Friends of the Doggie
Behold
Da Dog
by D.S. Black
Doggie
Diner paintings
by Anna Conti
A day to benifit the Dog's restoration
Doggie
Diner Photo Gallery
by James Stark
Ode
to the Doggie Diner Sign
by Denise Delaney/Patty O'Furniture
Behold Da Dog
At a follow-up meeting next Tuesday, February 29, supporters of the Dog hope the Supervisors get the message to let this sleepless Dog remain on its post with diner intact. The alternative, they dread, is that both will be removed and replaced either with a parking lot, or condos.
Again, I never got to Playland-at-the-Beach, but I see only too clearly the condos that replaced it. There's no doubt in my mind which I would prefer see on trips to the beach.
In January a tentative deal was brokered which would allow this Dog to remain till 2005...but the Dog's future is anything but assured. Supporters of the Dog will be watching the City's Supervisors to see how they respond to yet another threat to the material evidence of San Francisco's ever evanescent history. (Also at risk further up the coast is the Camera Obscura by the Cliff House.)
Not everyone's nostalgia is linked to the passion of carnivores for dead meat in a tacky grease-pit. Many who missed the Doggie Diner's sanguine offerings (the last one closed in 1986) see in the Dog the Ideal Animal: well-dressed, happy, eager to attend to soul needs as it once did one's flesh-eating appetite.
The sign of the Dog has become part of the genius loci of its Ocean Beach neighborhood. To separate the two would be to let that much more the City go-to the lower case dogs.
This Dog could be the best friend we'll ever have, so why mess with it? As Marcelle Clements has observed, in a book bearing this title, The Dog is Us. To turn our back on the Dog would be to spite ourselves, allowing another much-loved relic of our living past slip into the memory hole.
