While Downtown Flounders is thriving, this San Francisco neighborhood is thriving

The succulent-decorated park outside Hook Fish was filled on a recent Friday afternoon with customers enjoying a late lunch of $17 burritos with hot carrot sauce. Shoppers perused the shelves of Mollusk Surf Shop and enjoyed coffee in the newly renovated backyard of the Black Bird Bookstore. Others continued down Irving Street, littered with children’s scooters and discarded helmets, to walk along the shoreline.

It could have been Venice Beach, except for the fog that lingered just off shore. This is the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.

“I love it,” says Cathy Huang, 45, who moved to the neighborhood two years ago. “It’s very residential, but at the same time you have access to really great restaurants and bars. It’s a very walkable, very friendly neighborhood.”

On the western edge of the city, between Golden Gate Park and the San Francisco Zoo, the Outer Sunset was thriving as downtown San Francisco struggled to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.

The city’s business center is grappling with some seemingly intractable problems: the economic fallout from the disappearance of tech workers, open-air drug trafficking and a large homeless population. But the Outer Sunset, which stretches along the Pacific Ocean and is one of the foggy parts of the city, feels far away from the hustle and bustle of city life. On Irving Street, a main artery near about 50,000 people, Marge Heard sits by the window of the Last Straw, her jewelry store, overseeing the goings-on in the neighborhood since 1975.

“It was almost nothing,” she said of what the neighborhood was like when she first moved here 48 years ago. “It just turned out really nice.”

Young families have been drawn to the Outer Sunset because remote work has negated the need for long commutes, says Kathryn Grantham, owner of Black Bird Bookstore on Irving Street. The neighborhood’s success reflects the way cities have evolved during the pandemic, with people spending more time enjoying themselves and spending money in their communities. In March 2021, The San Francisco Chronicle published an article titled “When San Francisco is dying, they forgot to tell the Outer Sunset.”

“It has the energy of people interested in investing in the neighborhood and building a community here,” Grantham said. “Being part of the network of entrepreneurs running small businesses here is exciting.”

One such small business is Hook Fish, a local fish shop and restaurant that opened in 2017 after operating as a pop-up business since 2014. Christian Morabito, one of the founders, said he was drawn to the Outer Sunset because of its relatively low rents and the fact that it was an outpost for artists, musicians, surfers and other outdoor enthusiasts—people with whom Morabito got along and could live, but could also work.

The result was a storefront that captured the vibe of the neighborhood—local artist Jay Nelson helped design the store and also sourced the interior wall panels from reclaimed redwood lumber that had been used as groyne material during the construction of the Bay Bridge.

“We just tried to give everything a story and keep it a little bit special and unique,” Morabito said. “I feel like there’s definitely a big focus on that in the Outer Sunset.”

Another major focus of the neighborhood is the new car-free Great Highway, which runs along Ocean Beach. Closed to cars during the pandemic, the Great Highway is now permanently open to pedestrians only on weekends, after San Francisco residents voted by a wide margin against allowing cars back on the road. That has made the neighborhood even more walkable and attracted people from other parts of the city.

“There are lots of nice cafes, restaurants and shops,” says Matt Jagedao, 23, who lives downtown and took a walk along the Great Highway with a colleague. “SoMa doesn’t really have that. It is a bit more relaxed, which I really like.”

Claire Fahy is an editorial assistant for The New York Times covering breaking news and general assignment stories. She grew up in San Francisco.

If you read one story, let it be this one

Liberal prosecutors are looking at police killings again, but so far they have charged few officers.

Where we travel

Today’s tip comes from Clarice Stasz, who lives in Petaluma:

“With summer just around the corner, I’m looking forward to a concert in the Green Music Center, located on the campus of Sonoma State University. Inspired by Tanglewood, the rear wall of the hall can be opened to allow visitors to sit on the sloping lawn while picnicking, drinking local wines and even dancing. A large screen provides a close-up view of the performers on stage. Those who prefer less nature can sit inside and enjoy the exceptional acoustics.

The programming appeals to the diversity of the North Bay. This season includes Buddy Guy, Nickel Creek and Los Huracanes del Norte. I’m excited about music from all nine Star Wars movies played by the resident Santa Rosa Symphony. Encouraged to come dressed in character, I expect to join a bevy of Princess Leias with cinnamon bun hair additions. The regular season features a similar variety, from singer-songwriters to Renée Fleming and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Since the opening of the Green Center, I no longer go to The City (SF) for musical excellence. There’s culture in the ‘burbs!’

Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We will share more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.

Tell us

We are almost half way through 2023! What are the best things that have happened to you this year so far? What have your victories been? Or your unexpected joys, big or small?

Let me know at CAToday@nytimes.com. Please include your full name and the city where you live.

And before you go, good news

What’s hiding in your Notes app?

My colleagues recently asked readers to share the chaotic, beautiful mess in the notebooks on their iPhones, inspired by a TikTok trend in which users share their Notes app screenshots to reveal more quirky, less shielded versions of themselves than what they would normally post on Twitter or Instagram.

I’ll let my colleague Madeline Malone Kircher tell you what we learned:

Notes is mostly an unstructured brain dump, a destination for the random thoughts we discharge while doing something else.

A reader named Hillary shared a list of nonsensical words overheard at a conference, including “premeditation,” “planned,” and “apply.” In his Notes app, Mark wrote a sentence to illustrate the meaning of the word “fugacious” (adj. tends to disappear).: “I had a fleeting glance at that bird before it dove into a thick undergrowth, never to be seen by me again.”

Even the most mundane things in Notes can be a kind of time capsule. One of the most touching comments we got was from Janet, who sent her play-by-play for Thanksgiving in 2020. She had tomato bisque and a salad with a pepper jelly vinaigrette (yum!) for 5:30 cocktails and a family Zoom. The big turkey dinner, which was only for two people, took days to prepare: she made the pie crusts on Tuesday, the bisque on Wednesday, and the stuffing on Thursday.

Barbara found a note from six years ago titled “REMEMBER.” The items listed were “Whole Order 40, Canister 6402” and “Be Happy, Be Kind, Be Grateful.” She said she had no idea why she wrote the first two. But at least the latter isn’t as bad as we all try to remember.

Thank you for reading. We’ll be back on Monday.

PS Here it is today’s mini crossword.

Soumya Karlamangla, Briana Scalia, Maia Coleman and Bernard Mokam contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at CAtoday@nytimes.com.

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