‘Doom loop’? Perhaps. Or maybe, S.F., we’re looking at it wrong

It felt like that this winter for sure. I took a springtime walk to see for myself early in the week, when the sun came out. I saw a sign outside a Valencia Street store that said “Get Sprung.”

But downtown, many stores had signs that said “For Lease.”

And on Second Street, just off Market, the Alexander Book Co. had signs, too: “Closing Sale Save 25%.” That was particularly sad. The Alexander bookstore had 50,000 books for sale, three floors of books. All kinds. They always had a reliably broad selection of bargain books: last year’s almost bestseller, marked down. Also the usual new fiction and nonfiction, kids’ books, cookbooks, obscure volumes: a biography of Metternich, another of Wendell Willkie. There was also a large selection of African American books, not just the classics but books people read for pleasure.

I used to browse the Alexander store when I worked downtown regularly. I’d sneak out at lunchtime on a slow news day, or when the editor was distracted, lost in a world of books I meant to buy and sometimes did. If anybody asked, I said I was doing research.

Michael Stuppin, one of the store owners, told The Chronicle that foot traffic on Second Street is half of what it was. “The city’s changed,” he said.

The Alexander Book Co. has reached its last chapter after 32 years in business. But Paul’s sidewalk flower stand has been a fixture at Powell and Market streets for 108 years. It is a modest street flower stand, but millions of visitors have seen it right next to the cable car turntable. It was famous in its way, a small gem. “I think of this as the heartbeat of the city,” Harvey Nalbandian, the operator, told me years ago.

Paul’s flower stand used to be open every day of the year. Valentine’s Day and springtime were best in the flower business. Nalbandian once told me April was his favorite month. He died in 2014, and the stand stayed open for some years. Thousands of people walked by every day until the pandemic. Now the little sidewalk stand is closed and empty. Maybe it will reopen. I hope so.

But it’s springtime, after all. The year has barely begun. The city’s changed. Or maybe I was looking in the wrong places.

As it turned out I was an hour early for a lunch date I had in the Financial District, so I walked down Market Street. It’s cleaner than it was — and quieter, too. Many of the street businesses had vanished: the good ones, flower stands, little food joints, were gone. And so were most of the street beggars. So it was a mix.

I stopped at a sort of sidewalk street park where Sutter, Sansome and Market all run together, sat at a street table in the sun and read the newspaper. There were others sitting around as well — workers on a break, maybe. The city rolled past: Muni buses, the funky old streetcars, tourists with cameras. A fire truck. The city seemed quieter than I remember. But it was quite pleasant.

A couple of days later, I was a guest at the semiannual lunch of the Irish-Israeli-Italian Society in North Beach. It’s an old-line San Francisco institution, featuring three of San Francisco’s many tribes. Everybody that day seemed to know everybody else.

A priest and a rabbi offered prayers, but that day the group was honoring the city’s main religions: eating, drinking and football. Mark Schachern, who has run dozens of bars and restaurants, was one of the two honored. The other was Phil Ferrigno, the longtime football coach at Abraham Lincoln High School.