Nov 10 2003
Walking Home Suzy
Today you get to walk home with me, only without all that annoying physical effort. There will even be visual aids.
I walk home up Columbus, through North Beach, the Italian neighborhood. Past Beat era icons City Lights bookstore (celebrating its 50th year) and Vesuvio’s, and then past the strip clubs (for some reason, there are a lot of them in North Beach, though they are not noticeably Italian), including what’s left of the Condor.
The Condor has the distinction of being America’s first topless bar, when Carol Doda danced on the bar in mod designer Rudy Gernreich’s topless bathing suit in 1964. The Condor used to have a wonderful neon sign of a nude woman with flashing red nipples, which sadly disappeared after the club was sold and it became the boring restaurant it is now (the new owners thought it was rude!). The sign looked particularly charming in the fog. I miss it.
Turn left on Vallejo* and you’ll see why I say I walk home up it. The hill is so steep that the sidewalk gives up in despair and becomes a stairway. You can’t tell, but this is only the first block of four or so that are stairs (the rest are hidden in the trees). But it’s worth the hike. Halfway up, it looks like this, and then like this, and at the top, this.
If I’m not taking pictures for you (it is, however, fun to play tourist in your own town), I can do all the stairs without stopping, which is very gratifying. Past the multi-million dollar houses and it’s all downhill to Chez Suzy from there.
*Named for General Vallejo, one of the early settlers of Northern California. The guy who answers the phone at my pizza place always corrects my pronunciation of “Vallejo” (Va-lay-o) by giving it the full Spanish treatment: “Ba-yay-ho”. It just wouldn’t feel right if he didn’t.