After running non-stop for 45 years for audiences ranging from Willie Brown to Queen Elizabeth II, the quintessential San Francisco camp theater experience will play its last date on December 31. They’re not being forced out; producer Jo Schuman Silver simply feels it’s time to wrap things up.

The historic comedy club that once counted Robin Williams among its regulars will lose the lease on its longtime (since 1978) locale on Battery Street in August.

Club owners are making spirited public statements about finding a new spot, while the likes of Dave Chappelle, W. Kamau Bell, Supervisor Aaron Peskin, and now even Google rallied this week to try to save it.

This old-school clothiers near Union Square almost pulled itself back from the brink with an unexpected buyout offer in February, but the deal collapsed at the last minute. The 46-year-old FiDi favorite had trouble keeping up with the powerhouse of online retail.

Not only was Gump’s San Francisco’s oldest department store, after 157 years it was among the oldest things in San Francisco—period. But there’s no such thing as forever, and Gump’s filed for bankruptcy in 2018, shutting down before Christmas.

Forbes reported that Gump’s adapted to the tech scene well, and did almost all of its sales online during its final days, but blamed just plain poor business choices for doing what wars, depressions, and even the 1906 earthquake couldn’t do before.

Long a mainstay of Fillmore dining, the Elite Cafe started dishing out New Orleans-inspired fare in 1981 and took on new owners in 2016. Eater SF reported in April that a dearth of late-night patrons helped cashed out the place’s elite status, and it closed shortly thereafter.

It was the despair of SF’s punk scene when the Hemlock Tavern announced in August that the building and bar’s new owners planned to demolish the longtime music dive in favor of condos. The wrecking ball arrived in early May to clear the way for a six-story mixed-use building with 54 homes.

Of note: Seventeen years earlier, the Hemlock replaced the Giraffe, one of the famous gay bars on Polk Street.

Located in a former Cadillac dealership circa-1922, the third AMC multiplex in San Francisco fell on hard times in recent years, not receiving the same renovations and perks as its siblings downtown or in Japantown. A mysterious dearth of showings and new movies presaged its mysterious closure in February.

Silver Sprocket is an old SF favorite for 22 years, but until 2017 it never had a storefront of its own, instead selling independent comics as a home business before moving to Haight Street. Easy come easy go: Silver Sprocket lost the outlet earlier this year, only to soon reopen again next door. The casualty in that exchange was the t-shirt store Bang-On, which closed in 2018.

The owner of this homey circa-1978 bookshop near Market Street also owned the building, but this did not spare the store from closure when he decided to put the place on the market. Sold in October 2018 for $2.43 million (the original asking price was $2.85 million), Aardvark went extinct earlier this year.

Forty-year favorite All-American Boy closed on Castro in 2008, replaced in the same space by Outfit and its tremendous signage.

Although the replacement duds hung in for more than ten years, owner Ryan Hill told Hoodline that an unbelievable $6,700-per-month rent price these days was the one thing that they couldn’t outfit, noting that even if the rent was cut in half that they couldn’t stay open.

The sci-fi themed Borderlands bookstore suffered a closure scare a few years back, but righted itself through sponsorship from dedicated customers and will soon move into a new Haight Street locale that it bought outright.

The adjoining Borderlands Cafe was not so lucky, crossing the final frontier in April, with owner Alan Beatts blaming slumping sales and a dearth of workers.

This Mission institution was in place on Valencia Street since 1925 and went off the great pasta banquet in the sky in April.

Long a family business, none of the new generation were interested in continuing the family enterprise, so owner Michael Feno put the building up for sale asking $1.45 million and closed up shop.