Scandia Bakery

Vivian and Marian Brown

Looking back at the 1970’s in San Francisco, the Scandia Bakery on Powell Street looms large for me. Crowded with small tables which threw its patrons into amenable groups, it served good coffee and an array of delectable pastries and cakes. Most weeks, if I went down town at all, I stopped in at the Scandia. My sisters and I used it as a meeting place, and on one magic occasion, I arrived to find my mother, who had not been in San Francisco in my memory, calmly sitting at one of the little tables.

A Swedish baker and his family owned the coffee shop. (Try as I might, I cannot find any reference to their name on the web.) While you sat drinking coffee, you might hear the pounding and rolling of dough on the balcony above you and smell the sweet and yeasty smells wafting out of the oven. The baker was grey-haired, older; his wife was behind the counter most of the time. Once I arrived to find their daughter, dark-haired and vivacious, holding court over a circle of admirers who filled up the tables in front. Dark-complected Eastern Europeans, they looked incredibly full of life to me.

I had a hard time choosing between my two favorite pastries, a cherry or a prune Danish, lightly glazed with sugar icing. The dough for Danish is similar to puff paste, rolled, folded and interleaved with butter. Making it is hard, heroic work. I didn’t try to make it myself more than once. I understand it comes from Austria, though it became wildly popular in Scandinavia. Wonderful Princess cakes of vanilla sponge, jam, and cream topped with a pale green marzipan frosting, and other cakes and puffs filled with pastry cream, as well as cookies were also served at Scandia.

The place was always full of exotic people. European tourists found it quickly. I loved listening to the many different languages at every crowded table. But there were also the regulars. I remember a well-dressed older woman, in hat and gloves, who I often saw there, or the concierge of a nearby hotel whom I talked to several times. I often saw Marian and Vivian Brown, the San Francisco twins, dressed to the nines and happily talking to people around them.

Tame as it sounds, I have a lot of wild associations with this bakery, partly because it was on Powell Street. The rows of sycamores at the base of the street cast light and shade on fair and foul alike, making it look like a European avenue. Those of us who lived in the city were not deceived, however! The street was just north of the Tenderloin, where many of the city’s most unfortunate lived. On Powell Street in the 1970’s you might walk past a derelict person lying face down in the street or see a wasted person who no longer cared that their rags barely covered them.

Because it is here that the cable car drivers push the cars onto a turntable, then turn them around and catch the cable under the street north, long lines of tourists waiting to go to Fishermans’ Wharf attract street musicians and entertainers. An indelible image for me was a thin, long-legged girl wearing woodsy material dancing in the center of a ruffian gypsy band. Tall dark men with long unkempt hair, brown faces and sinewy limbs, wearing ragged accretions of leather and cloth surrounded her. Wild, enchanted, gypsy fiddles made the music. The girl whirled as though possessed with a joy unequaled in the civilized city. They looked as though they had wandered out of a fairy tale.

Beside the bakery was a bookstore, a deep room infinitely filled with shelves and tables graced with books and stationery. I spent long hours there, sifting through the art books, hunting down new writers and decrying the fact that my favorites weren’t in print. The city changes constantly, but for my first years there a few blocks surrounding the Scandia Bakery was its cultural center.