Clown Pins and Buttons
Description: In 1962, Enrico Banducci drove past an unusual looking shuttered gas station at Columbus and Jackson in San Francisco. His friend Morgan Montague remarked, “what a great hamburger stand that would make.” A few months later, Montague and Banducci opened a 24-hour hamburger stand at the same spot, calling it Clown Alley. The triangular café, on the edge of San Francisco's North Beach’s bar scene, became a wildly popular late-night hangout as people leaving the bars craved a greasy burger. With the success of Clown Alley, the duo opened a second location at Lombard and Divisadero, but soon their partnership dissolved, with each of them taking a location, and now there were two burger stands called Clown Alley less than two miles apart.
