TELEGRAPH HILL’S STUDIO FALLOUT AND HAPPY HOUSE PSYCHEDELIC GENERAL STORE SOOTHE THE “WHAT NOW?” BLUES
by Romalyn Schmaltz
By the time you read this, it will have been about 100 days since the illegal coup of our federal government by people whose names we already hear too much and don’t bear repeating. As we navigate this new zeitgeist, the question I’m asked most these days is, “What now?” Having barely emerged from the depths of the pandemic, our optimism and a sense of being on the rebound were running ever higher until that coup. I find that the question “What now?” comes less from a place of despair and more from a sincere yearning to gather and train one’s energies on meaningful work whenever and wherever possible.
The good news is you can have a lot of fun and make a difference just by shopping in your favorite neighborhood.
As throughout the Bay Area, we neighbors of North Beach and Telegraph Hill are home to an embarrassment of artists and activists, and since January 20th, artful activities of resistance have only become an amplified ration of our daily bread. It follows that patronizing artists and businesses that reflect your values—“voting with your dollar”—is itself a revolutionary act, especially when popular shopping options like Amazon gild the billfolds of billionaires. Fortunately, we have a kaleidoscope of cafés, restaurants, bars, and retail that have proven themselves citadels of San Francisco’s hallmark individuality, diversity, and community in the face of this new hegemony of fear, division, and exclusion.
Two such outposts of revolutionary retail live within picketing distance from one another right here on Telegraph Hill. And although their names, history, and presentation are unique to their brand, both Winston Smith’s Studio Fallout and the freshly-minted Happy House Psychedelic General Store promise patrons punk points on every purchase—plus the free dopamine dose that comes with rejecting the oligarchy’s mass consumerism.
From Tomb to Fallout Shelter
Long ago deriving his sobriquet from Orwell’s protagonist in Nineteen Eighty-Four, collage artist Winston Smith was born and raised under a different name on an animal farm near Oklahoma City in the 1950s, but in his adolescence, he escaped to Italy, where, as he puts it, “The Uffizi was my high school.” There he immersed himself in art, culture, and counterculture in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
“After studying art and being a general ne’er-do-well, I came back from Italy to America and hitchhiked across the United States in ’76. I decided to stay once I landed in San Francisco, and I always hung out in North Beach because of my connection to Italy and especially Florence—you could walk down Columbus Avenue and hear the Tuscan dialect on every block! It was an instant extension of my Italian life!”
At the same time, punk was emerging on the west coast as a political and aesthetic rejection of conservative cold-war American institutions and norms. Before long, Winston found himself designing some of the most iconic punk rock album covers of the ’70s and ’80s—and is still doing so today in trusty paper, scissors, and glue (and not Photoshop!). Indeed, as a spirited teenage punk isolated in pre-internet South Dakota, I knew him through my teenage record collection that leaned liberally on, say, The Dead Kennedys—a San Francisco veteran group whose visual language has become synonymous with their music because of Winston’s work. Fans of Bay Area band Green Day and readers of The New Yorker or San Francisco’s own periodical music bible Maximum Rocknroll will likewise recognize his hand’s sleights. Eventually, Winston knew it was time for a clubhouse.
“Our friends had been running a ‘tomb’—a gallery called Five Points Arthouse just below Grant Avenue, so they called it ‘Grant’s Tomb’—and they asked me to do a show there in 2009 and then offered for us to take it over. In that first show, we broke even down to the penny to pay the rent and thus began the mad dash to always keep the lights on.” While Winston had been immersed in North Beach culture for decades, this move rooted the artist and his wife, collaborator, and Director of Operations Chick Lewis, in Telegraph Hill’s commercial corridor along Grant (well, just below it).
“We would have one-night events celebrating such things as the anniversary of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the hundredth anniversary of Dada, or hosting speakers including John J. Heartfield, grandson of the notorious 1930s German anti-Nazi collage artist. My artwork may be my life, but Heartfield was risking his life making art. So our location has always been a place for misfits to make art and has actually been registered with the City that whatever happens there has to be art-related—it’s a ‘Designated Art Zone!’”
A Collage of Countercultural Delights
The 1500-square-foot semi-subterranean space has since hosted myriad iterations of resistance culture, including a punk rock museum. It feels like it’s arrived now as Studio Fallout: a mixed-use space comprising an art gallery (including some of Winston’s permanent collection and archives); Out of Sight Records helmed by veteran vinyl wizard Dave Tutton; Beach House Vintage clothing and household oddities; Txutxo Perez’s Days of Fury screen printing; and Jason Chandler’s Horrible Comics—all under the shepherding of Chick, Winston, and Art Director Matthew Kaldi.
Their events roster is always engrossing and educational—in fact, in March, I attended their “Teacher’s Lounge” event as a longtime progressive educator myself and was moved to zeitgeist-feisty tears as teachers in imperiled programs shared their spirited stories of teaching while resisting. Like many of their events, Teacher’s Lounge was a night of interactive, multi-media shenanigans, with audience members creating and sharing art in real time. Planned and spontaneous music is often a feature of Studio Fallout programs. The room’s joy regularly cuts up any paralysis of fear and rearranges it in a collage of purposeful play, and you can’t leave the space without feeling inspired, engaged, and alive in the “What Now?”
Studio Fallout is located at 50-A Bannam Place just off Union Street and below Grant and is open Thursday-Sunday from 12-6:30 p.m. and by appointment. You can peruse their roster and book the space for your event or pop-up at studiofallout.com.
Fancies Forged in the Flames of the Pandemic
A short march up Union and down Grant will land you at a similarly-tuned instrument of resistance, this one a two-story playland flooded with light, cheer, and conviction. Just last year, Isabella Hill and Nikki Greene opened the Happy House Psychedelic General Store between our oldest operating record store, 101 Music, and Otherwise Brewing, the new brewery by artist Stellar Cassidy. Happy House—whose namesake is the song by post-punk artists Siouxsie and the Banshees—is exactly that: You can feel your grin rising as you shuffle off the world’s woes and dance into its orbit of curiosities that, as it turns out, are all locally sourced and made.
“Nikki and I have been friends for a long time, and she moved back from New York during the pandemic. We were sharing an art studio space together and were noticing that a lot of our friends were underemployed and suddenly had a lot of time to create exciting artwork and gifts, and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had a space to showcase all of this amazing work by friends?’”
And awesome it is in the truest sense of the word. One stands in awe of Isabella and Nikki’s knack for curating knickknacks and independent art, and as with Studio Fallout, their assortment includes locally designed and vintage clothing, household treasures, vinyl records, original artwork, and a mezzanine gallery and event space available for openings, pop-ups, and other community purposes. North Beach’s own Liza Minnelli doppelgänger, Isabella welcomes passers-by into her collective cabaret with wide, sincere smiles and hugs, creating an epidemic of infectious cheer that belies any “What Now?” angst. But hers isn’t the joy of the naïve—not unlike Minnelli’s Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Isabella is hip to the sociopolitical stakes of our day and insists that the only way for her to keep her house happy is to stand by her convictions, even as a retailer. A native San Franciscan, she exudes the impish insistence and enthusiasm I associate with North Beach artists and activists yet is new to knowing our neck of the woods. She’s a speedy study, though.
Native North Beach Spirit
“So I grew up in the Haight, and I never really hung out in North Beach until the later pandemic, where I was doing some work for [Grant Avenue vintage store] Vacation. I realized that yes, North Beach is a huge tourist location, but that that’s actually a great thing” and that the global travelers who make us a destination deserve to buy unique, meaningful souvenirs and gifts that come with human stories and keep revenue local. Along the way, Isabella has become very at home not only at Happy House but in her adopted neighborhood, and from my vantage, it’s as though she’s always been here. She waves wildly at what seem like old friends so often you’d think she were reading the Constitution in semaphore.
That’s led her to a swift investment in our neighborhood and even city politics. We fell to gushing about the thrill of North Beach being recently nominated as a National Historic District and chewed on the inanity of its being opposed by anyone—to the point it’s become a political matter. As she proudly placed a Historic District support sign in Happy House’s window, she shrugged, “Yeah, this should be a no-brainer.”
“Like many of the political things I’ve been involved in recently, there’s been a huge misinformation campaign by very moneyed opponents, and to me what they’re saying is just so very…transparent. It’s all about creating something emotional and somewhat hysterical of ‘us versus them’ when in reality, both things [historic preservation and new development] can co-exist.”
Those “political things” included, in February, a bid to be an Assembly District Delegate in the California Democratic Party Assembly District Election Meetings, a woefully little-known election with a big impact on the direction of the Party. Competing in a pool of 49 candidates, Isabella joined 14 others in the “Grassroots Rising” slate in opposition to billionaire-bankrolled interests and consolidated candidates. Only 1,138 total valid votes were cast in the obscured election with complicated voting rules, and Isabella missed winning a seat by only 18 votes.
“I got involved because, as Happy House, we are members of an organization called ‘Small Business Forward’ (SBF), which was created as a progressive advocacy group for small businesses in the City. Some business owners often skew very pro-cop and anti-homeless, for example, so SBF was created for those of us who don’t identify with those strategies. They push their members to be more active in community and politics, and they support us in these endeavors. It was super eye-opening. Before, I had a lot of passion but not as much action.”
Passion and action—that’s revolutionary retail. From the punk bunker to the sunlight-strewn general store for the non-generic, we here in North Beach and Telegraph Hill have options, and our choices cause ripples we can actually feel right at home, right now.
Happy House is located at 1412 Grant and is open Wednesday-Sunday from 12-8 p.m. You can contact Happy House via Instagram at @happyhousesf for programming, event, and pop-up opportunities.
