What will it take for historic S.F. bars like Specs’ to survive coronavirus? Crowdfunding

Elly Simmons is in the highly unusual position of being able to say that she started her coronavirus-related fundraiser because Taj Mahal told her to do it.

The famous blues musician is a longtime friend of Simmons’, who co-owns the 52-year-old bar Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Cafe, better known as Specs’, in San Francisco’s North Beach. Like many bar owners — like many business owners, period — Simmons has been struggling to figure out how to keep her bar alive since shelter-in-place orders forced it to close in March.

Her daughter Maralisa Simmons-Cook, who co-owns the bar with her, had started a GoFundMe campaign for $25,000, a fraction of what they actually needed to stay afloat. But Simmons couldn’t shake her discomfort with asking for money. Then they saw an encouraging sign: Their neighbor City Lights Bookstore raised more than $300,000 on GoFundMe in a single day.

“When Taj called I happened to be making matzo for Passover,” Simmons says. “He loves City Lights, and he’d always come to our bar afterward.” He understands the uniquely quirky charm of Specs’, named for its founder Richard “Specs” Simmons (Elly Simmons’ father): Its wall-to-wall exhibits of tchotchkes. Its informed-consent cards dispensed by bartenders (“Sir, the lady is not interested in your company”). Its insistence on being a place where you’re not on your phone or your laptop, but where you actually talk to other people.

Taj Mahal encouraged Simmons to launch a serious fundraiser, right away. “Taj said, ‘you need to do it for the place to survive.’”

And so Simmons and her daughter decided to grit their teeth and ask for more help. They increased the goal to $100,000, a figure closer to what they actually need.

Their situation is not unique. Countless Bay Area bars have launched fundraisers since shelter-in-place orders began, including many in North Beach like Vesuvio, Gino & Carlo and Comstock Saloon. Unlike restaurants, which may remain open for takeout and delivery, bars that don’t serve food are left without any options for revenue under the current guidelines. (One longtime North Beach bar and restaurant, Tosca Cafe, surprisingly reopened under new ownership during shelter in place, for takeout only.)

For all the bars asking for help right now, a lot is at stake: employment, community gathering spaces, independent business ownership. But there’s an additional urgency to the predicaments of old bars in North Beach like Vesuvio and Specs’, which was among the first in San Francisco to receive “legacy business” status. Their stretch of Columbus Avenue is one of the most distinctive parts of the city, transporting visitors to bygone eras of San Francisco’s past — the clandestine Barbary Coast, the romantic Beats. And yet, even before the coronavirus crisis, many of these landmark tourist destinations were already struggling.

“Not as many people stay out until 2 a.m. as (they) used to,” Simmons says.

Even after laying off their seven employees, who are unionized, since the crisis started, Simmons and Simmons-Cook still had to pay rent, taxes, licensing fees and employee health coverage, among other costs. According to their bookkeeper, Simmons says, $100,000 was a low estimate.

The co-owners considered taking out a bank loan or bringing on a silent partner, but ultimately decided against taking on more debt. “It would really be a huge shame to see the bar close, but it would be too risky to put ourselves in that financial position,” says Simmons-Cook.

So far, they’ve raised over $42,000 from more than 800 donors.

The current proliferation of GoFundMe campaigns for small businesses says something about the way that these business owners perceive the availability of government assistance. “The government response is so anemic,” says Janet Clyde, co-owner of the 72-year-old bar Vesuvio, which has a GoFundMe page to raise money for its employees’ living expenses. “It pits large, sophisticated entities against small, less sophisticated people,” she says, referring to the first-come, first-served nature of the Economic Injury Disaster Loans, among other problems. “It’s not serving us well.”

In fact, on Thursday the White House announced that its other economic program for small businesses during the crisis, the $350 billion Paycheck Protection Program, had run out of money.

Clyde began working at Vesuvio in 1979 — “I was the morning bartender, working 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.,” she says — and she and her family gradually became co-owners of the bar with the Fein family. They own their building, which puts them in a different financial position from renters like Simmons and Simmons-Cook. For now, Clyde says they’re not asking for any help with their own expenses, just for the employees’.

The business owners of North Beach share an uncommon camaraderie. “Vesuvio, the Beat Museum, Trieste — all of us are from the same era and we all share the same customers,” says Simmons-Cook, referring to the 64-year-old espresso bar Caffe Trieste. “We all need each other to survive.”

Specs met his wife, Sonia, while bartending at Vesuvio. A few years later, he opened his own bar across the street. (Specs, so named for the spectacles he wore, died in 2016.) The two bars look quite different — Vesuvio with its stained glass and mezzanine, Specs’ with its busy exhibit walls — but are alike in friendliness, and both feel like a time capsule to a different time. Vesuvio was frequented by poet Jack Kerouac; Specs’, which came around 20 years later, by recently deceased folk singer John Prine, according to Simmons. And, of course, Taj Mahal.

If social-distancing measures remain in place for much longer, will these bars and their neighbors survive? For now, it’s hard to know, says Clyde. “If we reopen, we can make it,” she says. “As long as we can reopen in some shape or form.”

It’s not just about selling drinks, Simmons says.

“Specs opened the bar because he had a really deep love of humanity,” she says. “What bars are really about is the people and the stories and connection.”