Standing at forty feet tall, eighteen feet deep, and ten feet wide, the Newby-McMahon Building immediately appears out of place. Everybody seems to have an answer, but nobody knows the truth. Still others believe it is a castoff from some 1950s movie set, or that it used to be a smuggling house for bootleggers during Prohibition. Others swear that it’s a practice facility for firefighters learning to walk up and down stairways in their bulky suits. Some say it is a decorative housing for a water tower. "Tourists and convention people," she said, "don't know about little guys like us.Ask ten people from Wichita Falls, Texas the true story behind the rail-thin, heavily windowed building that rises from gritty sandstone warehouses like a red-bricked phoenix hatchling, and you’re likely to get ten different answers. Danny Lu moonlights as a bartender at the Westin San Francisco hotel on Third Street. Linda Lu is there at 5:15 in the morning to get ready. On a nice day, people like a woman named Elena pick up some sandwiches to carry to the lawn at the Yerba Buena Center, a block or so away. A meal for less than $5.Ĭustomers typically take a sandwich or spring rolls back to the office. They have the usual coffee and pastry stuff when they open at 7 in the morning, but at lunch they serve up banh mi, which combines a baguette with Vietnamese fillings, ham or various meats, with pickled carrots and cilantro, a bit like the little sandwiches you can buy in Paris, but with a Vietnamese touch. "A mom-and-pop place can't survive that." So they went into the breakfast-and-lunch trade. "But, you know, now there is a Starbucks on every corner, and Peet's all over," Danny Lu said. They ran it as a coffee shop for a while. The Lus, refugees from Vietnam, bought it 16 years ago. Old settlers might remember the place as a coffee emporium called the Daily Grind. Here is the world headquarters of Cafe Dolci, a hole-in-the-wall establishment just 9o feet square right next to one of those old-time classic downtown banks, this one a very dignified Wells Fargo branch.Ĭafe Dolci is just big enough for Linda Lu, who makes the sandwiches, and her husband, Danny, who takes the orders.Ĭustomers waiting for their orders stand outside on Market Street. The next day I took a different jaunt, this time up Market a block or so to just before Grant Avenue. Layne Cassidy, a third-generation San Franciscan, was in charge the other day. The top of the line is the Proposition 8 Dog, two hot dogs in one bun for $6. The Moral Conundrum, a veggie dog wrapped in bacon, is offered at $5.50. There are a couple of whimsical dogs, too. There are 12 kinds of regular sausages, from the humble corn dog ($3) to the lordly Santa Fe Bird, a turkey dog with peppers and cilantro ($4.45). Inside the little stand, a man takes your order and a woman grills it. 16 as Zog's Dog Day in San Francisco, in honor of Jesse Herzog, the founder of the feast. An official proclamation in the window announces that Mayor Gavin Newsom proclaimed last Oct. Behind it, a red fire engine, the color of ketchup. A streetcar the color of mustard rumbled by. A bum with lank hair investigated a garbage can. An important-looking man in a suit walked past looking worried. It still is.Īlong Market were hurrying people on their way to appointments, on their way to work, on their way to nowhere. Years ago, Charles Caldwell Dobie called San Francisco a pageant. I got a Zog Dog ($3.75), put on a little spicy mustard, and sat on the steps of the McKesson Corp.
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