S.F.’s North Beach Doing Turnabout

Restaurateur Enrico Banducci, who has seen four decades of changes on now-seedy Broadway, remembers when the North Beach district street was lined with thriving cafes and nightclubs.

“There was a great feeling and great smells on the street,” Banducci recalled. “Now you just smell the street, and that isn’t very nice.”

But Banducci, 66, also thinks the world-renowned Broadway strip, now known for dying topless clubs and sleazy sex shops, can start to regain its former character with new restaurants and a restored theater offering chamber music, dance and opera.

“It’s coming back now,” he said.

Leaders of North Beach businesses and cultural groups chose Enrico’s--the restaurant Banducci has run for the last 45 years--to announce a series of restaurant and theater openings they hope will start an important trend on Broadway.

“We’re showing that Broadway is on an upswing. We have many, many new businesses coming into the area and investing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars,” Walter Pastore of the North Beach Chamber of Commerce said.

“It’s an important area for the city, and people are trying to bring it back to life,” Pastore said.

The city’s North Beach area was the 19th-Century waterfront, a place to go for whiskey during Prohibition and a one-time beatnik neighborhood. San Franciscans and tourists still love it for its history and its remaining bookstores, coffee houses and Italian bakeries.

In 1964, Broadway, which runs through North Beach, gained instant national notoriety when several clubs announced they would offer topless dancing. Two years later, they turned the idea upside down with bottomless dancing.

For several years, the clubs and now-gaudy street flourished, drawing curious tourists with its neon signs and barkers. But eventually the novelty of nudity wore off, and fewer tourists visited Broadway.

“At one time, this was all new,” said a barker outside the hungry i, who calls himself Rocky Raccoon. “Now you can go to someone’s back yard and see topless dancing. People don’t have to come to San Francisco anymore. That’s why the clubs are dying.”

In recent years, several topless clubs have closed, and the strip has been plagued by vandalism, teen-age rowdies and competition from new, chic nightclubs in the South of Market Street area.

But Banducci was gladdened by the prospect of three cultural groups taking over the closed Mabuhay Gardens rock club, an old theater just a block down Broadway from his restaurant.

The club will be the new home of Donald Pippin’s Pocket Opera; Chamberworks, a chamber music group, and Dance Through Time.

At least three new restaurants are scheduled to open between now and the end of July, with at least three others also expected in the near future, said Marsha Garland of the chamber.

She and Pastore expect that the remaining topless clubs will keep going next to the new restaurants and theater--at least for now.

“‘It’s an old idea. You can’t keep the format going for 30 years,” she said. “As leases turn over, I think you’ll see other businesses taking their place.”

Banducci does not think so.

“I think we can all exist and get along fine,” he said. “I think we can coexist beautifully. Everyone is concerned about Broadway. . . . But to clean it up entirely is a misnomer. You can’t do that. It’s a fun street; it’s been a fun street for the last 150 years.”