It doesn’t get less Hollywood than Little Hollywood, the extreme southeast San Francisco neighborhood that most people, if they know about it at all, think of as a sliver of Visitacion Valley.
First off, if there’s one thing a certain generation of San Franciscans hate, it’s even a hint of comparison to anything Southern California. Second, it borders the town dump. Third, like Greta Garbo shunning the glam around her, it just wants to be left alone.
Mostly, it is. “Little Hollywood is so perfectly bordered by barriers,” says Russel Morine, born and raised in the neighboring Bayview, now a 20-year Little Hollywood resident and neighborhood historian.
“There are a lot of dead ends,” says Morine. “You can’t really add more with Little Hollywood. Whatever is happening is happening around us,” and he spins his index finger as if tracing a vortex.
Traffic on Highway 101 roars past to the east. Four-lane Bayshore Boulevard, with the Muni T-line streetcar in the median, is to the west. The Caltrain tracks cut off the southwest corner of Little Hollywood from the rest of Visitacion Valley. Then there’s Recology to the south, aka the Dump.
There is a ton of stuff indeed swirling around Little Hollywood, and it’s very much relevant to the current state of San Francisco. The big story is new housing. Not in Little Hollywood itself, which is nearly all single-family homes that rarely turn over.
But on the other side of the Caltrain tracks in Visitacion Valley proper is the old Schlage Lock factory site, now terraced dirt awaiting the buildout of nearly 1,700 residential units — a huge addition to a sleepy corner of the city.
That’s the just the beginning. On the other side of 101, through a dank two-lane tunnel, is the failed Executive Park office complex that is slated to become residential as well.
Locals’ corner
On a farther horizon, more changes could come. The massive Baylands project, going before voters this fall, would be just over the county line to the south; to the east is the old Candlestick Park site, then the Hunters Point shipyard redevelopment, now royally snafu’d by radioactive soil and corrupt cleanup.
But Little Hollywood itself feels not just isolated but insulated from the rest of the city. Fifty years ago, that means kids from the neighborhood married each other, says realtor Cathy Saunders, who grew up there and ticks off a list of couples who are still together: “Larry and Linda. Ken and Chris. Kevin and Joan . They were next-door neighbors.”
When the Schlage Lock factory whistle blew at 4:30, scores of people would walk the few blocks home, a leisurely blue-collar wave coming up the hill, Saunders recalls.
Nowadays, it’s too far from services and shelters, so homeless folks rarely show up, according to Morine and his friend Edie Epps, who runs the Visitacion Valley History Project.
The recent scourge of car break-ins doesn’t seem to have hit the neighborhood hard. The SF public crime database only shows three since the start of 2017.
The split-level pocket park that climbs the hill on Little Hollywood’s south end, just before the sprawling Recology site, is quiet with a community garden, landscaping, a tidy little jungle gym and basketball court. An elderly couple were the only ones there on a recent sunny afternoon. The wife was practicing Chinese-language songs from a hymnal, the husband was walking laps around the garden. The wife didn’t want to give her name, but she told me they’d bought their house in Little Hollywood in 1991.
Epps can top that. Her house, across the street from the venerable, worn-at-the-heels deli and liquor depot Piccolo Pete’s, has been in her family since 1936. As history buffs and memory keepers, Epps and Morine are surprisingly nostalgia-free.
There are a lot of dead ends. You can’t really add more with Little Hollywood. Whatever is happening is happening around us.
neighborhood historian russell morine
They can’t wait for the Schlage Lock project to finish and fill up. They want more neighbors, even if they come with no local pedigree, simply seeking easier commutes to Silicon Valley jobs. No problem if they are the wedge that finally lets in the precious eateries and electric scooters. (A couple scooters were recently left for a few days in the neighborhood, they say, and got everyone abuzz.)
A place that stays open past 6 pm would be thrilling. The nearest place for a drink and late meal these days is the 7 Mile House across the county line in Brisbane. They note, with a tinge of envy, the mini-boom taking place about a mile north on Bayshore in the Portola neighborhood.
Mae West and 49ers
To be clear, Little Hollywood proper wouldn’t figure into a commercial upswing; the business strip of the neighborhood is to the west, across bustling Bayshore, mainly Leland Avenue as it points toward the public library, Visitacion Valley Middle School, and McLaren Park. The new high-end chocolate maker and recreational pot dispensary are a good start.
Piccolo Pete’s no longer stays open on weekends. Candlestick Park and football Sundays are gone. On game days, 49er fans used to park in Little Hollywood, grab sandwiches and booze at Pete’s, and walk under the freeway to the ‘Stick. (They also would come back and piss in driveways before heading home, according to Morine.)
With drunk-ass Niner fans a memory and Pete’s hanging on, the old beating heart of Little Hollywood is, arguably, not a business but a house in the center of the enclave. It helps make sense of the place, and it might help explain the name too.
The address is 294 Tocoloma St. The house, built in 1933 and christened Casa Bahia Loma, looks like few others once you step inside. The Mission Revival style — wooden beams, thick white walls, Spanish roof tiles — and the wealth of artisan touches, from the bathtub tiles and the wrought-metal curtain rods to the built-in cabinet doors, give the house the feel of pre-World War II Southern California.
Others with the same beautiful bones, though not nearly as grand, are nearby and likely the source of the neighborhood’s name.
The baron-owner of then-new Lucky Lager, about a mile north on Bayshore, built the Bahia Loma for his German brewmaster, who quickly turned Lucky into California’s №2 beer. A U-Haul depot, visible from Highway 101, now sits on the former brewery site.
The house also comes furnished with legend. The basement rumpus room, which still sports a player piano with original music rolls, might have been a speakeasy. Mae West stayed at the Bahia Loma while she was filming Klondike Annie, or perhaps not. Not even the local historians have nailed it down, although it’s probably better that way.
Looking up past the magnificent palm tree in the front yard, at the veranda attached to the second-story guest bedroom, it’s easy to imagine West in lingerie enjoying a smoke and a Bloody Mary in the morning sunshine. Or in furs, as the evening fog rolls through.
After 60 years of housing a family that owned a moving company and junkyards along Third Street, Bahia Loma is for sale. The kitchen is from the 1930s. It still has an icebox and a pass-through from the alley for grocery deliveries. The wiring is from the ’30s too and needs a full upgrade. The neighborhood knows what’s going on, and hopes the house goes to someone who will love it as much as everyone else.
Saunders, who grew up in the neighborhood, has come back to sell the house. When she first started talking to the family a couple years ago, $800,000 seemed like a great target. It went on the market for nearly $1 million. Twelve offers came in this week, all well over the asking price. “Little Hollywood was one of the last hidden places” in the city, says Saunders. “But they found us.”
Not exactly NIMBY
It’s hard to imagine Mae West on the Bahia Loma veranda looking down on rapid-transit bus lanes. Muni floated the idea a few years ago for Blanken St., the main thoroughfare, only to be ferociously countered by the neighborhood. (The proposed bus line would connect the eventual Hunters Point and Candlestick developments to Balboa Park BART. Residents said the industrial street just to the south would be far more appropriate.)
Unlike opposition to bus rapid transit elsewhere in the city, this was not born of rank NIMBYism. Better connections to the rest of the city would be welcome. The T-line was supposed to do that. It replaced the old 15 Third bus line that shuttled riders downtown. Now the commute takes an hour or more on the T, residents say. Perhaps when the Schlage Lock site is brimming with a couple thousand people, Caltrain will see fit to schedule more than one train per hour to stop at the Bayshore station next door.
It’s hard to go full NIMBY when you’ve coexisted for decades alongside the local dump. “We’re friends with the garbage company,” says Epps. “It was just part of growing up here. No big deal.” Voters had a chance to loosen Recology’s monopoly on trash collection in 2012. Recology spent $1.5 million against the measure and saw it relegated, please excuse me, to the dustbin of history.
But residents remain wary on other fronts. The city’s car impound lot, cleared out of Pier 70, is now just over the county line in Daly City, which means a regular stream of tow trucks down Bayshore. More ominously, the neighborhood is also keeping an eye on reports that radioactive soil from Hunters Point might have been improperly dumped in the Brisbane landfill just south of Recology’s headquarters. They’ve been burned before. Environmental justice is in short supply in this corner of San Francisco.
Longtime residents of Little Hollywood also watched one of the city’s biggest housing disasters come and go in their lifetimes. Geneva Towers, billed as a luxury enclave as it was developed in the 1960s, turned into public housing in short order, then 30 years later became San Francisco’s Cabrini Green — imploded in seconds by out-of-town demolition rock stars.
But that wasn’t in Little Hollywood itself. Whether it’s today, tomorrow, or yesterday, it all seems to happen around the neighborhood.