Family Billiards has a feel that only a 60-year-old pool hall can.
Vintage movie posters line one wall, as neon signs advertising pool and beer buzz outside. Low lighting illuminates 17 pristine tables clothed in blue felt, most of them nine feet long. Many regulars are old-timers who started playing more pool in their retirement.
It’s been this way, more or less, since it opened in 1965. But now, San Francisco’s oldest pool hall is in danger of closing.
When The Standard visited on Thursday night, even the diehard league players hadn’t heard the news.
“What?” pool player Cameron Combs exclaimed. “This is my fucking home!”
Sporting a flat cap on his head and an SF tattoo on his neck, Combs said he had been at Family Billiards almost every day for the last three years. Combs, who collects disability insurance and does not work, said pool was the biggest thing in his life.
“Everything else in the city costs too much money,” he added.
Convent & Stuart Hall, a Sacred Heart Catholic school, bought the building that houses Family Billiards in July and plans to turn it into a multi-level gym that includes a swimming pool.
At a public meeting about the proposal earlier this month, school president Ann Marie Krejcarek confirmed that the project will force Family Billiards out, but added that it will be at least two years before construction starts.
Delbert Wong, 70 — who began frequenting Family Billiards in 1969 and acquired the place in 1987 — said at the meeting last weekend that he wasn’t sure if he’d try to find a new location for the pool hall.
“The problem is it would take so much money to reopen another one,” he explained, adding that he only found out his landlord was selling the building after the fact.
Krejcarek said the school wanted to “be a good partner” to Family Billiards, and could try to help the business relocate.
Rhys Hughes, a retired IT professional from Wales, first heard about Family Billiards while playing pool in a bar shortly after he moved to San Francisco in 2005. He’s been a regular ever since.
“Great tables, decent prices, good scene,” he said.
“And as you can see,” he added, gesturing to the league veterans and casual shooters playing on nearly every table on a recent weeknight, “plenty of people to play.”
Hughes was dismayed to hear about the sale.
“Not good,” he said. “Pool seems to be dying.”
But he wasn’t shocked. He’d been worried since the Bank of America next door closed. (The Dec. 7 meeting about the project took place in the vacant bank, where Convent & Stuart Hall staff set up folding chairs for attendees.)
Real estate agent Bert Benisch, who’s been coming to Family Billiards nearly every week for 20 years and helped refurbish the interior when it reopened in 2021, lamented its apparent demise.
“This is really the cornerstone,” he said. “It’ll leave a big hole in the San Francisco scene and the pool community.”
Benisch, who lives in the Richmond, added that there’s not much else to do in the neighborhood.
“You can only drink so much coffee,” he quipped.
San Francisco native and retired catering manager Julie Garner, 68, used to play at Billiard Palacade in the Mission District, but said she prefers the atmosphere at Family.
“I’m sad,” she said. “I formed a lot of relationships here. It’s a long-established place going under. But that’s the nature of change.”
