A Foggy Morning in the Inner Sunset

The Neighborhood the Fog Built

The Inner Sunset lives beneath a ceiling of fog for roughly half the year, and its residents have made peace with this in the way that people in Venice have made peace with water - not by fighting it but by building a life that assumes its presence. I walked the neighborhood on a Wednesday morning in July, when the fog was so thick that the tops of the streetlights on Irving Street dissolved into a white nothing and the air tasted of salt and eucalyptus and the cold, clean breath of the Pacific.

Irving Street between 9th and 19th Avenues is the neighborhood's commercial spine, and it has the character of a small town's main street - bakeries, hardware stores, a butcher, a fish market, all of it low-slung and local and deeply unconcerned with trends. I started at Arizmendi Bakery at 9th Avenue, a worker-owned cooperative where the daily pizza - a single variety, different each day, chosen democratically by the bakers - was mushroom and caramelized onion. The crust was sourdough, because this is San Francisco and all bread is sourdough by municipal ordinance (I am only slightly exaggerating). I ate a slice standing on the sidewalk, the fog beading on my jacket, watching the N-Judah streetcar rumble past on its way to the ocean.

I walked west along Irving, past Thanh Long, the Vietnamese restaurant that claims - credibly - to have invented the roasted crab with garlic noodles dish that has since been copied by every seafood restaurant in the city. Past the Irving Street branch of the San Francisco Public Library, a modest building with a disproportionately excellent graphic novel collection. Past a martial arts studio, a tea shop, a store that sells only brooms and brushes, which has been there for thirty years and shows no signs of closing, because people in the Sunset need brooms and appreciate specificity.

At 19th Avenue, I turned south and climbed toward Golden Gate Heights, where the streets tilt upward at angles that make your calves burn and your faith in urban planning waver. But the reward is the view - or rather, the views, because they change with every block. On a clear day, you can see the Marin Headlands, the Pacific, the Farallon Islands. On this day, I could see approximately forty feet in any direction, which gave the walk an intimate, almost secretive quality, as if the fog were showing me the neighborhood one house at a time.

I came back down to Irving and ended at San Tung, the Chinese restaurant famous for its dry-fried chicken wings, which are glazed in a sweet-spicy sauce and shatter under your teeth like something between a wing and a candy apple. The line was already forming at ten-thirty in the morning, which tells you everything about the wings and everything about this neighborhood - practical, patient, willing to wait for something genuinely good. The fog had not lifted. It would not lift for hours. Nobody seemed to mind.