Business was slow at the Tennessee Grill for a long time. But then the train came back.
“All of a sudden, now it’s everybody,” server Su Hlaing told The Standard on Monday, noting that the Parkside institution has been bustling since Saturday.
Hlaing credits the turnaround with Saturday’s reopening of the L Taraval Muni line, which runs in front of the eatery.
Taraval Street merchants throughout Parkside have described the L’s closure and accompanying five-year construction project as a nightmare. The project launched in September 2019. After that, the noise and chaos from construction drove away customers. The work itself broke windows, flooded storefronts, and took sinks out of service.
A frustrated worker in one Taraval Street business, who declined to give his name, still has a hard time seeing the value of the Muni project. “It seems like a big waste of money,” he said.
Fanning the fire of neighbors’ criticism is the fact that the easy-to-see improvements to the L train, including safer boarding islands and new tracks, are just a small part of what this $95 million endeavor was all about.
“The bulk of this project is invisible — it’s the underground utility upgrades,” said San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Director Jeffrey Tumlin.
San Francisco’s sewer and water infrastructure is aging; about 20% of the water pipes are a century old and vulnerable to breaks. During the years that jackhammers were pounding on Taraval Street, other San Franciscans felt the pain of aging infrastructure: Marina homes flooded with sewage, a massive sinkhole opened in the Union Street shopping district, and a civil grand jury concluded that the city’s wastewater system is woefully unprepared to deal with rising sea levels.
But the importance of upgrading infrastructure didn’t stop the outcry from Taraval Street merchants or stem lingering complaints from frustrated business owners on Van Ness Avenue, where the city completed a similar utility-and-transit-upgrade combo. That illustrates how hard it is for the city to get business owners to back long-term infrastructure improvements — especially unseen ones — while the constant stress of paying the bills never goes away.
The Taraval project’s five-year marathon timeline also drew criticism. But SFMTA decided on that schedule, splitting the project into sections, so the whole neighborhood wouldn’t be disrupted at once, according to Tumlin.
“An easier approach would have been to dig up all of the sewer line at once and replace the whole sewer line, and then replace the entire water line,” Tumlin said. “That would have been vastly more disruptive to the merchants.”
‘It feels like I’m in Europe’
There was a mingled sense of relief and excitement on Taraval Street when The Standard visited Monday, two days after the L train restarted service.
“I’m just glad [the train] is finally here,” said Romania Daza, who owns Tabita’s Café with her husband. The regular rumble is a welcome sound to Daza, who notes that with the upgraded tracks, the train no longer shakes her building as it passes.
“It feels like I’m in Europe, seeing the trains go by and hearing the bells,” Daza said.
In a positive sign for merchants hoping the train’s return will bring more customers to Parkside, downtown residents too were excited about the L’s return.
Tony Villareal broke into a run through a downtown Muni station after he heard the announcement that the L train was on its way. He didn’t want to miss his first chance to ride it in years.
After catching the train, Villareal, 63, a native San Franciscan, reminisced about the good old days when he used to take the L all the way to the beach as a teenager.
“It’s part of San Francisco’s history,” he said.
Update: SFMTA originally told The Standard that the L train stopped running in September 2019. After publication, the agency notified The Standard that September 2019 is when the project began, but the L train did not stop running until March 2020.