![]() Miz Brown's Feed Bag, where the menu included Mickey Mouse pancakes, gave way to a boutique diner called Beautifull that bills itself as "like having your own private chef who is a nutrition expert." A cosmetic store occupies the former home of the Shadow Box, a piano bar where members of the 49ers would unwind in the 1960s after their games at Kezar Stadium. This perspective allows the Flannerys to see the transitions that follow economic and generational shifts. Three decades later the sons moved from Cal-Mart into a full storefront and branched out from beef to what now is a snug supermarket. The owners are Peter and Terry Flannery, who know the village well: Their father in 1963 relocated the family butcher shop from Market Street near Grant Avenue to a stall at Cal-Mart grocery, which still does business in the same strip. Or Bryan's, a market where the meat counter offers any cut of Kobe beef you can imagine, since the entire steer is butchered and aged right there in the market. Scotch and beefīut then you step into Wine Impression, where the offerings also include 55 scotches. The man who sells Street Sheets is a regular, as is the woman who sits on a curb with her tattered bags for hours at a time. The retail strip consists of a dozen or so boxes with generous windows, one and two stories, no architectural frills to be seen. But the hill's north boundary along California was intended from the start to serve a larger public, and that's where shopping took root.īy the time of The Chronicle's 1958 series on city hills, Laurel Hill greeted visitors with "a comfortable though bustling atmosphere," and that's still pretty much the case.ĭespite its location to the south of Presidio Heights - one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods - the tone is not obviously posh. Most of the hill was filled with housing along streets tucked within the prevailing grid, lines of tightly packed modern flats that now sell for $1 million and more. Once the remains were carted off to Colma, developers set to work. Until then the slopes were filled with cemetery plots that held such notables as cable car inventor Andrew Hallidie. The retail strip slides along the edge of Laurel Hill, an area developed after World War II. "All you have to do is be here at 10 in the morning and see everyone running into everyone else, talking about what's going on, whether it's their kids or their Opera gala." "It really is a village," said Ingrid Nystrom, manager of Books Inc., which opened in 1972. But Laurel Village also shows how certain parts of San Francisco are like snakes: Even when they shed their skins - in this case, as tenants come and go over the decades - the essence remains the same. The ambiance of the two blocks along California Street between Laurel and Spruce streets is thoroughly suburban, in the best sense of the word. ![]()
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