What the Presses Left Behind
The Hearst Building at 691 Market Street has been a part of San Francisco's newspaper history since the early twentieth century. Its basement once housed the printing operations for The San Francisco Examiner and The Call — two of the city's major papers — before press technology moved on and the space sat dormant. That's the room Brian Sheehy and Doug Dalton walked into when they were looking for the right venue for their third San Francisco bar, after Bourbon & Branch and Rickhouse had already established Future Bars as one of the city's most reliably intelligent bar groups.
What they found was five thousand square feet of raw press-room floor, low ceilings, and an address that required you to walk down a staircase from Market Street to reach it. That's the kind of entry that separates the destination-seekers from everyone else, which is exactly the point.
Marble from the Castle
The Hearst Corporation still owns the building. Steve Hearst, the family's current steward, was involved from the project's beginning — and through that connection, Sheehy and Dalton were given something most bar operators never get: access to the family archives. The historic newspaper collection on the walls, which spans pre-1970s editions of The Chronicle, the SF Guardian, and other San Francisco papers, came directly from that archive.
The marble on the bar top and several of the tables came from Hearst Castle, the family's coastal estate in San Simeon. It's a material detail that sounds decorative until you understand what it means: the same stone that ran through William Randolph Hearst's private rooms now runs under your cocktail glass. That's a strange and specific kind of continuity, and Local Edition doesn't make a fuss about it. It just sits there, polished and cool under the candlelight.
A Menu That Reads Like a Front Page
The cocktail menu is printed to look like a newspaper — not as a novelty gesture but as a working design, with section headers and column widths that mimic broadsheet layout. The drinks themselves lean into the journalism theme without being coy about it. The Yellow Kid, named after one of America's earliest newspaper comic strips, is the kind of drink that rewards ordering without looking up what it contains. The Evening Journal and The Daily News arrive as bottled cocktails, pre-batched and served in 750-ml bottles for groups. The Daily News, priced at $48, is the kind of thing you split across a table when you want the conversation to go somewhere.
The broader cocktail philosophy belongs to the Future Bars tradition — built on the premise that craft spirits and careful technique deserve the same attention as the setting. In a room this theatrically committed to its premise, the drinks have to hold up. They do.
Jazz at No Extra Charge
The programming at Local Edition runs every night of the week, and there's no cover charge. On Tuesdays, the Local Edition Jazz Orchestra takes the stage. The Barbary Coast Jazz Band appears every other Monday. The genres stretch from swing and jump jazz to funk and neo-soul depending on the night, and the stage is small enough that you're always close to the music — close enough that the bass moves through the marble in the floor.
This is jazz the way it was in the clubs the room is designed to evoke: not performed at a distance from behind a velvet rope, but played in a room where the acoustics are an accident of the original architecture, and the drinks are cheap enough that you'll stay for a second set.
The Odd Logic of Going Underground
The word "subterranean" gets used a lot in bar writing, usually as atmosphere-shorthand. At Local Edition it's just a fact: you descend stairs to get there. The ceiling is low. The light is warm and not very strong. The walls are covered in paper that is older than most of the people in the room.
What makes this an odd edit rather than just a theme bar is the specificity of the commitment. The marble is real Hearst Castle marble. The newspapers came from the actual archive of the family that built this building. The space itself was, until not long before 2012, a functioning part of the city's press infrastructure. You're not in a reconstruction of something — you're in the thing, repurposed with enough care that it still feels like itself.
Practical notes
- Address: 691 Market Street at 3rd, Hearst Building (basement), San Francisco, CA 94105
- Hours: Mon 4:30pm–midnight · Tue–Wed 4:30pm–1am · Thu–Fri 4:30pm–2am · Sat 6pm–2am · Closed Sunday
- Getting there: BART/MUNI to Montgomery St. or Powell St.; walk to Market and 3rd, descend the staircase
- Reservations: Walk-ins welcome; tables available; OpenTable for reservations
- Live music: Every night, no cover charge. Tuesday: Local Edition Jazz Orchestra. Alternate Mondays: Barbary Coast Jazz Band
- What to order: Ask for The Yellow Kid or The Evening Journal (bottled, good for sharing). The cocktail menu is printed to look like a newspaper — read it that way
- Best window: Thursday or Friday from 5–7pm before the room fills; the music starts later and the marble bar is yours
- What to do after / nearby: Bourbon & Branch (same owners, speakeasy format, reservation required) is a 10-minute walk north on Polk St. for a second chapter
The point
Most bars make a show of their building's history. Local Edition kept the building's evidence. The newspaper cases, the marble, the archive on the walls — none of it was installed to evoke something; it was already there. Sheehy and Dalton built around it. The press room is still a press room, in the sense that the space still holds the weight of everything that was printed in it. Now people sit in it and drink well and listen to jazz, which seems like a reasonable trade.
Tags: #localeditionsf #cocktailbar #sfbars #hearstbuilding #sfexaminer #financialdistrictsf #downtownsf #sfhiddengem #adaptivereuse #oddedit #speakeasyvibes #jazzbar #sfcocktails #vintagedecor #subterraneanbar
Sources consulted: localeditionsf.com · futurebars.com · theperfectspotsf.com · urbandaddy.com · afar.com
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