Area in your inbox every week.
I have fond memories of my family checking out the maximum number of books on our library card. We inevitably managed to lose most of the books in our chaotic house and had to use another card on the next visit to satisfy our voracious reading habits and avoid fees. My brothers and I ripped through the summer reading program year after year, acquiring a mountain of knickknacks as prizes.
As we got a bit older, my parents felt the library was a safer alternative to being latchkey kids at home. We would walk there after school and do our homework until closing time, where we waited for our busy working parents to pick us up as we sat on the stairs outside of the library.
That red brick staircase was not only a place of waiting. It was and is a place of observing. You can easily see a slice of the city that encompasses classic San Francisco, with the Spanish and Tudor home architecture and decades-old businesses such as Submarine Center and BullsHead Restaurant. At the same time, you can also see new San Francisco with the trendy, fast-casual franchise Lemonade and the rebooted Eezy Freezy that carries nutritional yeast and gluten-free baking mix. The older folks take leisurely strolls to and from Spiazzo, an Italian restaurant, and toddlers run amok as their parents wait to order at neighborhood cafe Squat & Gobble. The arched West Portal MUNI tunnel lies to the left where the K, L, and M-line streetcars came rumbling out — that is, before the coronavirus shut down metro rail lines. To the right, the thriving Papenhausen hardware store fully recovered after a fire gutted it along with the West Portal Daily convenience store and Sloane Square Salon two years ago. A couple of regular panhandlers trek to and from their peaceful spots from this corner.
As an adult who only moved back to San Francisco a few years ago, looking at my childhood neighborhood with fresh eyes has made me appreciate what a central role the Corner (as I will refer to it) has played in my life. It’s an anchor on which to hold. It’s a perch from where to see.
The Corner was my babysitter as a kid. It was the site of social meetups as a teen. The meeting place of giddy friend reunions in college during the holidays, where we could celebrate our newfound independence.
As an adult, the Corner was the endpoint of a West Portal bar crawl I organized to compensate for never having hung out in the neighborhood. My crew of Asian American twentysomethings made our way through the mostly Irish and sports bars, from The Dubliner, to Portals Tavern, to McCarthy’s, and finally to the beloved Philosophers’ Club.
No matter what age or where I was living, seeing the library always meant that I was home.
Last year, the father of a long-time friend and neighbor passed away. We convened on the stairs of the library on a weeknight soon after the news, drinking wine coolers in an ode to more carefree times while mourning a loss. “It’s like we’re really adults now,” one friend said to another quietly. The Corner, once only associated with innocence and teen misgivings, had become a place to process adult tragedies.
My own mother, whose brain is being slowly ravaged by dementia, often asks if we can take a walk to the library. “It’s closed right now, Mom. It’s coronavirus,” I remind her. “Oh,” she replies disappointingly. In her old age, the Corner became a landmark for her stimulation and well-being. A place for rest and reading. The reality now is that the library is too far for her old legs. But I walk there by myself as a break from caretaking duties on my visits home. I know the library is closed during shelter-in-place. Still, I climb the stairs and turn around to look at the quietly bustling neighborhood, feeling both the weight of adulthood and the lightness of childhood nostalgia.
I think about how dementia is a long goodbye and a slow journey to the end. But this staircase will be around for a while. The anchor on which to hold, the perch from where to see. I hope it will be the place of another beginning one day — if I ever have kids and take them to the library. Checking out books on one card at a time. And sitting on the steps, gazing at our beautiful neighborhood we call home.
