Most car washes are just soap and water. Not the one in San Bruno.
“We’re trying to make it Disneyland caliber,” said Bobak Bakhtiari, proprietor of the Tanforan Shell car wash. “We’re not quite there yet.”
For $10, you drive into the car wash. The tunnel doors roll shut. Then the colored lights and space age music come on, along with the suds. Bahktiari calls it a virtual reality car wash. It’s not Disneyland, but it’s pretty exciting for San Bruno.
A car wash could be the least dangerous thing you can do during a pandemic, Bahktiari said. No mask or sanitizer required. No staying six feet away from anything. Just you, inside your car, in the dark.
The car need not be dirty. In fact, Bakhtiari said, a lot of people have been driving through with clean cars, especially on date night, when a few minutes of privacy in the dark is worth $10, maybe more.
Car washes, Bahktiari said, speak to the human experience. Nobody doesn’t like going through a car wash.
Bakhtiari inherited the car wash from his father 10 years ago and keeps pushing the envelope. He’s had lights and music for some time, but starting this month he upped the virtual reality trappings by hiring online artists to create each car wash sound-and-light show in real time. No two car washes are the same.
It’s something like the colored light display at the top of the Salesforce Tower, or a planetarium visit minus the planets. It’s also like a drive-in movie, with just as much smooching among the paying customers.
Even though he owns the place, Bakhtiari never cuts in the car wash line. The other evening he waited half an hour, like everyone else.
When his turn came, the blue Camry rolled into the tunnel. Seven projectors and nine loudspeakers came on. Swirls of colored lights filled the tunnel and swirls of soapsuds covered the windshield. Images of tropical fish swam by on the walls. Something that looked like a volcano erupted. There was a rainbow and a jellyfish. Music thumped and twanged. The suds blocked much of the show but they did get the car clean.
When it was over, the car inched down the exit lane past a giant dinosaur sculpture that had a likeness of Donald Trump in its jaws. That’s new, too. Watching the president get eaten is included in the $10.
“We’ve got something for everybody,” the car wash man said. “We trying to enhance the awe and wonder in the car wash experience. People need something fun to do right now that’s also safe. This is it.”
Walk this way: San Francisco will still be here long after the pandemic passes, and if you need proof, says a longtime Bay Area artist, just look up at the sides of the old buildings around town.
Hundreds of painted signs still remain, high up the brick walls. Eat Carnation mush, says one. Smoke Owl cigars or Zubelda cigarettes, say others.
Artist Kasey Smith calls them ghost signs. The products are mostly gone, along with the people who painted the signs and bought the products. But about 300 faded signs still remain. They hearken to the turn of the century — not the last one but the one before.
You can’t smoke an Owl cigar any more, and probably shouldn’t anyway, but maybe your great grandpa did. It’s all right there on the brick wall at 921 Post St.
The past is everywhere, said Smith. Eat at Ahren’s Bakery. Drink Acme beer. Drink Rainier beer, too.
Smith, who has mapped the signs and posted them on her website (www.sfghostsigns.com) leads popular downtown walking tours, pointing out the signs and telling their stories. Since the pandemic, the tours have gone online instead of on foot.
The other night, about 150 people signed up for the free online tour of Tenderloin ghost signs. Walking through the star-crossed Tenderloin, one of her favorite parts of town, can be less heartbreaking by computer, Smith said.
The Carnation mush sign just southwest of the Tenderloin, high on a wall at 1586 Market St., could be her favorite. It was hidden for decades until the demolition of a nearby building in 2012 revealed it. The sign says Carnation mush comes in three kinds, but it doesn’t say what they are.
Smith said she’s pretty sure one kind was polenta, the snazzy name that cornmeal mush goes by in 2020.
A lot of the signs, Smith said, were painted shortly after the 1906 earthquake, another calamity that San Francisco lived through and got past. Together, the signs offer as much of a hope for the future as a glimpse of the past.
“San Francisco has been through great tragedies before, and always comes out on top,” she said. “These signs speak to how resistant we are. Look up at them. They’ll tell you that the city can survive this.”
A chance to rebrand: When people start going to the airport again, said the head of all limousines in the U.S., they aren’t going to be going in limousines.
That’s because, by then, he hopes to be calling them something else.
“The word ‘limousine’ is a problem for us,” said Robert Alexander, president of the organization known (for the time being) as the National Limousine Association. “Not as much of a problem as the virus, but it’s still a problem.”
The association will get a new name if he has anything to say about it, which — being the president — he does. Maybe the term will be “car service,” as they call it back East, or “livery,” or “private driver transportation.”
The stigma of a long, black limousine that takes grieving widows to funerals and giddy high schoolers to proms is something that hurts all drivers of limousines, or whatever they are.
For the 2,000 members of the association, another big problem is persuading potential customers — during a pandemic or any other time — to pay two or three times as much to book a limousine, which these days is usually an SUV, instead of an Uber or taxi. Catching a Lyft from central San Francisco to the airport costs about $26, while a taxi costs about $39 and a limousine costs about $85.
Alexander said new rules for limousines call for free masks for all passengers, a thorough disinfecting of the vehicle after each ride and gloves for all drivers. Also sanitizer, lots of sanitizer.
But all the sanitizer in the world won’t get people moving again before they’re ready, Alexander conceded. Right now, about nine out of 10 airplanes aren’t going anyplace. And about nine out of 10 limousines, or whatever they are, are aren’t going anyplace, either.
“But we’ll be ready when this thing is over,” the limousine man said.
Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF
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July 23, 2020 at 06:00PM
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On the bright side: Car wash dates, virtual walking tours in SF and the death of ‘limousines’ - San Francisco Chronicle
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