In Lockdown, a Neighborhood Opens Up

The residents of Bernal Heights, a dense little neighborhood built around a grassy hill in the south of San Francisco, have been under lockdown a long time — since March 17, to be exact, when the city became among the first in the United States to shut down.

With incomes and freedom lost, and boredom and anxiety setting in, the neighborhood turned inward. This has led to a flurry of new activity.

Neighbors in the upper-middle-class community have formed a small newspaper for children. Socially distanced street dance parties and cocktail hours have taken over, block by block, as the sun sets. Some people have created a new micro-social safety net, turning bookshelves into sidewalk food banks and garages into medical-supply distribution centers. Email lists and text chains for each block are buzzing. And as sheltering in place eases, some of the changes in Bernal Heights are turning permanent.

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Bernal Heights is a diverse middle-class community in San Francisco.It’s a sign of how Covid-19 has taken us back in time. Televisions had killed stoop culture. Those little stages for gossip, flirting and catching up went quiet as people retreated to the living room after work. Then phones killed the living room TV time and homes got quiet, too, each family member retreating to a bedroom or a far end of the sofa.

Now we have returned to the stoop.

For all the pain that the virus has caused the 25,000 or so who live in Bernal Heights, it has also brought them together as a community — a pattern that is playing out in neighborhoods around the country.

“The scale of life has changed,” said Francesca Russello Ammon, an associate professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. “Your world has shrunk. The neighborhood and the block become really important.”

t 4 a.m. sharp, the pop-up bakery gets going.

ImageCindy Richter and her daughter, Scout Kasak, picked up baked goods from The Bernal Bakery, a project started by Ryan Stagg and Daniella Banchero, from their home in Bernal Heights.In a one-bedroom apartment on Wright Street, Ryan Stagg, 27, turns on the oven to bake the sourdough country loaf he has prepped the night before. A little while later, he revs up the countertop toaster oven for sourdough cinnamon rolls and brown butter chocolate chip cookies — the specialty of his fiancée, Daniella Banchero.

When the virus hit, the couple were hitting their stride. Ms. Banchero was cooking at Piccino, a hip restaurant in the Dogpatch area of San Francisco that is teeming with start-ups. Mr. Stagg was just opening Pollara, a new Roman pizza place in Berkeley, Calif. He was laid off. She was furloughed.

“We were finally getting a little bit of success,” Mr. Stagg said.

They started baking bread for neighbors, dangling each loaf

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By: Nellie Bowles and Cayce Clifford
Title: In Lockdown, a Neighborhood Opens Up
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2020/05/30/technology/bernal-heights.html
Published Date: Sat, 30 May 2020 09:00:31 +0000

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