My Excelsior is a series of interviews with a diverse group of people in the Excelsior. Learn a piece of the Excelsior history through those who know the neighborhood in different ways.
This interview has been edited for readability and flow.
The Italian American Social Club, at 25 Russia Ave. near Mission Street, has only been accepting women as members for less than a year. But women have been running the joint for a lot longer.
Julie Clima, 66, has been managing the club (and tending bar, and working in the kitchen) since 2005 — the first woman ever to hold the role.
She was no stranger to the restaurant business. Her grandfather, a merchant fisherman, opened Joe’s Fish Grotto in 1946, just up the street at 4435 Mission St. near Avalon Avenue, and her family ran the place until her dad sold it in 2006.
Leila Moylett, 68, joined as bartender and server in 2009, right after a kitchen fire closed the Granada Cafe, another Italian-American bar and restaurant, where Moylett had worked for three decades.
Jay Pham, owner of the Recovery Room, describes Moylett as the“mayor of the Excelsior.” She lives close to her constituents — just five blocks from the club, and a couple of blocks from the street where she was born and raised.
Those who love the Excelsior love to brag about how little the neighborhood has changed compared to other parts of San Francisco. Clima and Moylett tell a different story — they’re still here, sure, but they’ve seen the neighborhood change around them — and, in a few cases, helped it along.
Mission Local: My understanding is that there used to be a big Italian community here in Excelsior.
Julie Clima: It was all Italian in 1946. Italian and Irish, which is what we are.
I mean, I’m Italian, she’s (gesturing toward Leila Moylett) Italian and Irish.
ML: How do you think that changed?
LM: People just moved. And they got older. The kids want to take their kids down the Peninsula and raise them. They sell their homes.
But we’re [the Italian American Social Club] open to all nationalities.
JC: Yeah, you don’t have to be full Italian to be a member. And then also in 2025, we welcomed women. I think we got about 30 women that have joined within the last year.
It was an all men’s club. Most of the Italian clubs are all men’s clubs.
ML: That’s interesting. I mean, it is women-operated — the two of you.
JC: They never had a woman manager until I came. And here, a lot of times I rely on Leila to help me out with things.
ML: Was it because the most recent manager — the one before you — he was more open-minded? How did that change happen?
LM: Well … he got let go. The world has changed.
ML: Is there more you can share about how that change happened in 2025?
JC: Years ago when they started the club, men would join, their sons would join, their grandsons would join. They used to have a waiting list, years ago. All those generations aren’t in the neighborhood anymore. They’ve moved on. So to keep the club, and to expand, they opened it to women.
ML: Do you still have a waitlist?
JC: No.
ML: How does membership work?
JC: When you come to events, like dinner dances or the meeting night twice a month, the first and the third Tuesday, members get a meal for like $15 or $10. They have a big meal where they bring guests on the second Tuesday. We get like 120, 130 people, and the members pay less than the guests pay.
Our dues are very cheap here. It’s only $10 a month, compared to other clubs that might be $500 a year. After you’re a member for 25 years, you don’t have to pay dues anymore.
It was a privilege to be a member. You had to be 100 percent Italian. It’s changed a lot over the years. And they only allowed 200 members.
It was prestigious to them. Even now, the ones that are still members, they like to say, “oh, I’m a member of this Italian club.” When they pass away, it’s in their obituary that they were a member of this club, a member of that club. And it’s more of an old-school thing.
ML: How many members do you have right now?
JC: Maybe a little over 200.
ML: Are a lot of the members right now not Italian?
JC: There’s probably more Italian than not. It’s probably about 70-30.
ML: So where did women go and hang out if it’s men only?
LM: They could come in here. They just couldn’t join the club at all. So they can come to different functions that were going on here.
They used to have what they call a “guys and dolls” event, meaning the members and their wives. Things were weird way back then. When it first started, I was about 17 years old and it probably ended about six years ago. So they would come once a month for that. It consists of a dinner once a month, every fourth Wednesday of the month.
JC: Years ago, they would have a lot of dinner dances. And the women would volunteer and set the dances up and decorate and do all that part of it. It’s a different type of women then, too. They weren’t independent like they are now.
ML: And how long ago would that be?
JC: Gosh, probably at least 50 years ago.
As the years go on, I don’t think they cared. They weren’t supposed to be here, so I think they were glad their husbands were getting out of the house for the night.
ML: What were the meetings about? What do they actually do as members? It seems so secretive.
LM: They’re supposed to have meetings about how they should have some more functions, how they should do something in here. Say, if your lights need to be changed, they meet about something like that. Any upgrades that you want to do, they meet on that.
They have a board. So they have a regular meeting the first of the month, and then the board meetings right after that.
I don’t know what they really meet on, because nothing has changed at all.
Years ago when I was little … I remember seeing it because I don’t live far from here. I was really young then. Every Friday night, they’d have a dinner dance. They would dress up so nicely. You would see them leaving their homes around where I lived.
And you would see these older couples. And then as we got older, we figured out, oh, they’re coming down here and they would have a dinner dance every Friday night. You couldn’t even see that happening now, right? Wouldn’t it be nice if they still had that?
They were so dressed up. They used to do a New Year’s Eve party here. Everybody would dress up. This is before my time. I just heard about it. And at midnight, they would serve breakfast to everybody who was here at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
ML: How old were you when you remember seeing those people?
LM: I was probably in my teens. You know how you vaguely remember things? Some things stick out in your life. And seeing these older people come in here, it stuck out. They were so dressed up. People don’t even dress up like they used to anymore.
ML: Were there other Italian American community elsewhere in the city like the Excelsior?
JC: North Beach. The Excelsior was a big Italian — and Irish — but a big Italian community. And then in North Beach, I would say that was the biggest two in San Francisco.
LM: South city has a little bit of Italian. I remember growing up, my grandfather knew some Italians down there in South City.
ML: Are the North Beach Italians different from Excelsior Italians?
JC: There’s a difference. Here, to me, it’s more blue-collar members. And there, they have a little more hoity-toity, a little more richer members. I mean, some of these members have money, they just don’t like to part with it. In that club, their members are willing to donate a lot of money.
ML: Is the North Beach club still running?
JC: Yes.
ML: Are they men only?
JC: They still are.
They don’t have a woman’s auxiliary. Women can’t join. But, like, my aunt, after my uncle passed, she still donates money to the golf tournament in my uncle’s name every year.
ML: Is it a generational wealth kind of situation? What kind of jobs do they usually hold?
JC: A lot of people that own businesses. There’s a person I know who’s a member there and his four sons are members there, and they own wineries and properties.
If you go and look at some of the members here, they have properties around the city. They have money. They just don’t want to part with their money.
ML: I was also wondering, growing up, what’s it like to be Italian in San Francisco. Are there any cultural celebrations? What was the community like?
JC: It was just being close-knit. Being Italian, you’d always have Sunday dinners with family and stuff.
LM: It wasn’t racist back then. Everybody knows everybody. Everybody got along like it is now. That’s why I’m not racist. I wasn’t raised racist.
ML: Growing up, what was your favorite place to go, to eat and hang out?
LM: I’ve worked in a lot of places, and hung out in them.
Now, there are three places I go — The Recovery Room, Rock’s Den and The Halfway Club. I don’t come here because I work here. The regulars go down there too. We support each other in the neighborhood.
If we have a busy Friday night, even though the hours are nine, we could’ve been here till midnight or 11. But a lot of times we’re out of here by 10, and they’re open till like probably 1 or 2 in the morning. The regulars go down there too. We support each other in the neighborhood.
ML: If you were to show people around the neighborhood, where would you take them?
LM: Calabria Brothers — the deli. That’s a good one. The owner is a local man. He’s a member of this club. Any sandwich, they’re good.
JC: Their Dutch crunch with turkey, mayonnaise, pesto, with rosemary ham and the Havarti cheese.
LM: Definitely here, right? But if I’m off, I would take them down around the corner to the Recovery Room.
And then the Korner Store, the Korean restaurant. Although I don’t know what happened. I loved going there. And now she’s not open. She says we’re closed for a private event. [Note: The Korner Store operated as a restaurant until a few months ago, but is currently only open for private events].
And now the sushi place just opened up again at your place [gestures to Clima].
JC: That’s where our restaurant [Joe’s Fish Grotto] used to be. Across from the public library. Now it’s a sushi place. And next to the library was a big supermarket. And then that store turned into a batting cage. I used to go in there and bat because I played softball then.
ML: Did you eat at your father’s restaurant a lot?
JC: Well, I was working there all the time, so yes. I used to have the abalone. They used to bread it — pound it really well, and you dip it in the egg, and some light breading. And then you just put lemon butter on it.
ML: Why did your family’s restaurant close?
JC: Because they were retiring. And they owned the restaurant and the building. So that was their retirement money. They sold the building and the restaurant.
ML: Did you ever want to maybe take over?
JC: No, because the building was their retirement money. And the neighborhood was changing, too. It was getting slower.
ML: How do you feel like it has changed, for both of you?
JC: [Pointing to Moylett] She used to work around the corner at the Granada. That’s right around the corner. It’s Rock’s Den now. It was a bar and restaurant, just like ours was.
LM: A fire closed it down. The owner passed away months after that. He was in his 90s. The family still owns the building.
ML: Did you like it there?
LM: Yeah, it was neighborhood-y. We all had the same customers.
JC: A lot of family businesses. A lot of family markets, pharmacies, restaurants, camera shops, bike shops, foot doctors. It was a totally different neighborhood years ago.
ML: When would that have been?
JC: ’80s and ’90s. It was really hopping. There just isn’t the hustle and bustle in the same way there used to be. People would go out to dinner and then they would go over to one of the neighborhood bars. There were many more restaurants to choose from.
And if someone’s eating and they didn’t have their money with them, we’d say “Okay, just bring it back.”
ML: Why do you think that changed?
JC: People moving out. Different people moving in. A lot of these big buildings went up. [Pointing to 4805 Mission St., which has been sitting empty and nearly finished for almost a decade.]
There’s a lot of low-income housing or subsidized housing, which I know they need. But a lot of them probably don’t go out to the businesses in the neighborhood.
ML: I mean right now, to me, it still feels really residential.
LM: Yeah it’s very residential.
JC: [To Moylett] But don’t you think there was more business, more places to go to? I mean there were clothing stores, other restaurants …
LM: Younger kids are coming in. We’re older.
ML: Back in the days, where would kids go after school?
LM: Home. Do homework. Sports. A lot of sports after school. I have nieces in their 30s, and they’ve all been playing sports since they’ve been in school. Stay out of trouble.
JC: I think they got involved more. They weren’t phones and laptops.
LM: Nothing like it is now. You give a kid a phone when they’re 10, 11 years old for their birthday. Before you give them a baseball.
ML: What about teenagers?
JC: No, I would still say they would do sports.
ML: Is it true — I’ve only heard this, so correct me if I’m wrong — that Excelsior used to have a lot of police officers around?
JC: We used to have beat cops. It was nice. He would just walk and pop in and say hi. Someone gave him an apple or something. It wasn’t like he had a lot to deal with. There weren’t a lot of bad things going on.
LM: But it was nice to know he was out there every day. He would probably hit her place at 12. He’d hit the Granada at one every day. He hit the spots around the same time, come in and say hello, maybe sit down and have a cup of soup or just say hello. He knew everybody. It was nice to have a beat cop. Kay Baxter was one of the older cops.
Everyone would be friendly to him. Not now. They’re not friendly to police nowadays. It was a totally different time.
Kids used to come up here from Balboa. They stopped them from coming up. They would come up after school and there’d be a little trouble. They’d hang out on this porch after school.They’d be sneaking drinks or smoking something. In the early 2000s.
ML: Where do the kids go now?
JM: Hopefully home. Ride their e-bikes. Those bikes are crazy.
ML: Did either of you ever work at jobs that were not in the Excelsior? What was that like?
JC: I worked for the fish market. That was bartending and waitressing in Santa Clara. I worked at an electronics company before I worked there. I did that for a while, too, in Palo Alto. It was an office job.
We did a lot together, and just because everyone lived near each other down there. They’re all gone now. That was family-owned.
LM: I’ve never worked anywhere but Excelsior. Bars and pizza parlor.
ML: You also mentioned there are different kinds of stores back in the day, including clothing stores?
JC: Farrah’s. It was a family name. They had a clothing store. Their family was in the neighborhood.
They had all kinds of clothes, uniforms. They had another brother who had the shoe store next door because I used to buy my work shoes there. Then there was also Farrah’s hardware store because there was a family. Actually, the one who has the shoe store is still alive.
It is down that way on the Mission where Excelsior and Mission meet.
ML: Is the family still around here?
JC: No. Joe Farrah, who owns the shoe store, is still around. He might be close to getting 100.
There used to be a lot. There used to be Fregosi’s Flowers. And that big building next to the Safeway used to be Valente, Marini, Perata. It was a big funeral parlor.
There used to be a couple of bakeries. There used to be the Borelli’s Bike Shop, Jebe’s camera shop.
ML: Do you think younger kids want to go to other neighborhoods for food?
JC: Yeah. Other neighborhoods that are more lively, unfortunately.
We do have different events here where we try to create something like a Friday night. We did a western night. We also did a back-to-school night and we got filled.
ML: Do you feel like the club has come back from COVID-19?
JC: Not fully. We still got regulars, of course.
But then with different political things going on, we’re not getting the quinceañeras like we used to. I think they’re scared to have events. Don’t you think, Leila?
LM: Yeah. We need more storefronts open. A lot of closed storefronts. We need to get more businesses out here.
JC: You don’t notice it as much when you’re driving. But if you walk from here down to Silver, you’ll see the ones that are closed. And we remember what was there before.
LM: It’s all over the city. I know 24th and Noe is going through it. West Portal. The whole city is going through it. It’s slowly coming back. We just need a few more businesses out here.
JC: But we’re hanging in there. We have some graduation parties coming up and weddings and different events like that.
LM: We’re close to the customers.
JC: Yeah. Really close. They would bring gifts and stuff.
LM: That’s what it’s like here during the week. You walk in and they all know each other. Friday night we put the game on, watch a Giants game and or whatever’s on, maybe the Warriors. They all come and watch it.
ML: Any very interesting characters you can remember?
JC: There were a lot of characters. And there were some people coming and you were like “Oh no, why is he here?”
LM: The kids aren’t drinking like they used to drink.
JC: A lot of those mocktails and stuff.
LM: And the non-alcohol beer. I mean, it’s incredible. There’s a lot of that going around.
ML: So when you two were younger, what would you leave the Excelsior to do?
LM: Our shopping was downtown and down the Mission. They didn’t have all these malls. We’d get on the bus and go downtown with my mom and shop. Market Street was a big shopping area. You had to dress up.
We used to wear a hat to Easter church. When you went to church, you had to dress up in a hat or the little veil thing. I grew up Catholic.
ML: Do you go to church around here?
LM: Yeah. [Church of] Epiphany. I don’t go all the time. But I know the priest. He comes in here sometimes. Father Eugene.
ML: So you would dress up to go shopping downtown, and you said there were not all the malls like Macy’s?
JC: Neiman Marcus was The City of Paris. There used to be a department store called the White House. Joseph Magnin’s, I Magnin’s — they were all nice.
I remember going with my grandma, we would have all of our patent leather shoes on and dress on. That would have been when I was younger, so God, it’s probably between 60 and 50 years ago.
There would be a lot of things to see down there too. The Emporium Stonestown. They used to have the rooftop Santa with rides. Oh, that was my favorite in the world.
LM: During Christmas they had an ice skating show and rides. Macy’s took over Emporium. Remember their bargain basement? And it was really a bargain. They had no dollar stores back then. It was fun to go down to the cable cars.
JC: The dollar store used to be Woolworth’s. It was like a little dime store, but they would have a little counter. They’d also serve a little bit of food. They had a long counter with the little stools that would swerve around. But you also could go shop and you could go there and order a burger for probably $0.5 or something.
You must have seen pictures of the one downtown on Market Street where the cable cars turn? There were a few of them.
It was special to go downtown.
ML: Was there ever a movie theater around here?
JC: The Granada, right around the corner. It’s where the Goodwill is.
LM: There was another one up on Geneva called the Amazon Theater. That’s the Walgreens now. It was right around the corner from my house. We go every Saturday. Then I worked there. My sister worked there. And you probably paid $0.25 back then to get in.
JC: They used to have cartoons or horse races before the regular movie races. They didn’t have trailers for movies.
ML: Back in the day, were there any conspiracy theories around Dan White’s escape to Ireland?
LM: Dan White used to come into bars. The mayors used to come to places. I remember them coming into our restaurants all the time. Different mayors. Willie Brown came and he was a nice guy. He was very pleasant. We’ve had the fire chief here a few times, Dean Crispen. Super nice guy. Pleasant. He grew up in the city, so he knew a lot of the guys that come here.
We don’t see any of them anymore. If there’s some politician thing going on, you get people in.
Dan Lurie was around Boxing Day. We had heard. I got a phone call saying, “he’s in the neighborhood.” So I said, “send him up to us.” And he said he’s going to be here around two. So we waited and we waited and he never came. He went to a lot of some of the new businesses but didn’t come to us. He. His schedule was too tight for him to come up the hill.
I like him, but he doesn’t come out here. And we’re the oldest business in the neighborhood.