San Francisco’s first Italian Individuals flocked to the Excelsior, not North Seaside

The first floor of the Italian-American Social Club is decorated with scarlet velvet wallpaper, dark wood paneling, and a jukebox in the corner. A US flag, an Italian flag and mostly black and white photos hang on the walls. Brass chandeliers with red dotted wall lights and carved decorations frame the long wooden rod. To one side is the restaurant’s dining room, which has a handful of tables with checkered tablecloths. The dining room is smaller than the bar.

“Every place is different,” says club manager Julie Clima, “except here”.

Clima and I were sitting in the dining room at 25 Russia Avenue at the Excelsior, which was empty. The bar was also empty. In the back hall of the building there was just one other employee setting up chairs for a weekend event.

She wasn’t expecting any restaurant guests that evening. It was a Wednesday after all. The restaurant started takeout in 2020 but it didn’t seem like a lot of people would benefit from it.

Though North Beach is known as San Francisco’s “Little Italy,” the Excelsior’s farms and ranches once attracted many Italians whose eyes glittered with the American dream around the turn of the century.

In the 1920s, many of these Italian-American men, mostly first or second generation immigrants, gathered in garages across the Excelsior to drink wine, eat cheese, and play a game of cards called Pedro. Then, in 1935, the Italian-American Social Club (IASC) was founded.

The IASC, like other Italian social clubs in the US, provided a place to relax and belong to the Excelsior’s Italian immigrant community. Italian men who paid a membership fee were able to use the IASC’s game room, ballroom and other facilities and attend exclusive dinners and events. The number of members was always limited to just over 200 and restricted only to men. Club members received and continue to receive a portion of the IASC building that has been paid off for decades.

“There used to be five, six, seven years on the waiting list,” said Paul Giusto, chairman of the IASC.

Clima grew up in her father’s restaurant, Joe’s Fish Grotto, at Mission and Cotter. She recalls dozens of Italian-owned companies that once adorned the stretch of Mission Street between Geneva and Silver, the main street of the Excelsior. The Royal Baking Company supplied fresh bread to local restaurants. Valente, Marini, Perata & Co. Funeral Home hosted dinner at the IASC. Bars like Cotter’s Corner, which was next to Joe’s Fish Grotto, opened at six in the morning to pour drinks for the garbage collectors after work.

“People waited an hour and a half for food,” says Clima, “it used to be a lot going on.”

Giusto is a local from Excelsior who eventually took over his father’s auto repair shop near Mission and Silver. “Everyone was Italian,” said Giusto of his childhood at the Excelsior in the 1950s. “All the boys in the neighborhood were part of the club.”

Giusto also remembers sleeping in the dining room as a kid because his whole family shared a house with one bathroom and two bedrooms.

In the 1960s when Clima was 8, her family left the Excelsior and her father began commuting from the peninsula to run the restaurant. Clima didn’t want to move too far from her parents when she was growing up, so she’s now commuting to work at the IASC.

Although Giusto recently returned to the Excelsior area, he also went away for 34 years, commuting from Sonoma six days a week to run the auto repair shop.

“We ended up there [Sonoma] because we could get a bigger house and it was right next to the schools, ”said Giusto. “Back then the schools in San Francisco were actually pretty tough.”

Clima and Giusto weren’t the only Italian Americans to leave the Excelsior. Although the area remains a hotspot for immigrants (around half of Excelsior’s residents are originally from other countries), most immigrants are not Italians. Today the neighborhood is mostly Asian and Latin American.

Giusto sees many reasons for the Italian-American exodus from the Excelsior, which he both witnessed and later joined.

“People made money back then … they were wealthy. And they moved to San Mateo, they moved to Millbrae for a little better weather. Because we have a lot of fog here. You only drive 5 miles and you’re in the sun … and you’ve moved to get a bigger home to accommodate your family. People had three or four children and had the money to buy another house. … It went well in the 50s and 60s. “

When I sat down with Clima, she listed one local store after another that was not Italian or that no longer existed. The bakery in the Royal Baking Company building is no longer Italian-owned. The funeral home Valente, Marini, Perata & Co. is being demolished to make room for affordable housing. Cotter’s Corner is now another bar called Rocks Den.

Clima’s father sold Joe’s Fish Grotto in 2006. Today it is a sushi restaurant, Amami Sushi Bistro. And Giusto closed his car shop in 2019. He rents the building’s parking lot to the cannabis shop across the street.

Today the IASC has about 180 members spread across the Bay Area, including Giusto’s three sons. Although non-Italian men can now become members, they cannot hold office and they do not have a share in the building. In practice, the IASC remains a club for Italian-American men, with a building in a neighborhood that has been all but abandoned by Italian Americans.

Founded in 1917, the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club in North Beach has more than 650 members and a nonprofit foundation that organizes community festivals, Italian classes, and events. This year the 100th annual Statuto Race of the North Beach Club takes place.

With so few club members still living at the Excelsior or even in town, Clima is planning most of the IASC’s events and is not packing the calendar. Some events are open to both members and the public. A crab feed that happened before the pandemic attracted around 300 people. A sausage and polenta night is planned for Friday, to which 20 answers have been given so far. Clima expects more after the club meets this week.

She rents the halls and ballroom, mainly to Quinceaneras and churches, to cover the operating costs of the IASC, and runs the restaurant, which is open to the public. Clima is not only the general manager of the club, but also the head chef of the restaurant.

At 6 p.m. two people came into the club and strolled up to the bar. Clima knew her two drinks orders by heart: Martinis, Ketel 1 and Smirnoff. The three started laughing and joking. I packed my things and stepped out into a soupy mist. I walked down quiet Mission Street and passed the Central Drug Store, one of the few remaining Italian stores in the area. A few blocks down where Joe’s Fish Grotto used to be, I found Amami Sushi Bistro. And I wondered what the Excelsior will be in another hundred years and what shadows will be left of today.

It’s Excelsior month at SFGATE. We’ll be delving deep into the neighborhood throughout September as part of a series that highlights a different corner of San Francisco each month this year.