In mid-October, the owners of the Fat Lady shut down the iconic restaurant on a Sunday afternoon for a day-and-a-half. When they reopened, the already lush, eccentric interior was transformed into something Tim Burton might have dreamed up if he was filming the next Harry Potter movie as a Halloween special.

And it is for that most adventurous of holidays that Patricia Shaterian-Rossi and daughter Nicole Rossi spent day and night suspending in midair an assortment of bats, books, body parts and unidentifiable items that commonly do not hang from ceilings — such as a skeleton transformed into a chandelier. The centerpiece is reminiscent of an eerie chandelier made from skulls and bones at the Sedlec chapel in the Czech Republic. The books have titles like "Modern Magic," of course.

The theme of this year's decoration frenzy, which took the staff a week-and-a-half in all, is looser than usual. Shaterian-Rossi said it was a tribute to art and what has been lost through mass production and slick modernism.

The ideas mostly emerged from Rossi's recent trip to Europe. The rest comes from 35 years worth of collecting and — I suspect — the delirium of sleep deprivation. (The mother and daughter napped on the floor when exhaustion threatened to overtake them like a spell cast by a witch.)

The allure of a storybook Budapest is invoked in one corner, Venice in another. The spirit of Belgium appears in the guise of orchestral

sheet music tacked to a wall — along with two hands, two eyes and a nose. Nearby, Prague is symbolized by a time piece invention held, upon closer inspection, by two giant claws. Everything else is shrouded in layers of black, blue, gold, red and spider webs.

Shaterian-Rossi has been decorating the Fat Lady for Halloween for 27 years. She has been working there for nearly 40. The business is in the family's blood via her father, Louis Shaterian, who ran the Overland House Bar at First and Broadway for three decades beginning in 1952. The building dates back to 1884 and the name came from the Jack London's alcoholic memoir "John Barleycorn." ("Nelson and I were sitting in the Overland House. It was early in the evening, and the only reason we were there was because we were broke and it was election time.") Fitting with its namesake, Overland House was a hofbrau by day and a bar by night with singing waiters and waitresses. Shaterian sold it in 1985 and after a series of tenants (including a Tex-Mex joint) the building now houses a Vietnamese "fusion" restaurant, the Silk Road.

The Fat Lady, meanwhile, started out in 1970 serving businessmen and politicians, who broke bread and sipped cocktails at the Fat Lady.

"So much of what you saw you weren't supposed to be seeing, hearing, knowing or judging," Shaterian-Rossi said.

Shaterian decorated with a taste of a Barbary Coast collector, giving the Fat Lady the look of a New Orleans saloon and Victorian-era brothel. In fact, legend has it that the name comes from the madam who is said to have run a Victorian-era brothel in the same location, 201 Washington St.

Closer to the truth, but less titillating, is this "official" story: The restaurateur was taken with a portrait of the pleasing Fat Lady that her "enormous presence" (as a restaurant brochure put it) has graced the restaurant ever since.

Shaterian-Rossi said her father wanted to create the kind of bar common to the financial district in San Francisco during an era of men-only, two-martini lunches that was giving way to the sexual revolution.

"It all converged here," she said.

Now, women are as likely as men to be sitting at a table in a suit, which was not the case in the 1970s. On the other hand, customers are nearly as likely to be in tropical print shirts or jeans and sunglasses as they are business wear.

Perhaps the longest customer was Willie "Bill" Graves, a founding member of the California State Package Store and Tavern Owners Association, created to end discrimination against African-Americans in trades and businesses. Shaterian-Rossi said he was a Fat Lady regular for 40 years and sipped his regular drink, Chivas whiskey, there on the very night he died, Oct. 14.

The Fat Lady stayed curvy and inviting, even when the urge for austere, boxy architecture gripped the waterfront. The only pink pastel to be found is in the ladies room that, I should warn you, is temporarily inhabited by a pair of disembodied feet and a voice that cries for help. I should also warn you that Halloween is going to be packed. But the decorations will be up for several more weeks. That said, the Fat Lady is always in costume.