The San Francisco Citizen

You tend to see this more outside of San Francisco - restaurant employees out on the curb encouraging customers to come in. But it happened a lot in S.F. just after 9/11. Must not have been a picnic trying to make money in that environment. To help out, the Dine About Town program got started in 2002 trying to coax people back into restaurants.

But this is 2008, so it seems funny that a place on Columbus in North Beach would be looking for more business on a Saturday night, in June, at 8:00 PM.

In nearby Chinatown, the low point for the food service industry was in 2003 when the SARS scare prevented anybody from showing up for the Shirley Fong-Torres Wok Wiz tour one day. You couldn’t make it five feet down Grant Avenue without being propositioned during this time.

It can be a tough way to make a living, the restaurant biz.

Chin up!

It’s been printed in the San Francisco Examiner, (so it must be true):

Captain James Dudley of Central Station in North Beach plans to ask the San Francisco Entertainment Commission to consider making mandatory handstamps specific to a bar or club so police can more easily make connections between specific locations and drunken behavior.

According to the Cap’n, “it would be helpful to be able to track people.”

Will this idea pass constitutional muster? Is it justified? Feel free to read the Captain’s weekly newsletters to see what he’s dealing with  on a nightly basis in the world-famous North Beach area.

Will mandatory handstamps make your San Francisco bacchanal safer? Adamcomerford via Flickr

Be sure you don’t spend too much time showing off all your temporary tracking stamps to your friends on the street, as loitering too long in front of a club will soon get you into hot water as well.

Stay safe and have fun!

Some people think of Sausalito as a Portuguese fishing village and that’s kind of credible.

This atypical view of San Francisico with Sausalito in the background makes S.F. look a little like a village as well - evidence of Manhattanization is to the left, so all you see is basically the same as what you would have seen in the 1930’s.

Some people would like to construct tall buildings on the waterfront, but there’ll be a lot of fighting before that happens. 

Click to expand.