“We feel that those highly visible landmarks having been vacant for years contribute significantly to the issue,” Dikidjieva said. A new concept grocery store / food market called the Bazaar was supposed to replace it, but that was over two years ago, and there’s been no new progress. The old Big Apple Grocery Express has also been vacant since 2014. The Planning Commission ultimately rejected the proposal because the neighborhood was torn over the need for affordable housing versus a local grocery store. Last year, it was set to become a new Whole Foods 365, a sore subject for residents in the Polk Gulch / Nob Hill community. “What we’re observing in our section of Polk Street is growing vacancy bracketed by two large and very obvious vacant buildings,” said Iana Dikidjieva, District Coordinator of Discover Polk.įor example, the old Lombardi Sports store has been the largest vacant space on Polk Street, for five years. These barren properties are usually the result of rising rents and landlords who sit on their properties for months, even years, holding out in hopes of scoring the highest-paying tenant. Then, there’s the space where Tonic bar was on the border of Russian Hill, abandoned over a year ago and still vacant.įormerly Blur Bar and Big Apple Grocery Express, both now closed.
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Up the street, It’s A Grind coffee house closed in 2016 its windows are still wrapped in construction paper, signaling its vacancy. No one has moved in since it shuttered in January. Recent victims to the city’s high rental prices include Blur Bar, which retired from being the veteran dive bar in Polk Gulch after 15 years in business. Take a stroll from Broadway Street to California Street, and in just seven blocks, you’ll see at least seven storefronts that remain empty. Polk Street permeates a vibe of unwanted space. The street culture that once existed here has transitioned to buzzy oyster and wine bars.
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Plus, gay-owned clothing stores and antique stores would make under-the-table work for kids who ran away from home,” said Joseph Plaster, a PhD candidate focusing on queer theory at Yale University and whose exhibition, Polk Street: Lives in Transition, compiles more than 70 oral histories of runaways in the Polk Gulch area, documenting the neighborhood’s changes from a gay epicenter in the ’60s and ’70s to a changed environment by the mid-2000s. “There were a huge number of gay bars and trans bars. Other former customers of the Gangway have also salvaged some of the bar’s displays. Ellison keeps remnants of the former bar inside his home, including a buoy labeled with the establishment’s name and a map of all the gay-owned shops that once occupied the area. The Gangway has been replaced with a new concept bar- Young’s Kung Fu Action Theatre & Laundry––that screens “classic kung fu” movies. “Every organization, every group was represented on the wall from historical movements. “Unfortunately, there’s no bar like that left in the city,” Ellison told me during a visit to his home in Polk Gulch.
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Before bartending, Ellison was a customer of the bar, where he attended elopements hosted before gay marriage was legalized, for 40 years. For the past four years, Ellison worked as a bartender at the Gangway, the oldest gay bar in California, which shut down over a year ago to the dismay of its loyal customers and friends. Soon after, more than two dozen gay bars and businesses sprouted up on Polk Street, earning San Francisco its reputation as the nation’s gay mecca, a place where runaway kids from around the country could find a new sense of home and belonging.Ĭoy Ellison, a longtime resident of the neighborhood, was one of them. The first gay business association in the country was the Tavern Guild of San Francisco, formed in 1962.
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Back in Polk Street’s Glory Daysīefore the Castro District existed, LGBTQ business owners settled and thrived on Polk Street throughout the ’60s and ’70s. Once a vibrant street of gay-owned businesses, Polk Street has seen a ripple of vacant storefronts as it struggles to both reinvent itself as a commercial destination and preserve its historic and cultural value. The majority of the queer, working-class, bar-owning, sex-worker community is no longer there. Like many streets in this city, Polk Street has inevitably surrendered to new developments, new businesses, and newcomers. Gay Freedom Day, 1974, on Polk and O’Farrell Streets.