N. Beach Is Returning to Tastier Tradition : Neighborhoods: Sex-oriented entertainment in San Francisco community is giving way to enclave’s earlier heritage of Italian restaurants and other businesses.

When Carol Doda took off her top, tourists raced to North Beach to take a peek. But the garish neon glow of topless clubs is flickering out in the city’s Italian enclave, to be replaced by an older, tastier landmark--pasta.

Last summer’s dismantling of the Condor Club’s famous sign, a huge semi-nude dancer with blinking nipples, marked a symbolic end to topless as one of North Beach’s primary lures.

The club where Doda launched her career in the early ‘60s is now the Condor Bistro, a G-rated Italian cafe with a light menu and a wide array of coffees and liquors.

Doda now performs--clothed--as the lead singer of a rock band.

“At the beginning, topless was stimulating. But it got seedy and died,” said Marsha Garland, executive director of the North Beach Chamber of Commerce. “The first thing I learned in community activism is, you can’t freeze a neighborhood.”

At its height in the early ‘70s, Broadway buzzed with more than two dozen clubs where carnival-like barkers beckoned passersby to watch bare-breasted dancers. But the availability of X-rated videos and harder-core nude venues made topless entertainment seem almost quaint.

Today, all but four nude dancing clubs have vanished along Broadway.

The other side of North Beach--the Italian tradition--stretches back more than a century and is alive and growing. About 80% of businesses in the neighborhood are still owned by Italians, according to the chamber. And the heritage is a growing selling point for the business community.

Century-old eateries such as Fior d’Italia, which bills itself as the oldest Italian restaurant in America, compete with a new generation of restaurants such as The Stinking Rose--with a garlicky menu--and Calzones.

Garland also points to the scheduled reopening of Enrico’s Sidewalk Cafe in January. The place has been dark since former owner Enrico Banducci closed the legendary cafe four years ago. At its height, Enrico’s was a hip after-hours nightspot that attracted film stars and entertainers.

The new Enrico’s, scheduled to open in March, will look and feel much like the old one, Garland said.

“The reopening signifies a face of North Beach as a hub of metropolitan, cosmopolitan activity,” Garland said.

Still going strong is Tosca Cafe, a favorite of such stars as Sam Shepherd and Dennis Quaid, and City Lights bookstore, once the literary headquarters for the beat generation. There’s also a Florentine art gallery and Italian furniture stores.

Only two years ago, hope for the area was fading fast. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed the Embarcadero Freeway, then the main route into North Beach.

But disaster eventually built strength.

“It shook the business community out of its complacency,” said Joan Dahlgren, publisher of the monthly newspaper North Beach Now. “I think the renaissance of North Beach is the silver lining of the 1989 earthquake. For awhile, things here looked pretty bleak. The people who had been coming here weren’t able to.”

One fallout was the establishment of the chamber.

For years, business owners fended for themselves and had little pull at City Hall. Since the quake, the chamber has promoted the Italian image, cleaned up the streets and alerted visitors to alternate routes into the neighborhood.

Members also began making themselves heard at Board of Supervisors meetings, writing letters and making phone calls to those in power.

The organization now has 130 members.

“There’s a big interest on the part of merchants--and I think this is unique to North Beach--of working together,” said Walter Pastore, owner of the Condor Bistro and three of the four remaining nude-dancing spots on Broadway. He is one of the founding members of the Chamber of Commerce.

“We realize that people bring people and that the city is not going to do a whole lot about cleaning up the streets and the graffiti. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to do it. We’ve become a very vocal group,” he said.