| Featured Neighborhood - North Beach | May 7th, 2008 |
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Up the hill from North Beach, the neighborhood transitions into Telegraph Hill, another neighborhood where single family homes are rare and little sets of flats and small condo buildings are abundant. This is also where you get some of the City’s most dramatic views across the Bay.
A word to the wise exploring North Beach for the first time without a Realtor: avoid driving if possible as street parking is scarce. Instead, try taking one of the three major bus lines (#15, #30 and #45) or two Cable Car lines that pass through the neighborhood. Fodor’s has a good introductory walking tour of North Beach on their website. Leave a Reply |
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North Beach is that rare thing — a neighborhood that manages to be a perennial hit with tourists, and also remain beloved by San Franciscans. For those outside the City, it’s best known for its check-clothed restaurants, cafes and Old World delicatessens. It’s also a popular pilgrimage for fans of the Beat movement seeking the old haunts of Kerouac and Ginsberg.
Settled in the 1850s, the area’s first residents were middle-class Americans. Thirty years later, two-thirds were immigrants, mostly from Ireland, Germany, and France. By 1939, more than 60,000 Italians had moved to this square-mile neighborhood, earning it the nickname of Little Italy. The streets were lined with Italian restaurants, shops, and social clubs. I’ve spoken with many old-time San Franciscans who grew up in North Beach and heard wonderful stories about where they lived and how much– or rather how little– the mortgage or rent was!
(Personal aside– Vestiges of the neighborhood’s beatnik era still hung in the air when I moved to the City in the mid-80s. Some of my artsy friends had a flat with cheap rent on Green at Columbus. The Gray Panthers lived upstairs and I sometimes saw Alan Ginsburg at their parties. I think he even crashed on their sofa from time-to-time.)
For residents, North Beach is a traditional neighborhood. It’s rarely more than a few blocks walk to find a grocer, bakery, barber shop, hardware store, church, school or park. What you won’t find are chain stores– as early as the 1980s, the city placed controls on the type and scale of commercial uses to help protect North Beach’s identity. They also put restrictions on building heights and billboards. Today, historic landmarks such as Coit Tower are visible; no skyscrapers block the view. Washington Square, the neighborhood’s central open space, is a place for morning Tai Chi classes, dog walking, sky gazing, and several annual festivals.
From a Realtor’s perspective, North Beach is what I call a ‘high density’ neighborhood. Single family homes are rare, and home shoppers are more apt to zero in on condos on streets like Lombard and Chestnut. One of the largest condo buildings is the Malt House, which faces both Francisco and Chestnut between Powell and Mason. The Malt House is a former (you guessed it) malt house and grainery. It was converted to 180+ condos in the late 90s. Today, a 2br/2ba unit at the Malt House runs rought $850-950K depending on orientation, square footage, floor plan and outlook.
Generally, the units I’ve sold in North Beach have gone to singles buying their first home– (what better place to start?) and people seeking a pied-a-terre. One-bedrooms generally run in the $750-775K range, although we recently had a sale of an itty-bitty one bedroom for just under $600,000. Add on a view and the price goes up dramatically– we currently have a 