[from the Letters archive] Duncanville By Robert Andersen You won't find mention of Duncanville in the guide books. Indeed the Noe Valley itself scarcely rates a glance, which is just fine with its denizens, who enjoy the good life of San Francisco without strangers intruding on their urban idyll. The Noe Valley is about as "liveable" as it gets, and since it remains off the beaten path it invites a laidback parochialism that finds its consummate expression in Duncanville, that faux enclave nestled tongue-in-cheek in the Valley and representative of all the best that this terra-incognita has to offer. Indeed, its real-life epicenter, the corner of Duncan and Church, has a pronounced in-the-know vibe, while its fanciful boundary easily translates into a sensibility both territorial and ecumenical, a sensibility on display at Martha & Brothers in the morning, and across the street, at the wine bar at Incanto, in the evening. The daily congregants are cognoscenti steeped in neighborhood lore, familiar faces who subscribe to the same take-it-easy ethos as that vanished tribe who not so long ago crowded into Star Bakery following Sunday Mass at St. Paul's. What struck this Native Son the most during a recent extended visit was just how little the Valley has changed from its postwar heyday as a blue-collar paradise, notwithstanding the seven figures it takes these days to establish proof of residence. The alchemy of place still works wonders, and though the blue-collar diaspora has long since faded into the memories of "oldtimers," those who came into the Valley in the early 70s and found -- eureka indeed -- Victorians and Craftsmen going for the begging, the genii loci continue to exert their spell, enough to turn the blue jean environs of the wireless classes into the second coming of a great good place. Nostalgia is the bane of record for San Franciscans of a proprietary cast of mind, and since I swore I would never succumb to its siren song -- preferring my fourth generation memories cinema verite -- I take a certain delight in the fact that the prosperous, well-kept neighborhood (its look remarkable -- eerily -- unchanged) makes the Present the celebration of record. Judging from the baby boom evident on the stroller-clogged streets, the weekend throngs at Chloe's and Martha's -- not to mention the gracious locals who welcomed this stranger to their fabled haunt -- the Noe Valley is in good hands, so much so that this writer, too long in New England, now presumes to exercise his right of return, to the very place he couldn't wait to leave way back when, when the Valley was a far cry from Duncanville, and the good life was being sent packing, outsourced to subdivisions solar-powered. Like so many who grew up in the halcyon years, that long stretch from 1945 to 1963, the boyhood haunt today exerts a pull that is visceral in the extreme. The Valley, to paraphrase William Saroyan, is in my blood and bones, I knew it as a small child and I knew it as a whistling boy. At once home, school, church, playground, neighborhood, landscape and reverie. It functioned as our very own Duncanville, a place that married the sacred and the profane in that inimitable San Francisco fashion. Indeed in a City of hills and valleys, fog and sunshine, the perennial interplay between striking contrasts makes for psychic resonance, a state of grace as it were, nowhere more so than in the Noe Valley, exempt as it is from the harsher features of a Meditteranean city-state favored by the frigid Pacific. No better place to grow up then, no better time either. A photo on my wall, taken in June 1959, shows the 8th grade graduating class of St. Paul's Grammar School -- my class -- assembled on the steps of the Church, Irish and Italian faces beaming, a last rite of passage before expulsion from our parochial idyll. Long before "liveability" entered the lexicon the living was too good, the gothic wonderous St. Paul's and the diamond splendorous Upper Noe Valley Playground vying for our souls, our parents indulgent in the extreme, giving us ample room -- the entire City no less courtesy of the J Car -- to while away our youth, the good sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary entrusted with our education, the good cheer of the butcher, the baker, the grocery clerk, the newspaper hawker and the cop on the beat to ensure that we would always look back  with astonishment that there ever was such a place and time, a Duncanville long before its current denizens thought to invoke its pride-of-place as an insider's jest. But paradises exist to be lost, and so too ours, the Valley succumbing to urban blight, as neighborhoods emptied out in a flight to the inner suburbs, thick fog Westlake and Pacifica and other harsher environs, Duncanville filling with transients and lowlifes and become prey to the usual raft of down-at-the-heels ills, not the least of which was a virtual erasure of community identity. The days of the Latin High Mass and the hot-to-the-touch crullers at Star Bakery couldn't be sustained in any case. Enter the homesteaders, the old-timers who settled this urban frontier, slowly but surely bringing the Valley back to its natural state as the best place to live in San Francisco. Three decades later, that revitalizing spirit finds a community both enviable and distinctive, an identity for which the Duncanville appellation seems only too apt. Return then to the epicenter of this full circle, as I did day in and day out, marvelling -- no other word -- at the return of near paradise, presided over by two generous spirits whose establishments marry the sacred and the profane in inimitable fashion. Just down from the splendid restoration of the magnificent interior of St. Paul's Church Dante celebrates the human comedy in good Noe Valley fashion inside Incanto, Mark Pastore's inspired tribute to le stelle, to the concluding stanza of the Paradiso. Inside the Dante Room, in this most uplifting and congenial of restaurants, marvel also at Tom Morgensen's dramatic mural depicting Dante's ascent from the underworld -- a depiction that could double as an allegory of the Valley's ascension from an urban purgatory. The bar is exemplary, the bartenders extraordinary (Edward Ruiz, Chris Deegan, and Richard Triolo), and Chris Cosentino's cuisine as near divine as the proximity to St. Paul's will allow. Translate the Latin parchments framing the refectory-like space and have a flight of Italian reds, recite from memory the whole of the Divine Comedy in the original Italian (the miniaturized text of which can be found on a framed scroll inside the Dante Room) and Mark will have Tom add your portrait to the saints awaiting Dante's stellar reunion with lost love Beatrice. Incanto is Duncanville as epicurean sensation while Martha & Brothers is Duncanville as community center and keeper of the flame. The beauteous Yvonne is the coffee goddess who sees to it that your cup runneth over. At its most prosaic M&B is an exceptionally well-run well-stocked purveyor of that morning jump-start, at its most exalted however it becomes something else entirely, transsubstantiated no less, a ritualized space welcoming congregants rejoicing that they live together in a place and time blessed in the extreme. No wonder I have come to dread the redeye back to Boston. From my table in Martha's Duncanville looks too real to be anything but paradise regained. Siren-song indeed. Copyright 2004-2005 Robert Andersen. All rights reserved.