S.F. Still Looking for Living Room : Property: The city’s cemeteries have long since moved south. And there are only two bowling alleys left as economics crowd out large-space enterprises.

No drive-ins. No K mart. No Sears. No cemeteries. A baseball team with one foot in the U-Haul. And now San Francisco is down to its last two--count ‘em, two--bowling alleys.

Sure, the City by the Bay still has the Golden Gate Bridge. But just about everything else seems to be an endangered species.

“This has become a boutique city in a sense,” said Bob Sarlatte, a veteran San Franciscan and announcer for the 49ers football team.

“If it ain’t got bowling, it can’t be America,” jokes Gilbert Klein, who runs the still-popular “rock ‘n’ bowl” nights at Park Bowl, which along with the 40-lane Japantown Bowl is all that remains in a city that boasted more than a dozen alleys five decades ago.

The 22-lane Park Bowl is in the Haight-Ashbury district, erstwhile headquarters of the Summer of Love. The weekend rock ‘n’ bowl, which features rock videos, a big screen and songs blasted over a public address system, was “successful right from the start,” Klein said. He encourages novices by pointing out that “rock ‘n’ bowl doesn’t exactly attract the pro circuit.”

“It’s made bowling cool,” he said, modestly.

Bowling is not the only thing going down like tenpins. There are no skating rinks (frozen or thawed) in San Francisco and only four public swimming pools.

“There are a lot of things here that just have gone by the wayside,” said Preston Cook, a realtor who follows urban land use.

“The endangered species are parking lots and gas stations and auto repair garages,” he said. “All these things that take up a big amount of space, the economics don’t work any more. I’ve been seeing some churches for sale recently, which is a new phenomenon.”

At K mart’s Troy, Mich., headquarters, spokeswoman Mary Lorenz said the chain’s absence is nothing personal--”We love the San Francisco area.”

The problem is that land is too expensive, said Lorenz, who noted that the company did park a K mart on Staten Island, a ferry ride away from populous Manhattan, but “we don’t have one on Alcatraz.”

When the ice skating rink moved out more than a year ago, City Supervisor Willie B. Kennedy tried to stop it, but without success.

“The city really didn’t try,” she said.

While San Francisco retains a vibrant downtown shopping center with big stores such as Macy’s and Nordstrom and a host of high-priced boutiques, more banal shopping trips to big discounters outside the city means lost tax dollars, Kennedy said.

The city took another blow to its civic center in January when the San Francisco Giants announced they were going to San Jose if voters there agree to ante up new taxes for a stadium. The problem? Candlestick Park is too windy and voters had turned down proposals for a new city baseball stadium.

Land, or the lack of it, is the driving force behind the city changes, Cook agrees.

“We’re a small geographic area, 49 square miles,” he said. “We have absolutely nowhere to expand.”

Nowhere is the city’s lack of space more vividly illustrated than in the story of its cemeteries.

Today, stucco houses stand back to back in the densely populated Richmond district where 147 acres of cemeteries once stretched toward the foggy shore of Ocean Beach.

“It used to be the silent city of the dead, the necropolis,” said Joe Biernacki, manager of the Columbarium, a three-story turn-of-the-century building that holds more than 8,000 cremated remains and is all that remains of the city’s dead past.

In the 1930s, city leaders decided to make room for the living, moving the cemeteries to Colma, a small farm community south of the city.

And what happened to Colma?

From its ghost-town beginnings, it sprang up as a booming center of commerce, boasting a lengthy auto row, numerous strip malls and, yes, a K mart.