This is the second installment of Edificial, a column by Joel Rosenblatt about the buildings of San Francisco and the people who live and work in them.
Location: 4538-4540 Irving Street
Neighborhood: Outer Sunset
Year Built: 1900 (approximately)
Occupant: Marjorie Heard; The Last Straw
Architectural Style: Single story beach cottage
Unusual Feature: Its age, and its longtime tenant
Eventually, finally, it was a voice in Marjorie Heard’s head, growing in urgency and volume, that was The Last Straw.
Heard, who goes by Marge, is the creator of the store by that name on Irving Street, in the outer Sunset District, between 46th and 47th Avenues. On a recent Sunday morning, Marge, who has white shoulder-length hair and wire-rimmed glasses, looked up from weeding her garden to invite a nosy reporter into her 902-square-foot home, which sits behind the shop she ran for many years.
At 89, some of her memories of the building’s history were fuzzy. Others had altogether faded. But that didn’t get in the way of her gracious attempt to reconstruct the story of The Last Straw, named for the woven straw baskets Marge used to sell in the shop, along with jewelry, candles, a line of French soaps, and gift cards. Recently, her longtime friend, Eva Woo Slavitt, took over the shop and revamped it with a focus on local artisans.
The property is located one block south of Golden Gate Park and just two and one-half blocks east of the Pacific Ocean, in one of the few neighborhoods that make San Francisco feel like a beach town. As Marge reminisced, surfers in wetsuits strolled by carrying their boards in the golden light. Next door, the line for Hook Fish already stretched halfway up the block.
The Last Straw has been open at least four decades, far longer than any of the other shops on the block, which include the Mollusk Surf Shop and Black Bird Bookstore and Cafe.
“The store always paid my way,” Marge said. “I don’t know why. I was lucky, I think. I had great customers. I don’t know why it worked.”
Remarkably, Marge’s home, and the store, too, are many decades older than The Last Straw. According to records at the San Francisco Planning Department, the home Marge lives in was built in or around 1900. The exact date is a best guess, said Woody LaBounty, President and Chief Executive Officer of San Francisco Heritage, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the city’s architecture and culture. Many of San Francisco’s planning records were burned in the 1906 earthquake and fire, so during the rebuild city officials filled in any blanks with a uniform 1900 construction date, LaBounty said.
Marge’s home is a single story, country-style structure, with a “hipped” roof, meaning it has four low-slanted sides that meet at a central point, LaBounty said. It was likely a beach cottage, someone’s primary residence — perhaps part of the bohemian artistic community that existed in the area from about 1890 until the devastation in 1906, LaBounty explained.
There would have been no electricity, sewage, gas, or running water. The only transit was a steam engine line that dropped passengers off at Stanyan and Haight streets. (The line was electrified in 1898). The scattering of bungalows relied on outhouses and water from wells, holding tanks or a visiting water wagon. Without city services, they were susceptible to septic problems and even fires, according to LaBounty.
“It was pioneer life,” he said.
Construction in the Outer Sunset gathered steam after San Francisco’s core was burned out during the earthquake, LaBounty said. Even so, the area remained largely sand dunes into the Second World War.
Marge doesn’t recall exact dates, but says before she called the little house home, she lived in a nearby apartment with her husband, Trevor. She commuted downtown, where for years she worked at various banks, eventually as a teller. Never interested in classes the banks offered, and generally indifferent to money, she liked the customers but little else about the job.
Never a strong speller, Marje recalled a day when her boss approached her with a letter she had written to a customer with numerous misspelled words circled, by the customer, in bright red. He told her to never send another customer letter without his approval. It was around this time that a nagging voice in her head spoke up.
“You do not belong here,” it said, according to Marge. “It’s not good for you, it’s not good for them.”
She recalled the story with a pained expression, as if she was reliving the experience for the first time so many years later. “Oh, I’ve got to listen,” she said she told herself. “It’s so loud this time.”
Shortly afterwards, as she was out one morning buying a newspaper for Trevor, she noticed a store with paintings inside. The gallery owner told her he was giving up on his business, and that nothing would ever sell at the location. Marge ignored his dire warnings.
“I looked at this little place and said, ‘I think I can open a shop here,’” she said. “I knew it was the right place when I saw it.”
The owner of the building agreed to rent it to her. Trevor, who worked as a metalworker at the time, was so handy that Marge thought of him as an artist — he could make the neatest things from small scraps, she said. He rehabilitated the store front and soon enough The Last Straw was born.
“He made the window look nice, and that’s the end of the story,” Marje said. “I had a nice shop all these years.”
That’s not quite the end of the story; she and Trevor got divorced not long afterwards, forcing her to move out of their apartment and into the store. Holding her hands about two feet apart, she described sleeping on a bed that width because the shop was so tight. When The Last Straw began to produce reliable income, she rented the home behind it, and eventually bought the property, which includes both structures.
“I knew that everything would be ok,” Marge said. “I don’t know how I knew that, it was strange.”
About 50 years ago, the property was sold to the family of its current owner, Eva Woo Slavitt. Marge now pays a nominal rent, Woo Slavitt told Gazetteer, adding that the family, along with a group of friends and neighbors, help Marge with groceries and laundry.
Woo Slavitt recalls hanging out with Marge at The Last Straw as far back as 1976, when she was 12-years-old.
“She was like my Zen Mama,” Woo Slavitt said. “We have found solace in that shop with her presence for all these years, and we continue to uphold it.” Marge is beloved elsewhere in the neighborhood, too; she told this reporter she eats free at Hook Fish, which Woo Slavitt’s family used to own and operate as Chinese restaurant Great Wall.
Last year, when Marge had finally had enough of The Last Straw, Woo Slavitt took it over, reinventing the store as a gallery selling art and jewelry made by local artists, along with what she calls “vintage treasures.”
As I said goodbye to Marge, she was puzzled by who could possibly be interested in her story. I promised to deliver a hard copy, because she’s not online.“Don’t take too long,” she said. “I won’t be around much longer.”
