Author and Artist
Cow Hollow
A fictional travelogue; three minute read.
“I love indie shops,” one woman proclaims as if she’s just discovered, after years of therapy, this profound insight. “Any time I can, I shop at locally-owned businesses. Jeff Bezos is a pig.”
“Really!” her table companion confirms. “I was just in Italy. McDonald’s are like a Medieval plague. My husband’s in investment banking. He told me there are 39,000 McDonald’s worldwide; 54 in Rome alone.” She pronounces ‘McDonald’s’ as if she is spitting a bug out of her mouth.
The two women are sipping cappuccinos at a coffee house in Cow Hollow aka the Marina District in San Francisco. I’m at a table next to theirs, eavesdropping. The three of us are waiting for Lucca delicatessen to open.
One woman is poured into maroon yoga pants and a jersey tight enough to make a boa constrictor envious. Matching fingernails and a purple hair scrunchy suggest her casual look is anything but. Her friend is wearing stylishly faded blue Levi’s and a starched white shirt. They’re in their late twenties.
In synchronous imitation of bobbleheads, they continue their virtue signaling unaware that the land underneath them was formed from debris and detritus dumped into S.F. Bay to create space for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
The fair celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal and the era’s global economic interdependence. To make economic history come alive for my high school students, every year I plan a field trip to the Palace of Fine Arts, the fairground’s legacy building.
Long before the Exposition, cows grazed on grasslands and drank from a lagoon. Eventually dairy farming gave way to urban development, but the Cow Hollow nickname stuck. In class, I ask, “Raise your hand if you think the cows mooed against the gentrification that ruined their bucolic existence?”
The women are walking billboards for globalization. Yoga pants stitched in China. Apple watch assembled in Thailand. Leather handbag crafted in Italy. Bodies fragranced with French perfume. Levi’s manufactured in Mexico, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka.
The women themselves are imports. Gentrifers. Human Big Macs.
Before they and their money arrived, I liked when the neighborhood was drowsy, laidback. A mom-and-pop bodega. A single screen movie house. One small pharmacy. The ‘original’ Original Joe’s restaurant. An indie bookstore. A dry cleaners.
Now it’s a teeming souq of reservations-only restaurants, fashionable boutiques, Pilates studios, over-priced wine bars and cupcake bakeries.
In the heart of it all, Lucca, opened in 1929, is the real deal. Imported Italian foods are shoved into a space no bigger than a tramway gondola traversing the Italian Alps.
Salamis hang from the ceiling. Wheels of cheese too heavy to lift are tilted upright in a cooler. Handmade breadsticks—gnarled like tree limbs—are stacked helter-skelter in a bin. A glass jar is crammed with chubby green kosher pickles. Silver sardines swim in virgin olive oil. Balsamic vinegar, fresh-carved turkey, bread rolls, pepperoncini, ravioli, potato salad, Cerignola olives.
Most of the morsels come to San Francisco via the Panama Canal on cargo ships steaming under the Golden Gate Bridge. Even the name Lucca is ‘imported’ from the Tuscan town of Lucca.
As Ms. Yoga Pants and her Levi's girlfriend fill their totebags, I wait in line to order a combo sandwich on focaccia and a container of coleslaw.
McLucca’s.
