Janet Clyde and Vesuvio Café, Part 1

This episode is six years overdue.

That's because Storied: SF got started in a booth upstairs at one of our favorite spots in all The City: Vesuvio Café. In Part 1, we sit down in that same booth where it all began in 2017 to chat with Vesuvio co-owner Janet Clyde.

We begin with a talk about what a great place for bars San Francisco is. Janet brings up touristic spots we love, as I had joined my wife for Irish coffees at the Buena Vista just before our recording in North Beach.

Then Janet begins to lay out the history of Vesuvio. The location was originally an Italian bookstore called Cavalli Books, which moved first to the current City Lights spot, and then over to Stockton Street. Then, probably in the 1930s or early '40s, a woman known as Mrs. Mannetti opened Vesuvio as a restaurant. In 1948, Henry Lenoir bought the place from her and turned it into a bar.

Lenoir was a Swiss/French bon vivant. He ran it as Vesuvio through the end of the 40s and into the 50s. But by the early '60s, with the Korean War, the place changed as society changed, and Henri wasn’t feeling this generational shift at all. He sold the place to Ron Fein, who brought on Leo Riegler to run the bar.

Riegler had run Coffee Gallery on Grant, which served beer and wine only. He was an Austrian bon vivant, and he came to Vesuvio and overhauled the bar. Ron Fein hired Shawn O’Shaughnessy to give the place the look and feel we're all familiar with to this day.

O'Shaughnessy was inspired by Japanese art, aliens, and other worlds. Janet talks about the “I’m itching to get away from Portland, Oregon” sign, which hangs over the entrance to Vesuvio and which O'Shaughnessy derived from a postcard.

We then shift the conversation a little to talk about Vesuvio and the Beat Movement. The bookstore across the alley became City Lights in 1954 when Lawrence Ferlinghetti took over. And that brought writers into the bar. Before that, according to Janet, Vesuvio was a Bohemian hang, really a cross-section of San Francisco. People who worked at the nearby Pacific Exchange (later known as the Pacific Stock Exchange), insurance salespeople, advertisers ... Janet describes the place as “suits and ties having a really good time …”

When she arrived, in the late 1970s, the area was home to punk clubs, strip joints, bars, restaurants. Janet had hitchhiked from LA with the intention of landing in Seattle. She was born in Missouri but raised near Cape Canaveral, Florida. She left her family there and moved to LA but never really dug it much.

A trip north in 1978 changed her life forever.

Check back Thursday for Part 2 with Janet Clyde.

For more on the history of Vesuvio, read this article on Found SF.

This podcast was recorded at Vesuvio Café in North Beach in October 2023.

Photography by Jeff Hunt