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There is a band: mandolin, guitar, bass, drum. For their opening number: the old Duke Ellington standard "Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me." A ragged-looking man comes in, short, bearded, selling wilted red roses.

Not much going on, really. A slow night, people just hanging out in North Beach, San Francisco.

Seeking a connection

North Beach has always existed in kind of a dream, part reality, part fantasy, a neighborhood of deep roots and no roots at all. Sometimes, people settle down and stay, and become San Franciscans. Others are just passing through.

But it's kind of a California dream for a lot of people: an 18-year-old kid in some dead-end West Virginia town, the smartest girl in her Iowa high school class, looking out the window at the snow at the end of a long winter. Maybe, they think, maybe it's time to go to California, to San Francisco, to that North Beach place and hang out, drink wine, smoke something, listen to jazz.

Maybe they were assigned "On the Road" in school and read how Jack Kerouac saw San Francisco after a long, crazy drive. "It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her 11 mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. 'There she blows!' Dean Moriarty yelled. 'Wow! Made it!' "

Kerouac and his pals settled, of course, in North Beach. They took over upper Grant. At the high noontide of the Beat Generation, men and women in black drifted up and down the streets and into the coffeehouses, drinking, smoking, reading poetry, arguing.

Jimmie Schein grew up in Pennsylvania, saw no future in it, and at the age of 17 was playing harmonica in a band at the Saloon on Grant. He was a musician, went on the road himself, but was always drawn back to San Francisco and North Beach.

Now he and his wife, Marti, own Schein & Schein, an antiquarian book and map shop on upper Grant. "We deal in history," he says.

Everything you needed

The history of North Beach is like the history of the city in the 20th century - change roiling over a city that doesn't like change. You can find lots of people in North Beach who will tell you that the neighborhood was better a generation ago.

Back then, it was Italian. "It was a great neighborhood," said Gigi Fiorucci, "It was an Italian neighborhood. I mean, you didn't have to speak English at all."

North Beach had daily newspapers in Italian, it had Italian bakeries, delicatessens, selling dozens of varieties of olive oil, shoe repair shops, tailor shops, hardware stores. It had everything you needed. They called it "The Little City."

Fiorucci runs a restaurant called Sotto Mare on Green Street. He started as a dishwasher at Caesar's on Bay Street and owned a baker's dozen San Francisco restaurants. "This is my first restaurant and my last," he says of the Sotto Mare.

Roots run deep

There are people like Stephen Scarpulla, the manager at Rose Pistola restaurant on Columbus Avenue. Like a lot of Italians born and raised in North Beach, his roots run very deep. His uncles run restaurants. He's related to the Aliotos, and lots of other North Beach families. How many cousins does he have? "More than a hundred," he said.

"You know," he says, "you care more about the community if you have a business and live here, too."

Ken Maley has lived in North Beach for 32 years and has seen it change. He remembers the old Italian men sitting in Washington Square and basking in the sun, gossiping in Italian, smoking those foul-smelling Toscano cigars. He remembers very different places: bars like the Capri, the Black Cat, the Paper Doll. All gone now.

He remembers the first time he walked into the U.S. Cafe on Columbus, a new kid in town, long hair, obviously not a San Francisco type. "Everybody looked up. I could see what they were thinking. Who is this guy?"

Maybe the old San Francisco cliche is true. The city was perfect the day you arrived here, and it has gone to hell every day since.