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Jane on Larkin patrons are seen in front of a window looking out onto San Francisco’s Cedar Street alley. Residents say the Lower Polk Street neighborhood is increasingly dealing with crime and homelessness.

Amanda Michael, owner of Jane on Larkin, said her cafe has been hit with robberies and that the Lower Polk neighborhood doesn’t get the same level of service from police and as other areas in San Francisco.

Ronald Reece (left) and Jason Da Silva, community ambassadors, deposit items into a larger garbage bin on Fern Alley in San Francisco. Residents say the Lower Polk Street neighborhood is increasingly dealing with crime and homelessness.

Earlier this week, architect Bonnie Bridges was holding a staff meeting at her Lower Polk office when the conversation was interrupted by a loud argument and excruciating screaming outside in the Cedar Street alleyway.

“It was a full-on Taser fight involving a drug dealer who regularly parks in the alley,” Bridges said. “He was tasing one of his customers — an older gentleman who apparently had not paid. That was my Monday morning.”

As disturbing as the violence was, for Bridges, it wasn’t even the most troubling thing that happened in recent days. A few days earlier, burglars used a grinder to shave off the metal bars on her side door, then broke into the office. They ransacked the place and also hit Bridges’ retail tenant, the popular cafe Jane on Larkin. The intruders broke into a locked storage area containing financial information from Bridges’ architecture business and had already fanned out around the Bay Area attempting to pass bad checks.

It was the third time both Studio BBA and Jane on Larkin had been broken into in the past 20 months.

“All my financial information has been compromised,” Bridges said on Monday. “Now I’m spending the day going through all my bank accounts and shutting everything down.”

A decade ago, Bridges was one of the Lower Polk neighborhood’s biggest cheerleaders. The architect had taken out a Small Business Administration loan to purchase the 8,000-square-foot 921 Larkin St. for $1.4 million and then stripped the space down to its brick walls and Douglas fir framing. She replaced windows, doors, roof and mechanical systems. She planted a vertical garden on the building’s exterior and strung lights up in the Cedar Street alley.

Bridges leased the ground floor space to the cafe Jane on Larkin, which immediately drew lines of customers. Bridges threw annual parties open to anyone in the neighborhood who cared to show up. New stores and galleries were popping up along the stretch of Larkin and Polk streets north of Geary Street, a busy enclave that borders Little Saigon and the Tenderloin.

“It felt like the area was on an upswing,” she said.

Those days now feel like a distant memory. Nearly all the small shops and galleries that had opened on the stretch of Larkin Street north of Geary have closed. The neighborhood’s five alleyways — Austin, Fern, Hemlock, Cedar, Myrtle — are regularly lined with tents, which are used both as shelter for unhoused folks and hideouts for the drug dealers who serve a steady stream of fentanyl addicts around the clock.

“It’s just so incredibly sad, every day, to come into work and experience this level of lawlessness,” Bridges said.

Lower Polk is home to some of the city’s richest urban fabric. Its alleyways are lined with historic brick and wooden rent-controlled apartment buildings juxtaposed against modern glass and concrete condo complexes. Polk Street has long been a swinging nightlife corridor with a mix of bars and ethnic restaurants, and in the 1970s and 1980s, it was known as a refuge for gay kids who found a home on the streets after escaping intolerance and violence elsewhere.

But it is also a bit of an orphan — caught between bigger and better-known neighborhoods. The front door of 921 Larkin St., for example, is in the Central police district. The side door, on Cedar, is in the Northern police district. A half block to the south is the Tenderloin police district. Lower Polk doesn’t get the resources that have flooded the Tenderloin during the pandemic, even though the drug dealers, thieves and mentally ill flow freely between the two neighborhoods. Its community benefits district is among the city’s smallest.

“We are the doughnut hole, a no-man’s-land, an accountability nightmare,” said Chris Schulman, executive director of the Lower Polk Street Community Benefit District, who has lived at Polk and Sutter streets for 20 years.

In early September, a fight between two drug dealers in the alley resulted in one of the men crashing through the window of Jane, according to Amanda Michael, who owns five Jane cafes around the city.

“We had a cafe full of people,” Michael said. “It was lunch time.”

A few days before that, someone had barged through the back door and threatened kitchen staff. Both times Michael called police, who didn’t arrive until well after Michael had dealt with the situation herself. They didn’t take a report because the window-crashing incident was ruled “an accident,” she said. Michael said that, often, when she calls the Northern station, she is told to call Central. Sometimes when she calls Central, she is redirected to Northern.

“Each one will say, ‘You are not in our zone,’” Michael said. “It’s hard to know who to address complaints or issues to.”

The Jane cafe group, an unusually successful small business with 100 employees, has cafes in the Richmond District, Pacific Heights, Lower Pacific Heights and Chinatown, in addition to Jane on Larkin. Michael said it’s clear from her experience in different neighborhoods that the city regards Lower Polk as part of the “containment zone,” where activity is tolerated that would not be accepted elsewhere.

“What’s not accepted on Fillmore Street is the norm here,” she said, adding that recent issues at the Larkin Street cafe are the result of “being on the wrong end of the city’s people-moving program.”

Supervisor Aaron Peskin called the situation in Lower Polk’s alleyways, “a two-year-long game of Whac-A-Mole that has been exacerbated by the free-for-all that was the early days of the pandemic and a Tenderloin crackdown that has been a tube of toothpaste being squeezed into other neighborhoods.”

Peskin drives on Larkin on his way to City Hall in the morning and returns home via Polk Street. Sometimes, city workers clear the alleyways in the morning, but by the evening commute the tents are back, he said. Lower Polk residents and business owners have been unusually receptive to social programs — including housing for formerly homeless adults and youth — and Peskin said he doesn’t blame them a bit for being frustrated.

“Bottom line is we are not OK with this in the Marina, and we can’t be OK with this in alleyways on Lower Polk,” Peskin said. “People’s kitchen windows are being obscured by tents that are 12-feet tall. It’s been a nightmare and just has to stop.”

San Francisco Police Department Northern Station Capt. Derrick Jackson said that he had deployed more officers to the Lower Polk alleyways after the break-in and that officers had made “some key arrests” of drug dealers on Cedar in the past few days. He has met with Bridges and Michael and said investigators have good leads on the burglary.

“I would like to say that we have already made some immediate impact and will continue to monitor the area and provide more resources,” Jackson said.

He said efforts to crack down on dealing is an uphill battle, given the number of addicts on the streets of San Francisco.

“What is happening there mirrors what is happening all over the city,” he said. “Fentanyl is having a huge impact on our population everywhere. The Tenderloin, the Mission, you name it. It’s the same picture. The impact it’s having on society is really, really destructive.”

One resident who lives on Sutter Street between Polk and Larkin — her apartment looks out onto Fern alley — said she has lived in cities in India, the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe, but never seen conditions as bad as they are in Lower Polk. The resident, who asked that her name not be used because she is afraid of being retaliated against for speaking out, works in social services as a victim’s advocate. She said she calls 911 on a “daily basis.”

In the past few days, she witnessed a woman brutally beaten by drug dealers outside her window and addicts with mental illnesses so severe “they are licking the pavement.” She arrived home the other day to find “feces smeared across our front door.” The same dealers have been plying their trade since she moved in eight years ago.

“They come in cars that cost more than I make annually,” she said.

Meanwhile, Bridges and Michael both say they are left to wrestle with the reality that they can’t keep operating if things don’t improve. Michael has 30 employees at her Larkin Street store, and the bakers arrive at 4 a.m. when the level of lawlessness is even worse than it is during the day. Bridges treats her office like “Fort Knox,” and clients have to navigate through drug dealers and tents to get to the office door.

Bridges, who has a Ph.D. in architectural theory from Harvard University, said her lifelong dream has been to live and design buildings in San Francisco. She lives in the Portola district, where she is involved in trying to turn dilapidated greenhouses into an urban farm. Her clients include quintessential San Francisco destinations like Flora Grubb Gardens, Tartine, Mister Jiu’s, Sightglass Coffee and Equator Coffees.

But after 11 years at 921 Larkin St., she isn’t sure how much longer she can take it. “You fight and you fight and you call and you do what you can, and at some point, you abandon your city.”

J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen

J.K. Dineen covers housing and real estate development. He joined The Chronicle in 2014 covering San Francisco land use politics for the City Hall team. He has since expanded his focus to explore housing and development issues throughout Northern California. He is the author of two books: "Here Tomorrow" (Heyday, 2013) and "High Spirits" (Heyday, 2015).