The SFMTA has reopened weekend T-Third service after its first platform overhaul since 2007, and at 5114 Third St. a grant-backed "modern seafood" spot called Bayview Oyster Bar is set to fill a café that COVID closed in 2021 — one of seven restaurants the city is helping open along the corridor.

At 5114 Third St., the only evidence that anything is coming is a chalkboard. It leans in the window of the storefront that was Word. A Cafe until 2021, and it reads, "Coming soon. The Meetin' Place." Behind that hand-lettered promise, according to the city's Office of Economic and Workplace Development, is Bayview Oyster Bar — a "modern seafood" restaurant whose operator holds one of the storefront opportunity grants the city is spreading along the Third Street corridor.

Word. A Cafe closed shortly after the pandemic hollowed out foot traffic in the neighborhood. "COVID pretty much killed it," Kat Anderson, a San Francisco Recreation and Park commissioner who co-owned the café, told Mission Local, which first reported the new tenant in its Bayview Buzz column. The transformation hasn't reached the building department yet: no construction permit for 5114 Third St. appears in the city's recent filings — the block's paperwork this month runs to routine $1 placeholder alterations a few doors down. For now the change is a sign, not a gut job.

The grant behind it is the same lever the city has been pulling up and down this stretch. OEWD says the oyster bar's operator is one of seven Bayview restaurants — and nine businesses in all — slated to open on the corridor with public help, through awards that run from $50,000 to $100,000 and can go toward tenant improvements, equipment, inventory and permits. The Dissent has tracked the pattern before: a D10 Community Pharmacy is headed for a shuttered ice cream parlor at 5668 Third St., and a bookstore-café called Chapter 3 for a former MetroPCS at 4512 3rd St. — each backed by the same program, each filling a dark window.

The other half of the corridor's week was transit. The SFMTA finished a two-weekend cleanup of the Muni platforms along Third Street, and the T-Third is running weekend service again. Crews repainted platforms and replaced broken glass — work the agency said hadn't been done since the line opened in 2007. "It definitely is an improvement," Earl Shaddix, who directs the nonprofit Economic Development on Third Street, wrote in his newsletter, though he added that the roofs and glass "just don't seem to clean up very well… no matter how hard they try." Shaddix wants the platform roofs replaced outright when the T-Third shuts for the Islais Creek Bridge job, roughly two years out.

The corridor is still a working neighborhood under pressure: 20 eviction notices were filed in Bayview-Hunters Point over the last 90 days, and 582 requests came into 311 in a single recent week. What someone walking past 5114 tomorrow will see, though, is smaller than any of that — a chalkboard where a café used to be, promising a room that hasn't been built yet.