South Beach

You find South Beach on the far eastern edge of SoMa. I need to tell you because this neighborhood did not exist just a few years ago. This is part of the on-going effort to market SF by creating a series of neighborhoods like this. Usually they have names taken from other more prosperous neighborhoods (like “Lower Nob Hill”) or from other famous areas in other cities (South of Market is thus SoMa to recall New York’s SoHo).

So here we have South Beach—though the area has less the feel of Miami than some of the nicer areas of Boston. Just a couple of years ago there were still buildings going up and a ton of empty lots. Now however, you will find few signs of the massive construction project that created this area (at least south of the Bay Bridge—on the northern end there are still some projects still underway). Someone walking through might be mistaken in thinking this neighborhood has been here for a generation, at least—except for the amazingly high ratio of newer buildings and lack of Victorians—a rarity for SF.

So what is the cost like in this area? The typical apartment in the area averages around $2500/room with prices rising the closer you get to the ocean. (It is not unusual to see a one-room for $3800 in the close to the waters of the bay.) Put simply, this is one of the priciest places to live in a city that is known for its high cost of living.

What about nightlife and entertainment? Well, we need to start with AT&T Park of course. The home of the Giants is a magnet for foot traffic to the area and a whole set of restaurants and other shops have moved in to take advantage of both the high rent apartments and the fan traffic.

Restaurants of note in the area include One Market, Boulevard and Ozumo right along the waterfront—many of these are in the classy lounge style featuring American cuisine (like Serpentine in Dogpatch to the south).

There are also a number of bars in the area, starting with the Gordon Bierschi Brewery and the Hi Dive.

Overall, if you can afford to pay the equivalent of a teacher’s salary in rent, this makes for a very nice spot to live.

Once home to the 2001 tech boom, South Beach remains one of San Francisco’s high density tech business areas. The neighborhood is relatively small, extending from the Bay Bridge to 3rd Street but offers great amenities including a waterfront location as well as South Beach Harbor.

During the week, the neighborhood is bustling with tech savvy entrepreneurial types and lively lunchtime eateries buzzing with business chatter. On sunny weekdays, joggers run along a long paved trail that skirts the edge of the Bay. Shopping is a bit hard to come by in this area though, only offering high end furniture and boutique book stores.

South Beach is also home to AT&T Park and the 2010 World Champion Giants. The area can get quite busy during baseball season as thousands of fans dressed in orange and black flock to the stadium during rush hour. If you didn’t get tickets to the game, there are a handful of enormous sports bars near the stadium with plasma televisions blanketing the walls. Two great locations adjacent to the stadium are Pete’s Tavern and Momo’s restaurant both on King Street.

Traffic in this neighborhood is a nightmare if you’re looking to commute over the Bay Bridge. You’re best bet is taking the Muni that travels along the edge of the Bay and up to Embarcadero. If you’re looking to live in the neighborhood and you’re wallets are deep, South Beach offers luxurious high rise condominiums with sweeping views of the Bay Bridge, Downtown and Dolores park.

South Beach is a bustling and busy neighborhood on home games at AT&T Park, home to the San Francisco Giants. And on these days you’ll see hundreds of people decked out in orange gear, it’s quite a sight to see as you drive by on the Embarcadero, you’ll even see them cheering for the Giants even before the game starts. Though, the mood really changes on game days, whenever body is in their orange gear, it’s like everyone is family, all the fans are friendly with one another whether or not they know each other. There is also a large number of boats on the waters right next to South Beach, mostly those who wanted to catch a home run ball from a Giants game.

There are a lot of great restaurants and bars in South Beach, great place to celebrate a Giants victory. And if you’re looking for more, you won’t have to go far as there are tons in Downtown San Francisco, which is only 15-20 drive to, depending on the traffic.

West of South Beach is a lot to do, and I’m speaking truthfully, there is so much to do that you won’t be able to do it all in a day. Just a bit west of South Beach, you will find several museums, such as, Cartoon Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco. I’ve only been to the Museum of Modern Art, which I really enjoyed. In the same area, you will also find the Yerba Buena Gardens or center. There you have bowling and ice skating. Lastly you have the Westfield Shopping Center, which is the most trendy and hip place to go shopping nowadays for San Franciscans, it’s still relatively new compared to other shopping centers.

Talk about transition. Of all city neighborhoods over the last decade, the one that has undergone the most change—and is poised for even more transformation—is South Beach, the area south of Market Street nearest the bay. Where there were once old homes that fell to warehouses and light industry, today there stand skyscraper condos and commercial buildings. In spots, it is not so much a neighborhood as the promise of one, its vast empty lots and highway ramps slated for more high-rise condos and acres of urban parks and landscaped “commons.” Once this latest round of changes takes effect, few will recognize the area from its former incarnations. To many who remember South Beach for its forlorn alleys, rundown storefronts, and seedy bars, that is a good thing. To others, the gritty character of these thriving blocks will be sanitized, replaced by a sleek, overly designed vision of the city of the future.

Yet, in South Beach—and particularly its sub-district, Rincon Hill—change has always been a constant. It started out as a bona-fide neighborhood in the 1850s, one of San Francisco’s first, with large fashionable homes dotting the flanks of the gently sloping hill (Rincon) after which the area was named. But then, with the rapid growth convulsing the young city, the area went into rapid decline, its once gracious streets and neat yards derided by none other than Robert Louis Stevenson, who in 1880 described it as "a new slum, a place of precarious sandy cliffs . . . solitary ancient houses and butt ends of streets." The area’s fate was sealed by the 1906 quake and fire, which reduced it to a smoldering heap. It was rebuilt in the early 20th century as a warehouse district with light industry mixed in, and it remained so for the next 75 years, especially after being bisected by the elevated approaches to the Bay Bridge and later the I-80 freeway. Many of the blocks north of the freeway between the Embarcadero and Second Street were razed during the city’s unenlightened urban renewal in the late 1950s through the ’60s, with anonymous towers and developments (such as those around Folsom and Second) filling in the gaps over the years. It’s a somewhat different story south of the freeway, where many post-1906 quake buildings remain (including the ClockTower building on Second) along with the historic South Park, an oval greensward (copied after one in London) lined with sycamores and surrounded by low-slung buildings that form a cohesive enclave even in our disjointed 21st century.

The northern and southern halves of South Beach today can still be considered in terms of new and old, with the half north of I-80 (a.k.a. Rincon Hill) where most of the new skyscrapers are slated (including the massive Transbay Transit Center redevelopment, with its Cesar Pelli-designed tower and adjoining Renzo Piano-designed high-rises), and the half south of I-80 where much of the redevelopment of historic older structures has already taken place. Because most of the northern half is still on the drawing board as a “transit-friendly” development (Folsom Street, for instance, is scheduled to become the main drag of a new neighborhood of low- and high-rise housing), the part of South Beach that currently has the most street life, businesses, restaurants, and other attractions is the southern half, particularly around South Park, Bayside Village and South Beach Marina (the latter two modern apartment complexes off the Embarcadero), the Delancey Street Foundation’s award-winning retail/residential complex, and the recently built AT&T ballpark, home of the San Francisco Giants baseball team. With the new ballpark and the office campuses mushrooming in Mission Bay next door, a number of new apartment and condo buildings have sprung up along King and Townsend streets, many designed to fit in with the brick-warehouse look of the historic neighborhood.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, South Beach has about 8,000 residents, the great majority of them white (70 percent) or Asian (18 percent), with the remaining 12 percent either African American or of mixed race. Many are young adults (median age here is 35). Most earn about $70,000 annually. They tend to rent (69 percent) rather than own their homes.

Though a few attractions exist in the northern half of South Beach (such as Palomino restaurant and Gordon Biersch Brewery in the landmark Hills Bros. Coffee building—not to mention One Rincon Hill South Tower, at 60 stories San Francisco’s tallest residential building), most of the action, both day and night, is in the southern half. By day, the area is buzzing with Web 2.0 employees, the old dotcom boom of the late ’90s having been replaced by a multimedia-invigorated wave of Internet entrepreneurs and their established businesses and start-ups (MySpace, Buzzlogic, Slide.com, Macworld, Technorati, Wired, and Twitter, to name a few). By night, they join locals and sports fans at any of the numerous restaurants and clubs that serve both the ballpark crowd (MoMo’s, Pete’s Tavern, O’Neill’s Irish Pub), as well as trend-seekers (Tres Agaves, Paragon Restaurant and Bar, Nova). A number of eateries with a long history here continue doing business as well (South Park Café on the high end, Zeke’s Sports Bar and Grill on the low).

With the newly renovated small parks and promenades along the Embarcadero, the bay feels open and accessible to all, albeit in the form of boat slips and refurbished wharves. Though there are no beaches, there’s nothing to stop people from picnics and al fresco rendezvous along the paved walks and benches that line the newly opened waterfront.

Public transportation has the area covered. The “T” and “N” streetcars run along King Street and the Embarcadero before joining other lines underground at Market near the Ferry Building. Most bus routes drop off and pick up passengers at the Caltrain Depot en route to or returning from the Financial District, some specifically designed to do so. Express buses (Nos. 80, 81, and 82) go from the Caltrain terminal at Fourth and King to the Financial District and back, as do the No. 10 local, traveling along Townsend and then Second, and the Nos. 30 and 45, which make the circuit between Caltrain and Union Square. The No. 12 goes up and down Folsom Street and also Second Street. AC Transit brings commuters over the Bay Bridge and back from Oakland and other points in the East Bay.

Due to the number of businesses with many employees, the presence of the ballpark, and the dense population, parking here can be fairly described as difficult to nerve-wracking, with one- or two-hour limits on streets that don’t have coin-depleting meters (25 cents for five minutes). The city’s Department of Parking and Traffic issues “U” and “Y” residential parking permits for tenants of buildings on particularly congested streets.

Because there are so few children in the area, no public schools are located in South Beach. Marin Day Schools has a preschool/day-care center on Harrison Street, and there is a sand playground with swings and climbing equipment in South Park. But for the most part, the few kids here travel outside of the neighborhood to go to school and for outdoor recreation.
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This is an inner-city neighborhood, so crime here is moderately high, according to the San Francisco Police Department. In addition to vandalism (graffiti, broken windows, etc.) and disturbing the peace (noise outside of bars and clubs), assaults were frequent in a recent three-month period, as were robberies. Burglaries were also common. This is a hot spot for stolen vehicles and car break-ins as well, indicative of a trend in San Francisco. Additionally, there have been five homicides reported in the last three years.

Real estate is a fairly pricey proposition here, even after a 30 percent slide in the recent recession. Though a few lofts and condos (small one- and two-bedrooms, with one bathroom) can be found for under $500,000, the norm throughout the neighborhood is high range: $800,000 to more than $1.5 million, according to Trulia.com. If you’re looking for views, the just-completed One Rincon Hill South Tower has one-, two-, and three-bedroom condos from $600,000 to $2.9 million. Rentals are likewise expensive: Studios in Bayside Village are $1,600 a month, with other complexes asking up to $2,000 for a studio, $2,200 for a one-bedroom, and from $3,000 to $5,000 for two-bedroom, two-bath condo rentals.

This is not necessarily an area that will please everyone. The traffic, noise, street bustle, and urban edge may prove to be too much for certain prospective residents, but just right for those who don’t need to get away from the city to enjoy it.