Specs’ bar sees its legacy in North Beach

“Almost every day, people had been coming up to me, going, ‘What are you going to do?’” says Elly Simmons, daughter of Specs.

Friends and patrons knew that the lease was up in July, and a rent increase all but inevitable.

The bar (its full name is Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Cafe) has always had five-year leases — and San Francisco’s real estate climate has changed a lot in the last five years.

With the legacy business conferral, however, they signed not a five- but a 10-year lease, and while the rent did go up, Simmons laughs: “It could have been a lot worse.”

“The program is designed to highlight businesses that have been in San Francisco for 30 or more years, that have survived and weathered the ups and downs of our economy,” explains Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the city’s Office of Small Business, which oversees the legacy business registry.

Because the environment with commercial rents is becoming very challenging, there’s a need from the community to preserve businesses that have “helped define our neighborhoods for decades.”

Other approved businesses include Lone Star Saloon, the gay bar in SoMa; Precita Eyes, the arts organization famous for its Mission District murals; Cliff’s Variety in the Castro; and others.

The plan is to approve more, and the hope is that other cities where gentrification threatens small business will follow suit.

The landlord (who cannot be the business owner) gets $4.50 per square foot per year, offsetting the tenant’s rent, if they extend the lease to a 10-year term, and the business gets a grant of $500 per year per full-time employee.

Nestled in an alleyway between Tosca Cafe and Devil’s Acre, Specs’ is an institution — because of its longevity, because of its inexhaustible permanent collection of tchotchkes (some educational, some scatological) and mostly, I suspect, because it still provides vivid access to a North Beach whose existence flickers more faintly each year.

Elly Simmons gives an example of her milieu, and the population that has kept the bar in business for nearly 50 years: I’ve got this one new friend, a young poet character named Wolfgang, who lives in the Basque Hotel.

When you know mostly artists, people who live in SROs, they’re spending all their time in bars and cafes.

Specs’ is famous for its supply of business-card-size admonishments, which you are encouraged to employ in your rebuffing of unwanted suitors: “Madam, the gentleman prefers to sulk in silence” and “Sir, the lady is not interested in your company.”

Simmons describes her father as stubbornly averse to change, a quality that surely worked in their favor before the legacy business commission.

Ask a regular to point out some of this museum’s must-see pieces, or you might end up roaming the bar and staring at the walls all night.

A petrified soda bottle in a display case, with a handwritten index card detailing its backstory (shipwreck, Australia, 19th century).

Around 1:30 a.m. on one September morning, following a night of drinking in Fisherman’s Wharf, Specs and friends got on a boat in the San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles bound.

Seeking a lighthouse, her father swam for help through the freezing swells, holding his Coleman lantern just above the water, until miraculously he was noticed by the owner of Sausalito’s No-Name Bar, who must have shared a penchant for late-night sailing.

Whether the legacy business program’s symbolic value can buoy the bar forever remains to be seen.