S.G. Browne

My walking tour of San Francisco during the Shelter-in-Place directive and the mandate for social distancing continues with a stroll along Fisherman’s Wharf. But first, here’s what the parking situation looked like on Scott Street between Lombard and Chestnut in the Marina just before 11:00am. (NOTE: You’d think that the Marina Psychic would have seen this coming, but I guess that’s why she doesn’t have many customers.)

My walk started out on Chestnut Street, which had some businesses with windows boarded up to prevent any potential looting. Yes, looting. So that’s part of the precautions being taken by those stores that are closed up for the lockdown.

But there are restaurants along Chestnut and in the Marina still open for business, albeit limited to take-out and/or delivery and many have limited hours. This list includes, but is not limited to:

• World Wrapps
• Le Marais Bakery
• Delarosa
• Dragon Well
• Super Duper Burgers
• Peet’s Coffee
• Noah’s NY Bagels
• Saiwalks

If you have the means and the inclination, there are plenty of businesses such as these throughout San Francisco that could use your patronage to help their chances of still being around once the shelter-in-place restrictions are lifted.

Yes, I know. I said this was going to be about Fisherman’s Wharf. But I got distracted. It’s easy to do when you’re walking around the neighborhood you’ve known for the past 14 years and everywhere you look there’s something that is either shocking, strange, or surreal. Or a combination of all three. These are strange times indeed. Now on to Fisherman’s Wharf!

But first, here’s a photo of an outdoor Fitness Court along Marina Boulevard just across from Webster Street, where half a dozen fitness-minded types are working out using communal stationary rings and bars without wearing gloves and without wiping down any of the surfaces before or after they work out. No reckless flaunting of recommended pandemic hygiene to see here. Move along.

So now we finally come to Fisherman’s Wharf. While my previous two entries in which I explored the Marina and North Beach neighborhoods took place on the weekday during the morning hours, all of the photos below were taken at the height of lunchtime on Saturday. Specifically on Saturday, March 21, the first weekend of spring on a warm, sunny, perfect day.

For those of you who have never been to San Francisco, or for those of you who live in the city but avoid Fisherman’s Wharf like the plague (rim shot…thank you, I’m here all week), a normal spring Saturday afternoon would entail sidewalks and restaurants and stores filled with tourist and customers. Instead the streets are deserted, the restaurants and souvenir shops closed up and empty. It’s as if the entire area has fallen asleep and is waiting to wake up.

So rather than including commentary about the photos, I’m just going to post them because I think they speak for themselves.

This morning I woke up in North Beach. Not because I had a blackout drunk from the night before, but because I spent the night there. Although I do admit to having a couple of glasses of red wine to go along with a dinner that consisted of salmon, cauliflower, and a fresh spring salad with tomatoes, peppers, and goat cheese.

A nice, normal evening in.

But in San Francisco, as well as in more than a dozen other California counties, a nice normal evening in has taken on a whole new meaning.

That new normal gets weirder when you go to sleep after 11pm on St. Patrick’s Day and aren’t woken up once by the drunken revelry of tech bros shouting and staggering their way back home from the North Beach bars. Instead, there’s eerie silence.

In the morning you wake up and walk outside and wander along Grant Avenue and look West along Lombard Street all the way to the crooked part that crests the opposite hill and there’s not a single car for seven blocks. There are signs for Take Out Only or One Customer At A Time and a virtually empty Green Street and you know that there won’t be a line outside of Golden Boy Pizza tonight.

You stand on an island at Green and Columbus and see a single car waiting at the stop light. When you get down to Broadway and Columbus, you walk out into the middle of Broadway at 7:30am and the normal morning commute traffic is non-existent. The restaurants along Broadway and Columbus are closed until further notice. Even the strip clubs are dark, The Condor and The Garden of Eden and Little Darlings–the most obvious casualty of social distancing when it comes to financial transactions–and you wonder why no one is talking about the hardship this economic shutdown is going to cause for the strippers.

A few places are open for business, even if they’re not open yet–such as Portofino Seafood Co. on Grant, Lush Gelato and Caffe Greco on Columbus, and Liguria Bakery on Stockton–but they only offer take out and ask that you respect social distancing.

As you head back, you stop on the Northwest corner of Broadway and Columbus, which is your favorite corner in San Francisco because it offers a view North along Columbus into the heart of North Beach, a view South down Grant into the shopping heart of Chinatown, and a view East down Broadway past all of the strip clubs–the juxtaposition of sex for sale bumped up against the family friendly tourist attractions of North Beach and Chinatown. This has always amused you.

Finally, as you head back up Columbus to start your second day of this new normal, you notice three humans taking their dogs out to play in Washington Square Park. While the humans are practicing social distancing, the dogs remind us of a simpler time when we could all run around and play together without having to worry about a pandemic. Either that or they’re all just channeling their inner honey badger because they don’t give a fuck.

As the city of San Francisco (and other cities and counties throughout California) implement a Shelter-In-Place directive, closing up all businesses that are considered non-essential and restricting the movement of humans in order to limit the spread of the coronavirus in an attempt to flatten the curve of infection, I thought I’d share some photos of what San Francisco looks like on the first morning of the apocalypse…I mean the directive.

I went out to take a morning walk at 6:30am to get some exercise, keeping in mind that the directive recommends keeping a minimum distance of 6 feet from anyone else on the street, which, as you can see from the photos, wasn’t difficult to do. Plus I hadn’t showered yet, so there’s that.

As you can imagine, it’s rather surreal to see empty streets and deserted sidewalks in a major metropolitan city, even at 7:00am on a weekday. And the Marina District is usually bustling with cars and cafes and Crunch Fitness. But for now, this is the new normal.

Whenever I take a walk around the city, I like to have a soundtrack. I still have an iPod shuffle, so I don’t have playlists, just a shuffling of the songs I’ve downloaded. Normally I skip over songs that don’t suit my mood, but I decided to let the songs play without interruption to see what kind of mood they set. Below in order are the songs that provided the soundtrack to my rather surreal morning.

Feeling That Way / Anytime
One Tree Hill
Love Rollercoaster
All the Small Things
Time of the Season
Waiting
God Part II
Tired of Sex
I’m in Love with My Car
Surrender
Kiss Off
Roadhouse Blues
Smooth Sailin’
Miss You
Rehab
Personal Jesus
Love for Sale
It’s Now or Never
Hello It’s Me
Alive and Kicking
Hammer to Fall

That last one seems a little too close for comfort to the current situation, but it’s Queen so I can’t complain.

Tomorrow I’ll check out North Beach.

Breathers, my dark comedy and social satire about zombies, is currently being offered as an eBook promotion for just $1.99.

That’s right. For less than a grande coffee from Starbucks or a large frosty from Wendy’s, you can order Breathers from your favorite digital retailer. That includes Amazon Kindle, NOOK for Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Google Play, and Kobo, which is the eBook provider for many independent bookstores.

So if you’ve been thinking about adding a digital version of Breathers to your library, or if you’d like to introduce one of your friends or family members to Andy and the gang for half the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac, act soon as the promotion will only last a short time.

As always, thanks for reading.

On June 27, I will be self-publishing a new book, a novella about dogs and cats titled The Maiden Poodle: A Fairy Tail.

For those of you who have read any of my previous books, it would be understandable if you expected this story to be a supernatural dark comedy about an unmarried poodle during the time of King Arthur, with some social satire throw in for good measure.

The Maiden Poodle is not one of those books.

While there is a fair amount of humor involved, it’s on the lighter and more playful side. And although I’ve incorporated a hint of fantasy and the supernatural, you won’t find any immortal personifications of fate or any designer drugs that allow you to become Elvis Presley. You also won’t find any super heroes, luck poachers, or zombies.

Here there be poodles.

And not just poodles. There also be Scotties, Saint Bernards, border collies, golden retrievers, beagles, greyhounds, German shepherds, and numerous other dog breeds—all of them of the anthropomorphic variety and living together in the ancient kingdom of Felinia.

Oh yes. And cats. Did I mention there were cats?

(You can read more about The Maiden Poodle HERE. And for those of you who are wondering, the book is appropriate for animal-loving children and adults of all ages.)

As I mentioned, The Maiden Poodle officially goes on sale on June 27, but it is currently available for pre-order on Amazon for Kindle and will also be available in trade paperback once the on-sale date approaches.

Any questions, just let me know. And as always, thank you for reading.