Golden Eagle Hotel
402 Broadway Ave.
San Francisco, CA
# 415-781-6859
I’d never been to the Golden Eagle until very recently, but it’s been in operation for decades now and apparently used to have a reputation as being one of the cheapest and most down-and-out places in the city, packed with drunks and strippers and bedbugs. I don’t know exactly how true that is, but the word I’d heard before coming here is that new management took over at some point last year and have really made a point to clean the place up. At $193.00 per week after hotel taxes, I wouldn’t exactly call it “cheap” anymore, but it was also clean, fairly quiet and struck me as being pretty well run.
It’s on Broadway near the intersection with Montgomery. There’s a strip club two doors down and a couple of bars right across the street, and the next block or two down are basically strip club/sex shop central for the city. Despite the “red light” theme the area is pretty tame except for Friday and Saturday nights after dark, when a bunch of rowdies roll in from out of town and “whooo” it up until 2 A.M. when all the bars and clubs shut down. If you’re a light sleeper this may not be the best place for you, as if you get a window facing the street you’ll probably not be sleeping much on the weekends. The other nights of the week it wasn’t too bad though. During the day it’s real quiet, and I definitely would not call the neighborhood “dangerous” at any time of the day. On the upside you are two blocks down from the center of North Beach and the border of Chinatown, and then in the other direction it’s only a few blocks to the Embarcadero and the water.
The place is no-hassle about checking in, just call ahead in the morning to see if they’ve got anything open. A rate of $170 for the rooms plus hotel tax comes to $193.00 total per week. The place is pretty rabid about tenancy, handing you an application as soon as you come in and asking you to bring it back if you want to stay a second week (even if you don’t actually want to become a tenant). The tenancy form looked surprisingly thorough for an S.R.O. and I heard from someone that they don’t accept anyone not consistently employed at a job for at least a few consecutive months. Guess it’s a response to the way the place was in the past. The management seems serious about running a clean place, but this also means you can’t stay more than three weeks if you don’t get accepted (or don’t want) tenancy.
The room I had was small, and the carpet rather dingy, but otherwise it was clean and in good shape. It was actually rather pleasant, as everything was in good repair, the bed seemed fairly new and there were even a couple of nice paintings hung on the wall. Rooms have a sink, closet, desk with lamp and bed, and that’s about it. Showers and toilets are shared in the hall, and there’s enough that one always seems to be open. No wireless, kitchen, or other amenities, but there’s washers/dryers on premises and a couple of vending machines.
Cleanliness of the bathrooms and showers was decent considering the amount of traffic they get. The janitor goes around multiple times per day scrubbing them up. Occasionally they were mildly funky, which is pretty much unavoidable, but I never encountered anything really gross.
I’d heard that this place was notorious for bedbugs in the past, so the first thing I did upon inspecting the room was to lift the sheets off and check the nooks and crannies of the mattress for signs of the little buggers. I didn’t see anything, and none made an appearance during my stay (also didn’t see a single rodent or roach). I did hear from another guest who checked in shortly after me that they had bedbugs in their room. So I guess you can still get them here, but it’s a crapshoot.
Tenants seemed to mostly be older folks on disability, and younger service-economy workers who had jobs in North Beach and the Financial District (and the occasional stripper here and there). Thus the place was pretty quiet and there seemed to be an actual sense of community, everyone seemed to know each other and talk in the halls regularly. There were a few mentally unbalanced “characters” here and there, but the place definitely isn’t a drug nest or crackhead haven. Also, one of the few S.R.O.s I’ve encountered that lets people have cats and dogs in their rooms.
All-in-all I thought the place wasn’t too bad. If you get a room not directly facing Broadway and not inflicted with bedbugs, you can have a decent stay here. $193 was a touch high given what you get, but in North Beach you can’t really do a whole lot better than that.
