by Sebastian on March 25, 2024 (BeyondChron.org)
Market Between Sixth And Seventh Streets
My friend had been asking me for months to have lunch with him at Tú Lan restaurant in the heart of the City’s troubled 6th and Market Streets.
I had been able to make excuses and got away with not having lunch at the tastiest and cheapest Vietnamese restaurant on the filthiest street in the City.
I always lose my appetite after seeing and smelling human waste on Market Street on my way to the restaurant.
Tú Lan Restaurant, 8 6th Street
Herb Caen wrote in his SF Chronicle column published on November 15, 1985, about Julia Child dining at the restaurant,” Julia Child at Tu Lan on Sleazy Sixth, a place with a great Vietnamese chow. She contended herself with spring rolls, shish kebabs with rice noodles, lemon beef salad, fried fish and Tsingtao beer.”
Last week, I finally ran out of excuses and agreed to meet my friend for lunch at Tú Lan.
Julia Child Ate at Tú Lan
It had been a few years since I had been to Tú Lan.
I used to have lunch there frequently with my friend, GraceAnn Walden who wrote for the SF Chronicle.
I gave her “deep dish” (restaurant information) for her column, Inside Scoop.
Back then, there were more restaurant openings than closings in the City to write about.
Ironically, nowadays, I can’t keep up with giving “deep dish” to the media about retail closings in the City.
I wish those stores were organized together to announce at the same time that they were closing their stores so that we didn’t have to read about it every week.
In March 2023, I walked from the Financial District to Mid-Market to test the pulse of downtown San Francisco.
At that time, I felt that the Financial District was already in a coma but I still felt pulses in Mid-Market.
Shortly after my walk, several retail stores along Market Street including Nordstrom in Westfield Mall announced their closures.
Like the domino effect, there were many more retail closures in Mid-Market and even spread to Union Square.
SF Chronicle shows the map of every major retail closure this year.
The City invites universities to open a campus downtown to fill vacancies but it fails to keep the area around its existing campus, UC Law SF clean and safe.
Market and 7th Streets
To lure businesses and people back to downtown, the City must first clean up its streets and change the image of “Downtown Is For Drug Users.”
