‘The Beach’ in S.F. Hit by Upscale Transition

To many of his friends, Henrik Jorgensen was the quintessential North Beach man. Owner for 26 years of a Scandinavian furniture store at the corner of Grant and Columbus avenues, he came to symbolize the neighborhood and its people.

Customers often became house guests and Jorgensen seemed less interested in sales than in conviviality.

But in recent years familiar faces started disappearing from the neighborhood, and last year Jorgensen was confronted with a $1,200 rent increase, making his commercial survival impossible. After a struggle with his new landlord, a Hong Kong-based real estate company, he was evicted June 1 and died the same day. His sisters say it was of a broken heart.

“To Henrik, North Beach was like a strand of pearls that lost so many of its pearls that all that was left was a tiny bracelet,” said Andrew Christie, a furniture repairman and one of Jorgensen’s closest friends. “When the change came around his way it killed him.”

Dramatic Changes

To many North Beach residents who knew Jorgensen, his story sums up the dramatic changes that have taken place recently in one of San Francisco’s most colorful neighborhoods. They say that old and new businesses are now attracting a younger, more affluent, professional crowd--a process that threatens to erode what has come to be seen as the North Beach way of life.

But to others the transition is a natural progression of “the Beach’s” varied ethnic and cultural past. At the vortex of Chinatown, Broadway, the financial district and the waterfront, North Beach has seen changes come in waves, and the influx of new commercial blood is essential to the neighborhood’s survival, they say.

Once the city’s northern shore on the San Francisco Bay and an Italian enclave since the 1880s, North Beach was home to struggling Bohemian painters in the ‘40s, poets of the Beat Generation in the ‘50s and Flower Children and topless dancers in the ‘60s. In the 1970s, Chinatown spilled over Broadway, North Beach’s imaginary border to the south, bringing an influx of Asian businesses.

Through the years most of the Italian coffee houses, restaurants, bakeries, butchers, ravioli factories and pizza parlors have survived, although many of their landlords, owners and customers are different--a change that troubles community activists.

“The older-generation landowners valued community customs,” said Brad Paul of the Coalition to Save Small Businesses in North Beach. “Whenever a lease came up for renegotiation it was done over coffee or a glass of wine. The younger generation (many of whom live elsewhere in the Bay Area) discuss their property with their peers at suburban cocktail parties. They hear what others are getting for their real estate and they are under a lot of pressure to increase commercial rents.”

Community and merchant groups this summer are banding together to create North Beach Corp., a nonprofit organization that will acquire property and lease it to neighborhood store owners and residents at subsidized rates. Within the next two years, the corporation hopes to offer 100 to 200 living units and 10 to 30 store fronts in the area, Paul said. Funding will be drawn from local and regional community foundations and small business loans.

Paul said the story of Jorgensen’s furniture store is only one example of how skyrocketing rents are forcing older establishments out of business. Gloria’s Sausage Factory, a North Beach delicatessen since the 1920s, closed after a monthly rent increase from $3,000 to $7,000. The Cuneo Bakery and the Malvina Caffe saw their rents go from $1,400 to $5,000.

Other casualties abound; 10% of the Beach’s 350 store fronts are vacant, according to a report by San Francisco’s Planning Department. A study by San Francisco State University predicts that 40% of present North Beach businesses will not be around by 1990.

Despite recent rent increases, however, the neighborhood still has some of the cheapest housing in San Francisco, because inexpensive residential hotels make up half the area’s living spaces.

New businesses, many of them Chinese or second-generation Italian, are moving into the area. But some old-time North Beachers say they cater to a different crowd.

“I see a lot more yuppies and sharp-looking executives eyeing our real estate for the possible location of God knows what,” said Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a celebrated poet of the Beat Generation who owns the well-known City Lights Bookstore at Columbus and Grant. Ferlinghetti wants to see the Beach turned into a national historic monument.

“Fewer and fewer artists can afford to live here and tourists crowd us out of the cafes,” he said, pointing out that many artists still frequent the Beach, but they live elsewhere. “The political resistance from the left here was much stronger in the ‘50s. The TV brainwash has created general indifference.”

One North Beach institution that illustrates the changes in the neighborhood is the Savoy Tivoli on Grant Avenue, where the nationally acclaimed musical review “Beach Blanket Babylon” started 15 years ago. According to legend, waiters dressed in eye-catching costumes, sang while serving drinks and chased non-paying customers down the street. It used to feature everything from jazz to punk rock and inexpensive culinary delights.

Recently it changed hands. The new owner, Louis Magliulo, closed the kitchen and put in a recreation room with pool tables. He said the Tivoli’s younger patrons do not necessarily go for the serious arts, but still use it as a rendezvous and a refuge from fast-paced restaurants and theaters.

“They’re definitely better off, but much more integrated. . . . It’s a mixed bag,” said Magliulo, who is a lifetime North Beach resident. “In the old days, Bohemians were looked down on. These younger kids try to understand each other, try to speak each other’s language and absorb much more of their surroundings.”

But these “nouveau-riche baby yuppies” lack the depth to keep North Beach culture alive, said Sami, 37, a painter who prefers to go by the single name. Sami said the artistic disposition that attracted him to North Beach 10 years ago has disappeared.

“I don’t see any more Henry Millers, Jack Kerouacs or Jackson Pollacks coming out of the North Beach coffee shops,” he said. “The young ‘neo-Bohemians’ are living on the reputation of the old ones. None of them produce enough to make a splash. The art scene just isn’t happening here.”

But James Redo, a 44-year-old poet-painter and lifelong North Beach resident, disagrees.

“The arts are flourishing here,” he said, putting his brush to a 10-foot canvas representing humanity in turmoil. “Too many people are living in the past. . . . I am trying to reflect the time as it is now.”

Redo contends that hundreds of creative minds thrive in North Beach, but that media attention has simply turned away from them.

Enrico Banducci, owner of Enrico’s Sidewalk Cafe, sandwiched between the luring lights and sights of Broadway, declares that North Beach was and always will be the heart of San Francisco, despite the “occasional coronary attacks.”

Banducci also owned the Hungry i at Jackson and Kearny streets, where the likes of Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen and Richard Pryor debuted.

“Starting during the bootlegging days to today’s yuppies, this has always been the meeting place and melting pot--kind of like Paris,” said Banducci, who sports a graying mustache and a well-worn beret. “The seed is still bubbling. It is just waiting for a major economic depression to come to life again.”

“It is still the community atmosphere that is attracting people to this neighborhood,” said Jerry DalBozzo, who has opened two restaurants on Columbus in the last year. “It is just becoming more upscale. San Francisco is going to be one of those quaint little towns--like Carmel--cute and very expensive. That means you lose some of the artists in the area, but the new people that are coming in are people too.”