North Beach was a true Italian colony — perhaps even more self-sufficient than New York’s Little Italy, and almost as isolated from the rest of The City as Chinatown.
Today North Beach is a peaceful, law-abiding neighborhood, its tranquility broken only by dance music emanating from the bars on Upper Grant, the brays of tech bros partying on roofs and the occasional howl from someone looking for the ghosts of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
In 1876, 20 grocery and liquor stores on Dupont Street offered long bunches of pasta, salamis, big wheels of cheese, bottles of Chianti and other Italian specialties. Numerous pasta factories and several accordion shops and Italian-language newspapers catered to residents. Fruit and vegetable peddlers made house calls, calling out their wares as they pushed their carts up the steep streets. It was a poor neighborhood.
For whatever reason, a large number of Italian youth became delinquents. By one estimate, by 1920 Italians comprised 60% of all the juvenile delinquents in San Francisco. “Everyone knew the horse’s limitations and everyone knew the driver would be carrying his pies on foot up Telegraph Hill in order to reach the stores at the top.
“Next followed a searching study of all the flavors, interspersed with little arguments about apple as opposed to cherry and peach versus the apricot. ‘How about blackberry?’ someone would suggest.“We decide on two of the apple and jump off the truck, racing up Varennes, down the back steps of Tut’s house and into the safety of his basement.”
The Union Street Gang was not exactly a precursor of the Crips, or even the Sharks or Jets from “West Side Story.” But as Semenza recalled, some years later, when its older, now law-abiding members were playing in a baseball game at San Quentin Prison, they heard someone shout out “Cocky!” No one knew their nicknames, so they all turned and saw Jakey, waving from the screened-off inmates’ section.
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