Walk two blocks west on Haight to Masonic. The building on the northwest corner was put up in 1903 as a grocery store. By 1925 it was the Cloverleaf Market. In the late 1920s it became a Shumate’s pharmacy. None of those are why we’re part of this walk.
In the late 1960s the building became the restaurant of Patricia Donna Mallon, a San Francisco native and burlesque performer who went by Magnolia Thunderpussy. She ran a late-night delivery service of erotic desserts and ran the room on her own terms for years. She died in 1996.
In 1997, publican Dave McLean opened Magnolia Pub and Brewery in the same space and named it after her. Every year he brewed a barley wine called Old Thunderpussy. Magnolia was one of San Francisco’s first craft brewpubs and ran for more than two decades before being sold to Colorado’s New Belgium Brewing in 2017. The brewery shut down in August 2024.
It came back two months later. In December 2024, three local operators (Kevin Kynoch, Brian Reccow, and Brandon Phillips) took it over with brewmaster Jon Taylor. They’re working through Dave McLean’s original recipe book.
One more layer before you move on: the corner across Masonic held the Drogstore Cafe in the late 1960s, a coffee house in a former Victorian drugstore with the original pharmacist’s drawers still set into the walls. Along with the I/Thou Coffee Shop at 1736 Haight and Tracy’s Donuts at 1569 Haight, it was one of the late-night anchors of the scene. The Diggers, the street-theater collective that gave out free food in the Panhandle, used its walls as a message board: drug warnings, lost roommates, missing daughters from Iowa. The building is still there. The cafe is long gone.