The Deli at Monterey and Edna

Parcel 3117-033

The San Francisco Assessor's records compress the building at the northwest corner of Monterey Boulevard and Edna Street into a few categorical facts: two stories, three units, 2,532 square feet on a 1,245-square-foot lot. Building class: "Flat & Store 4 Units or Less." Year built: 1947. Public property records confirm the parcel, the building class, the three units.

Flat and store. That building class contains a whole neighborhood logic in four syllables. Residential above, commercial below. Someone looked at empty lots at the corner of a neighborhood shopping street and built a structure designed to do two things at once: house people upstairs and sell to them downstairs. The year places the construction in the immediate postwar moment, when San Francisco's residential neighborhoods were filling in their last vacant parcels. This corner at Monterey and Edna had sat empty through the Depression and the war. In 1947, someone decided it was time.

Stand at the intersection now and look northwest. The building sits where Monterey Boulevard meets Edna Street, its ground-floor commercial space facing the corner, two stories of residential above. The lot is small, 1,245 square feet, and the building fills nearly all of it. Across Monterey, the boulevard continues east toward its junction with Circular Avenue; to the west, the commercial corridor stretches toward Ridgewood. This is the eastern edge of the shopping street, the point where the boulevard's commercial identity begins or ends, depending on which direction you are walking.

The DBI's permit system does not surface the original 1947 construction permit in its current digital records, a common gap for permits predating the agency's electronic tracking. The year-built date, however, appears consistently across multiple assessor-derived sources.

Seventy-Four Years of Deli

What occupied the ground-floor commercial space for the next seven decades was a delicatessen. The full human story of that operation, the successive owners who ran it, the immigrant families who built their daily lives around its counter, the rhythms of a neighborhood business that opened early and closed late, has been told with care and firsthand detail by Amy O'Hair in the Sunnyside History Project's piece titled "Immigrant Dreams and Long Hours: The Delicatessen at Monterey and Edna." O'Hair's account draws on interviews and personal recollections that no assessor's database could capture and no archival researcher should attempt to replicate secondhand.

What follows here builds beside O'Hair's work, not over it.

From the public record, the arc is legible. A building constructed in 1947 with a ground-floor commercial unit housed a continuously operating delicatessen for approximately seventy-four years. A 2008 property listing for 495-497 Monterey Boulevard described the building's layout as two one-bedroom flats above a ground-floor commercial space, noting that the commercial unit was then operating as "a liquor/convenience store with deli." That compound description captures something the assessor's categories cannot: the hybrid character that neighborhood corner stores develop over decades, layering functions as the market shifts while retaining the original identity in the name and the counter.

The deli operation ended around 2021. The SNA's May 2021 business inventory listed the address as Starr Spirits, a liquor store offering wines, craft beers, cocktails, and roasted coffee beans. The transition from deli to liquor store was not a demolition or a reconstruction. The building remained. The two-story flat-and-store that someone built on empty lots in 1947 continued to do what it was designed to do: put a commercial operation at street level on a neighborhood corner.

The Corner in 2026

The parcel is zoned RH-2, a residential designation, not the NC-1 neighborhood commercial classification that covers much of the boulevard's central stretch. Seventy-four years of deli operation on a residentially zoned corner. Zoning categories describe what a city's planners intended; they do not always describe what a neighborhood's residents built. Someone in 1947 looked at empty lots on a residential parcel at the edge of a commercial corridor and built a flat-and-store. The city's records classified the result. The neighborhood used it for three-quarters of a century.

As of mid-2026, the current status of the business at 499 Monterey Boulevard is uncertain in the public record. Some third-party sources indicate that Starr Spirits may have closed; others, including a specialty retailer listing and a venue database updated as recently as early 2025, continued to carry the name. What a person standing at the corner finds today is the building itself: two stories, narrow lot, ground-floor commercial space with its entrance facing the intersection where Monterey Boulevard meets Edna Street. The proportions have not changed since 1947. The relationship to the sidewalk has not changed. Whatever sign hangs above the door, the room behind it is the same room where a deli counter served the neighborhood for nearly three-quarters of a century.

The public record shows the building's bones: when it was built, how it was classified, what it contained. O'Hair's work shows the life those bones held. The two accounts need each other, and the reader who wants to understand this corner should read both.

The building at 495-499 Monterey Boulevard still stands at the corner of Monterey and Edna. Two stories, a commercial space at street level. Whatever opens there next will inherit a room that has been serving the neighborhood since 1947, in a building that was designed from the foundation up to do exactly that.