Climb the Filbert Steps this month and the screech still cuts through the fog exactly the way it always has. Somewhere above the switchback gardens, a flash of cherry red and green breaks from a cypress, and every head on the staircase tips back at once. Nothing about the birds has changed. What changed is that the man who spent three decades explaining them to the rest of us is no longer here to do it.
Mark Bittner, the writer and musician who turned Telegraph Hill's wild parrots into one of the more improbable love stories in San Francisco history, died on March 1, 2026, at 74. He had spent much of that year living as a nomad in a camper van, and made it only as far as Arcata, in Humboldt County, for a ten-day housesitting job before a heart attack ended his life there, according to a Chronicle obituary recounted by the animal-welfare site Animals 24-7. Before that, he had lived off the Greenwich Steps, in a cottage in the Heslet Garden Compound, for about 25 years, with enough time on his hands to name every bird in the flock individually, according to SFist's obituary. This is the first summer since he started feeding them in the late 1990s that Telegraph Hill has had to decide what the parrots mean without him telling us.
The Man Who Never Made the Flock
Here's the part that gets lost in the nostalgia: Bittner didn't create anything. The cherry-headed conures that make up the flock are believed to have escaped or been released from the exotic pet trade sometime in the 1980s, well before he ever noticed them. By the time he started leaving out sunflower seeds, the birds had already banded together and found their own footing on the hill. His contribution wasn't biological. It was narrative. He watched them long enough to see individual personalities, wrote a memoir about it, and handed San Francisco a story it could love instead of just a noisy, non-native bird population that had wandered into the neighborhood.
That distinction matters this year, because it's the one thing that didn't die with him.
Telegraph Hill resident and former city supervisor Aaron Peskin put it plainly in his eulogy, as recounted by the site Animals 24-7, which drew on the San Francisco Chronicle's obituary:
"Mark celebrated the parrots' wildness, but also became their public voice and interpreter and ultimately safeguarded the flock."
An interpreter, not a caretaker in the sense of keeping them alive. The flock never needed him for that.
The Roxie Sent Him Off With the Birds in the Room
The neighborhood's response was to do what Bittner would have wanted, which was apparently nothing formal. On April 12, 2026, the Roxie Theater hosted what it billed as "A Celebration of Mark Bittner" rather than a memorial, since by his family's account he disliked both memorials and testimonials. Filmmaker Judy Irving, his widow and the director of the original 2003 documentary, appeared alongside his sister Beth Lyons and Sarah Lemarié of Mickaboo Companion Bird Rescue for a Q&A after the screening, moderated by SF Gate's Amanda Bartlett. A handful of rescue parrots from the actual flock reportedly made an appearance in the theater, and the event doubled as the launch of a project to finally publish Bittner's second book, a memoir of his busking years titled Street Song, according to the Roxie's event page.
It's a small, specific detail that tells you something the wide shots of Coit Tower never will: the people who knew Bittner treated the parrots as a shared civic project, not his personal legacy. That framing is what's being tested this summer.
Nobody Is Interpreting the Flock Now, and That's the Point
The birds, for their part, are doing exactly what they've always done. Axios San Francisco puts the current flock at roughly 300 birds, ranging well beyond Telegraph Hill into North Beach and along the Embarcadero. Older reporting on the flock, including a piece from Atlas Obscura, notes sightings as far south as Brisbane, the small Peninsula town about twelve miles down the bay. Nobody organized that spread. Nobody needs to keep organizing it now.
That's the actual argument this post is making: the flock was never fragile, and neither is the neighborhood around it. What Bittner gave Telegraph Hill wasn't survival, it was meaning. And meaning, it turns out, is the one resource North Beach seems to be able to regenerate on its own, over and over, with whoever happens to be standing there next.
North Beach Keeps Doing This With Buildings, Too
You can watch the same pattern play out this year in the neighborhood's storefronts, which have a habit of losing an institution and finding a new interpreter for the space almost immediately.
Grant Avenue lost Portofino, its longtime seafood restaurant, and gained Qua O La, a Croatian wine bar that opened this spring. The owners, Sal Annuzzi and his wife's family, aren't outsiders chasing a trend. Annuzzi grew up in the Excelsior, but his in-laws' roots run straight through North Beach: his mother-in-law, Linda Lazarich, settled there in the 1960s after emigrating from Croatia and met her husband, who was born on the Istrian peninsula. According to the SF Standard, San Francisco hadn't had a restaurant devoted to Croatian food and wine in almost a decade, and North Beach specifically hadn't had one at all since Albona Ristorante Istriana closed. The family gutted the old fishing-themed dining room, pulling roughly 2,000 fishing lures off the ceiling and replacing them with punched tin, then filled the space with heirlooms from Lazarich's own collection.
A few blocks over on Green Street, the old Spaghetti Factory building became Equal Parts, a Californian and seafood-forward restaurant from chef Melissa Perfit that Modern Luxury's 2026 dining guide calls "North Beach's newest hot spot." Different building, different cuisine, same mechanism: an old room gets handed to someone with an actual point of view about what it should say next.
The Festival That Turned Four This Year
The clearest version of this handoff pattern is happening on the calendar, not in a storefront. On Saturday, August 15, from noon to 4 p.m., Stockton and Filbert Streets around Washington Square host the fourth annual Pizza, Bagel & Beer Festival, organized by 13-time World Pizza Champion Tony Gemignani in partnership with the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club Foundation.
Gemignani started the event right after the pandemic because, in his own words to ABC7, he'd done pizza festivals in New York, Naples, and Chicago and decided "San Francisco really has to have a pizza festival." Four years later it's become exactly the kind of institution Bittner's flock once was: something that didn't exist, then did, and now runs mostly on the specific people who show up to keep it going. Over the past three years the festival has raised more than $225,000 for local causes, according to the official 2026 event listing, with this year's beneficiaries including Saints Peter & Paul School, the North Beach Business Association, and Friends of Washington Square Park.
What's new this year: Washington Square itself is finally part of the festival footprint, with live music and picnic space added for the first time, and a second entry point to speed up the line.
A quick logistics rundown, since the details change slightly every year:
- When: Saturday, August 15, 2026, noon to 4 p.m.
- Where: Stockton and Filbert Streets, around Washington Square
- Format: unlimited tasting-size slices and bagels from dozens of local pizzerias and bagelries, plus a beer garden
- New in 2026: live music and picnic seating inside Washington Square, a second entry gate
- Proceeds: benefiting Saints Peter & Paul School, the North Beach Business Association, Friends of Washington Square Park, and several other named local organizations
The Walk Still Works
None of this requires a special occasion to experience. Start at Coit Tower, take the Filbert Steps down through Telegraph Hill's terraced gardens, and keep an ear out around the Greenwich Steps, the same stretch where Bittner's cottage once stood. If the flock is out, you'll hear it before you see it. From there it's a short walk into North Beach proper, where you can end up at Qua O La for a glass of something Croatian or at Equal Parts for dinner, depending on which room you feel like sitting in tonight. Circle back on August 15 and Washington Square will be doing something it's never quite done before.
The flock didn't need a translator to keep flying, and North Beach doesn't need any one restaurant or festival to stay itself. It just needs someone, every so often, willing to take over the space and say something true about it. That's been true of this hill for longer than any of us have lived here, and it's still true this August.
BrokerLuxe follows these small, specific shifts in San Francisco's high-rise neighborhoods because they're the texture that makes a block worth knowing, long before anyone starts thinking about a real estate transaction. If you're weighing a move into Telegraph Hill, North Beach, or another San Francisco high-rise neighborhood and want a broker who tracks the details this closely, schedule a private consultation with Bryant Kowalczyk.
