On San Francisco’s Seventh Street between Harrison and Folsom, there’s an unusual building, an Orthodox church with a golden dome. Few realize that this imposing structure is virtually all that remains of perhaps the least-known ethnic enclave in San Francisco: Greektown.

Large-scale Greek immigration to San Francisco began after the 1906 earthquake and fire, drawn by reports that there were jobs to be had rebuilding the city. Like other ethnic immigrants, Greeks settled in the working-class South of Market, mainly around Third and Folsom streets. To establish a foothold they had to rely on other Greeks, on relatives if they had them, and on hard work.

The story of future restaurateur Peter Boudouros, related in George Daskarolis’ “San Francisco’s Greek Colony: The Evolution of an Ethnic Community,” is typical.

Boudouros immigrated alone in 1911 at age 17. He was ill and so thin that an examiner at Ellis Island asked to see his feeble hand and questioned how he was going to make a living. He replied, “Dear lady, there is more than one way of making a living. Some people make more by using their brains and their ability than by using their hands.” Boudouros was admitted to the U.S. and taken by his uncle to San Francisco.

When the teenager arrived, he went to the Acropolis Cafe on Third Street in the heart of the Greek quarter, where newcomers could get a meal and information. He was sent to a rooming house at Fifth and Tehama. The next day he went down to the American Can Co. at Seventh and Brannan and got a job piling crates at $1 a day.

In one year he saved $200, which he used to start a small dry goods business. After opening several other businesses, he started a Market Street restaurant called Maison Paul, which he ran for 40 years. Boudouros became such a pillar of the community that he was known as “Mr. Greek.”

An even more dramatic immigrant-makes-good story belonged to George Christofele, whose mother took him from a poor village in Arcadia to San Francisco in 1910. As George Dorsey recounts in “Christopher of San Francisco,” George’s father, James, who had anglicized his last name to Christopher, had arrived in 1898 and opened a six-stool hamburger stand, the Reception Cafe, at Third and Minna streets.

The family first lived on Clara Street, then moved to a six-unit building James had bought on Shipley Street. Like many children who lived in Greektown, George went to both the Lincoln Grammar School on Harrison Street and a Greek-language school on Rincon Hill. On their way home from Greek school, they were frequently attacked by Irish kids hurling stones and yelling, “Dirty Greek, greasy Greek!”

Christopher’s first job was in a candy store at Third and Harrison. When his father died at age 48 after running the hamburger stand for 20 years, George became the head of the family. By renting three flats to Chinese partners, he was able to avoid selling his family’s heavily mortgaged apartment building.

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Christopher went into the milk business and became a success. In 1955, he was elected mayor of San Francisco, the first Greek American chief executive of a major U.S. city.

By 1920, San Francisco’s Greek colony was the fourth-largest in the country. Census figures showed 5,922 Greeks in the city in 1930. In 1923, according to the San Francisco Examiner, Greeks owned 564 restaurants and were disproportionately represented as proprietors of groceries, candy stores, shoeshine stands, laundries and flower stands.

The most important cultural institution in Greektown, at least for men — by tradition, few women patronized them — was the coffeehouse. There were 26 of them in the neighborhood. Daskarolis cites a description of one in Tacoma, Wash., that could apply to those in San Francisco: “The coffeehouses as a rule have large pictures on the walls with one or more maps of Greece and a picture of the Parthenon. ... Men would bring instruments and play. They were stopping places for traveling Greek entertainers such as dancers, boxers, wrestlers, weight lifters and strong men. There were also shadow puppet performers. Men would throw coins, both gold and silver to the performers, especially if they were women.”

Different coffeehouses in San Francisco’s Greektown featured different performers and types of entertainment, Daskarolis notes. “Mary and Katina danced at the Beautiful Greece, while Madame Cula and Cleopatra performed at the Minerva. The Mavromichalis Cafe featured shadow pantomime ... while the Kilkis had elaborate wall decorations.”

In “Greek Settlement in the Bay Area,” Demitra Georgas writes that one of the reasons the coffeehouses played such a central role for men in Greektown was the shortage of Greek women in the city. Most immigrants in the early days were single, or, if married, had left their wives at home until they could make enough money to bring them over.

The major religious event in Greektown was Easter, which was celebrated with a big gathering behind the Cosmopolitan Market, off Third Street between Folsom and Harrison, at which as many as 20 lambs were roasted. That holiest of Orthodox Christian holidays, along with funerals, weddings and other big events, were observed at the Holy Trinity Orthodox Church on Seventh Street — the domed landmark that survives to this day.

As San Francisco’s Greeks moved into the middle class, they began to move away from Greektown. By 1945, the colony was a shell of its former self.

In the 1960s a small group of Greek restaurants and stores opened on Eddy Street in the Tenderloin, following the popularization of Greek culture in movies like “Never on Sunday” and “Zorba the Greek.” Even those, however, went into decline when the Tenderloin got rougher in the 1970s.

Today, the old Orthodox Church — now St. Michael’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church — and a plaque on the corner of the Moscone Center at Third and Folsom are the only reminders of a little-known ethnic enclave in San Francisco, and a small American success story.

A previous version of this story misspelled the name of author George Daskarolis.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com