Hayes Valley Tentative Reopening

Other than the new murals on boarded up storefronts, Hayes Valley has looked pretty bleak for the last four months of the pandemic, with almost all businesses closed and tent encampments scattered everywhere.

Last Saturday there were new signs of public life as restaurants set up outdoor seating on the sidewalks with all the tables spaced six feet apart. (The Robert Louthan mural above is on the Gough Street side of Absinthe).

The sidewalks are still a bit too crowded for me so I am sticking with takeout from local restaurants, but the neighborhood has gotten progressively better about universal mask wearing when walking about.

Hayes Valley isn't at inner Richmond levels of mask adherence, but it's much better than the scofflaws of the Marina District or downtown Palm Springs where tourist families and gay bars seemed to be in a contest to determine who could be the least safe during my recent visit.

The old Arlequin cafe has been rebranded as Arbor and it opened for takeout last Friday.

The redecoration job looks spiffy and if the virus isn't raging out of control in San Francisco, the beautiful backyard may open next month.

We ordered a pair of $5 Fort Point KSAs and some curly fries to welcome them back to the neighborhood, but they had not yet figured out their ordering software or their two takeout windows, so it was a bit of a service mess.

It did not matter as the uncrowded, old iron tables on the sidewalk felt like a temporary oasis.

One only had to walk a half block to the corner of Franklin and Hayes for a reminder that we are still in a dystopian world, with trashed cars sitting out on streets for weeks at a time.

This particular vehicle has started to look like a public art piece entitled The Looting and Trashing of America.