Paul's Hat Works, the custom hatmaker at 6128 Geary Blvd founded in 1918, appears to have closed in May with no public announcement — though the signals are mixed and The Dissent could not reach owner Abbie Dwelle.

The question surfaced on r/sanfrancisco this week, posted by a neighbor who'd walked past 6128 Geary Boulevard one too many times: what happened to Paul's Hat Works? The custom hat shop, wedged mid-block in the Outer Richmond, appears to have closed in May after more than a century in business — and, as the neighbor noted, without any announcement anyone can find.

The Dissent could not independently confirm the closure or reach owner Abbie Dwelle, and the signals are genuinely mixed. Yelp flags the business "closed," with the listing updated in May 2026. But the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce still lists it as an active member, and the shop's Facebook page advertised a year-end sale as late as December 2024. No filing, press notice, or public statement from Dwelle turned up in any records searched. If Paul's is gone, it left the way it operated: quietly, by word of mouth.

The shop is one of the oldest continuously running businesses in the city. It was founded in 1918 by Napoleon "Paul" Marquez, a Peruvian immigrant whose nickname became the sign over the door. It nearly closed in 2009, when a group of four young women — artists, not hatters — wandered into its goodbye party, took out loans, and learned felt, straw, and leather on the fly, as The Frisc reported at the time. Dwelle, a master hatter, eventually took sole ownership. She made rabbit-fur fedoras and Montecristi straw hats to order, most of them for Bay Area customers, from a cramped 1918 storefront with barber stations in an upstairs loft.

"There are all these parts of San Francisco that have always been there," Dwelle told the Richmond Sunset News in 2023. "Everything around it changes and evolves, but it stays the same."

For now, the block itself offers the only reliable report: a mid-block façade painted with silhouettes of classic hats and waxed mustaches, and, behind the glass, a shop that a passerby this week found dark.