Yesterday’s post featuring pictures taken in Dolores Park 20 years ago was so nostalgic it inspired MM reader and cheese connoisseur Gordon Edgar to post some his old snapshots from the same era.
A week or two after Bush Sr. started the first Gulf War San Francisco had a huge protest. We watched the crowd grow outside our window (and let people in to use the bathroom since no one rented honey buckets for protests back then) and I finally took a picture when the crowd got huge. Then we rushed downstairs and joined the march.
Oh yeah, all the people in the park were there for the protest, not sunbathing. The park was empty by the time we got to City Hall.
Read on for more photos of the Park and to find out the name of the vegetarian Chinese restaurant that used to be in the Dolores Park Cafe spot.
That’s funny, because I lived on this corner a few years later, but in 1989, as a kid, I remember coming up to SF for this protest.
Actually Real Good Karma was a hippie vegetarian restaurant that I have fond memories of eating at as a kid. Check out this write-up on it in the ’85 issue of Vegetarian Times – http://bit.ly/bS3flL
It may have have been good in 1985, but it was worse than the worst collective-house-of-anarchists-stir-fry-of-rotten-dumpstered-veggies when I lived across the street from ’89-’91. My expectations were very low! Still, I was sad to see it, and the old-school mural, go. The people who worked there were really nice!
When we moved into our house very nearby this place, we got letters/surveys from the Health Department asking about how many rats we’d seen in the proceeding months (I think it was every six months). We asked around and it turns out that this restaurant was so infested with vermin that they had to do some kind of mass extermination and the Health Department was following up for like the next five years. It was a little disturbing.
A nice old DP shot leads today’s SFPL History Center’s post:
http://sfhcbasc.blogspot.com/2010/09/test-kitchen-happiness-is-full-lunch.html
They are truly a gold mine.