CRYSTAL PALACE MARKET
My grandparents shopped at the Crystal Palace Market in San Francisco, and my twin brother and I tagged along.
I can still smell it, after 56 years: The salami, the pork, the beef, the garlic, the spices, the sawdust, the flowers. Did I mention salami?
In this picture, the woman on the left reminds me of my grandmother shopping, and the man in the hat would be a very young version of my grandfather. It was just like this, except I was two feet shorter than the photographer.
The last time I was there was in 1957, when I was ten years old. My twin brother and I were going to have our First Communion the next day at The Most Holy Redeemer Church in the Castro, so we were given money and told to go get haircuts, go to a movie, and take the street car home. We enthusiastically found a barber shop on Market Street and had all of our hair cut off in the Butch fashion.
From there it was a block or two to the Fox Theater on Market (the photo is probably from the late 20's).
A science fiction 'B' movie (Tor Johnson's role confirms my rating) was showing, and besides my two brothers, there were perhaps twenty other patrons in this cavernous space.
This is a video of the demolition of the Fox Theater. It was such a waste. I came across this video on the same day I became aware that the House of Bahá'u'lláh in Baghdad had been destroyed. However nostalgic the one, an overwhelming loss the other.
It turns out that my grandparents were mortified and probably embarrassed at our radical appearance at our Communion. And if that wasn't enough, my mother told me in her last years how she, too, was mortified at our appearance, but always attributed it to her father's frugality. She had no idea it was just unsupervised kids having fun.
