Mission District

Frommer's Irreverent Guide to San Francisco
by Matthew Richard Poole
Published 17 Mar 2006

Kilowatt (p. 185) MISSION DISTRICT The latest watering hole to inhabit this former firehouse is pretty much like the last few: pool table, beer, a little bit of cruising, the usual.... Tel 415/ 861-2595. 3160 16th St., at Valencia St. 16th St. BART station. No cover. See Map 11 on p. 176. Latin American Club (p. 185) MISSION DISTRICT You don’t have to be a fashion model to feel comfortable at this Mission District neighborhood bar.... Tel 415/647-2732. 3286 22nd St., at Valencia St. 24th St. BART station. No cover. See Map 11 on p. 176. NIGHTLIFE Hemlock Tavern (p. 187) MISSION DISTRICT This friendly neighborhood bar is a lot like the hip haunts in the Mission District— comfy, stylish, but totally down to earth....

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Curran Theater (p. 207) UNION SQUARE The Curran presents both warmed-over Broadway hits and Broadway-bound musicals.... Tel 415/551-2000. www.bestofbroadway-sf.com. 445 Geary St. MUNI buses 19 or 38. See Map 12 on p. 202. Dance House (p. 204) MISSION DISTRICT This Mission District dance studio showcases local choreographers and ethnic traditions.... Tel 415/970-0222. 1275 Connecticut St., at Army St. MUNI bus 19 (cab recommended). See Map 12 on p. 202. 215 Dancers Group Studio Theater (p. 210) MISSION DISTRICT Dance buffs are excited about this small Mission District studio.... Tel 415/920-9181. www.dancersgroup.org. Studio B, 3252A 19th St. 24th St. BART station. See Map 12 on p. 202. Exit Theater (p. 208) CIVIC CENTER Closer to the mainstream than many neighborhood theaters, this small theater-district house is gaining a national reputation for avant-garde “classics”....

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AE, DISC, MC, V. Mon– Sat 11am–10pm, Sun 5–10pm. $$ See Map 6 on p. 77. See Map 3 on p. 47. La Rondalla (p. 61) MISSION DISTRICT MEXICAN The fare is tasty and substantial, a perfect prelude to a few gigantic margaritas at the crowded, lively bar.... Tel 415/647-7474. 901 Valencia St., at 20th St. 16th or 24th St. BART station; MUNI bus 26. No credit cards. Sun–Thurs 5pm–midnight, Fri–Sat 5pm–3am. $–$$ See Map 5 on p. 76. La Taqueria (p. 61) MISSION DISTRICT MEXICAN This Mission District favorite has a clean, comfortable cantina-style atmosphere.... Tel 415/285-7117. 2889 Mission St., at 25th St. 24th St.

Frommer's Memorable Walks in San Francisco
by Erika Lenkert
Published 15 Mar 2003

Manufactured in the United States of America 5 4 3 2 1 Contents List of Maps iv Introducing San Francisco 1 The Walking Tours 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Union Square Past & Present The Culture & Cuisine of Chinatown Noshing Through North Beach The Storied Steps of Telegraph Hill The Haughty Hotels of Nob Hill The Ghosts of Russian Hill The Majestic Homes of Pacific Heights South of Market: A Civilized Afternoon of Arts & Leisure The Culture & Color of the Mission District A Historical Flashback Through Haight-Ashbury Golden Gate Park: Museums, Blooms & Trees from Dunes The Golden Gate 7 21 36 54 68 83 94 106 115 127 136 146 Essentials 158 Guided Walking Tours of San Francisco 169 Index 174 LIST OF MAPS The Tours at a Glance 4 The Walking Tours Union Square Chinatown North Beach Telegraph Hill Nob Hill Russian Hill Pacific Heights South of Market Mission District Haight-Ashbury Golden Gate Park Northern San Francisco 11 23 37 55 69 85 95 109 117 129 139 149 About the Author A native San Franciscan, Erika Lenkert writes food, travel, and lifestyle articles for San Francisco Magazine, Wine Country Living, and Four Seasons.

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A word of warning: If you bring your car down here, practice caution as you would in any metropolitan city. Make sure any valuables are not visible from outside of the car. That said, begin at the busiest corner in the Mission District: 1. 24th and Mission. No matter what time of day or year, there’s always something going on here. At least one or two soapbox prophets preach to passersby in Spanish. Another righteous soul might be handing out pamphlets regarding the human injustices suffered by immigrant Mission District . 0.2 mi 0 finish 17th St. 18th St.  start here 1 2 3 26th St. 4 5 9 8 Garfield Square p Cap St. 11 Bryant St. 6 7 25th St. 26th St.

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Franklin . St Fillmore Sutter St. Post St. CHINATOWN t. tS ke UNION SQUARE ar M Geary St. St. O’Farrell d . St . St h . St . 17th St. 280 3rd St. Connecticut St. Deharo St. Potrero Av. Mission St. South Van Ness Av. Dolores St. Church St. Castro St. 24th St. St . St 101 MISSION DISTRICT 5t M . Haight St h 7t ar Oak St. . St nt 6 a t y h Br . St h St. 8t t. h 9t th S 10 t. tS ke Fell St. h 4t M 3r . St . St d t. t. ar m S n S w o o o s s i l H Fo rr Ha d n io iss SOUTH OF MARKET 2n 101 Turk St. ate Av. Golden G . St n o lt Fu 14th St. . Powell St NOB HILL n St.

Hollow City
by Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg
Published 1 Jan 2001

"The strongest argu- begins a few blocks west of the church, and training, elderly becoming homeless. her and drums away with the over, say, Dallas (other Mission District that day, I set next to and we've got in guy with the soul patch for is he preaches with. Turning sideways, Asian couple has ment church that to sing with a cordless mike, King gets behind the red drum same this 25 city's history. phone message from the performance When I call him back, he tells me of sev- which Latinos were attacked or thrown out of bars Mission District that no longer feels like their home. "It is in a horrible, hor- HOLLOW 26 CITY he says with emotion, and he repeats what several others rible, horrible," have told me, that the San Francisco police are busting the neighborhood's Latino bars for every possible code infraction, thereby accelerating their turnover into enterprises catering to wealthier and whiter The Mission is named after new Mission Dolores, the church built by Francis- can missionaries in the eighteenth century, and it has had a Latino pres- ence ever since, notably since the 1930s, but that population siege —mostly by money.

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Orthodox Church a benefit to help it relocate fi:-om a Street Sunday evening the and imme- St. John Col- few blocks down the boulevard holds its home of twenty-nine years. And this bar and this church aren't even in the San Francisco neighborhoods that are being in the most rapidly changed. What's happening Western Addition Mission District, is on Divisadero just the spillover fi'om the wild Street mutation of the once a bastion of Latino culture and cheap housing, and of the formerly industrial South of Market, districts that are becoming the global capital of the Internet economy. San Francisco has been for most of and an anomaly.

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This modernisms of the Being an politicians, rise to Montmartre and Greenwich was one way of being a participant in the debate about meaning and value, and the closer to the center of things one more one can participate. This is part of is the what makes an urbanity worth celebrating, this braiding together of disparate lives, but the new gentri- Eviction Defense Network poster, Mission District, 1999, fication threatens to yank out some of the strands ing urbanism itself Perhaps the function like suburbs as those them over. In the new urbanism will altogether, diminish- result in old cities that who were suburbia's blandly privileged take postwar years, the white middle class fled cities, which created the crises of abandonment, scarce city revenue, and depression that defined urban trouble through the 1970s, but the poor and the bohe- mian who stuck those to cities often made something lively there anyway; now who once fled have come back and created an unanticipated crisis of wealth for those raised on the urban crisis of poverty.

Frommer's San Francisco 2012
by Matthew Poole , Erika Lenkert and Kristin Luna
Published 4 Oct 2011

Amenities: Restaurant; concierge; fitness center; pool; room service; spa. In room: A/C, TV w/pay movies, CD player, hair dryer, minibar, MP3 docking station, Wi-Fi ($15 per day). Elements: A Hip Mission District Hotel Bad credit? No problem. There’s finally a place for the perpetually young and broke to stay and play in the heart of the Mission District. The Elements Hotel is sort of a cross between a boutique hotel and a hostel, offering both private rooms and shared dorms, all with private bathrooms. Add to that Wi-Fi Internet access throughout the hotel, a free Internet lounge, rooftop parties, free movie nights, lockers, free continental breakfast, luggage storage and laundry facilities, free linens, TVs (in private rooms), a lively restaurant and lounge called Medjool, and a plethora of inexpensive ethnic cafes in the neighborhood, and, baby, you’ve got it made.

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The gay community began to move here in the late 1960s and early 1970s from a neighborhood called Polk Gulch, which still has a number of gay-oriented bars and stores. Castro is one of the liveliest streets in the city and the perfect place to shop for gifts and revel in free-spiritedness. Check www.castroonline.com for more info. The Mission District Once inhabited almost entirely by Irish immigrants, the Mission District is now the center of the city’s Latino community as well as a mecca for young, hip residents. It’s an oblong area stretching roughly from 14th to 30th streets between Potrero Avenue on the east and Dolores Avenue on the west. In the outer areas, many of the city’s finest Victorians still stand, although they seem strangely out of place in the mostly lower-income neighborhoods.

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Frommer's San Francisco 2012® Table of Contents The Best of San Francisco The best Only-in-San Francisco Experiences The best splurge Hotels The best Moderately Priced Hotels The best Dining Experiences The best Things to Do for Free (or Almost) 10 More free & dirt-cheap secrets The best Outdoor Activities The best Offbeat Travel Experiences 10 Places to spot locals in their natural habitats San Francisco in Depth San Francisco Today Looking Back at San Francisco San Francisco in Popular Culture: Books, Films & Music When to Go San Francisco Neighborhoods & Suggested Itineraries Where to Stay What You’ll Really Pay The Best Hotel Bets Union Square Nob Hill SoMa Accommodations with free parking The best Family-Friendly Hotels The Financial District Sleeping seaside North Beach/Fisherman’s Wharf The Marina/Pacific Heights/Cow Hollow Japantown & Environs Civic Center The Castro Haight-Ashbury Near San Francisco International Airport Practical Information Where to Eat The Best Restaurant Bets Union Square Financial District The sun on your face at Belden Place SoMa Nob Hill/Russian Hill Chinatown North Beach/Telegraph Hill Fisherman’s Wharf The Marina/Pacific Heights/Cow Hollow sweet Nothings Japantown Civic Center/Hayes Valley Hidden treasures Mission District i scream for artisanal ice cream! The Castro & Noe Valley Top Chef’s Yigit Pura Picks Your Next dessert Haight-Ashbury Richmond/Sunset Districts Practical Information Exploring San Francisco Famous San Francisco Sights Funky Favorites at fisherman’s wharf Museums San Francisco’s Old-Fashioned arcade museum free Culture Neighborhoods Worth a Visit fortune cookie Factory The Presidio & Golden Gate National Recreation Area Golden Gate Park Religious Buildings Worth Checking Out Architectural Highlights Especially for kids Self-Guided & Organized Tours Getting Outside A whale of a Tale Spectator Sports City Strolls Shopping The Shopping Scene Shopping A to Z amazing Grazing San Francisco After Dark The Performing Arts Comedy & Cabaret The Club & Music Scene Drinking & smoking laws underground Entertainment The Bar Scene Eugenio Picks Your Next wine bar Gay & Lesbian Bars & Clubs heklina reviews Every Gay Bar in the Castro Film Side Trips from San Francisco Berkeley Oakland The USS Potomac: FDR’s floating white house Angel Island & Tiburon Sausalito A Picnic Lunch, sausalito style Marin, Muir Woods & Mount Tamalpais The Wine Country Napa Valley The Ins & Outs of shipping wine home Price Categories Enjoying art & nature What You’ll Really Pay Where to Stock Up for a gourmet picnic Sonoma Valley wannabe winemakers Pack Up for Sonoma’s “Grape Camp” Touring the sonoma valley by bike Planning Your Trip to San Francisco Getting There Getting Around Finding local gay events San Francisco 2012 by Matthew Poole & Erika Lenkert with Kristin Luna Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River St.

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco
by Chester W. Hartman and Sarah Carnochan
Published 15 Feb 2002

In his stead, Shelley appointed a close personal friend and political neophyte, Francis Solvin, a Coast Guard hearing officer. Shelley’s off-and-on opposition to redevelopment, combined 26 / Chapter 2 with serious community protests, resulted in a six-to-five Board of Supervisors vote upholding the Latino Mission District’s opposition to a neighborhood renewal program, and an unprecedented six-to-two vote asking the agency to halt its follow-up Western Addition A-2 project (a resolution Shelley then vetoed). Justin Herman and his renewal program were on the ropes. The same Examiner article, entitled “City Hall and the Slum Dragon,” began: “The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency is in trouble.

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There were appointments from labor’s ranks, giving them access and visibility.29 The key unions in Alioto’s drive were two of the city’s largest: Local 10 of the ILWU and Local 261 of the Laborers International, AFL-CIO. Both unions had large minority memberships, the ILWU being mostly black, and the Laborers having a strong position among Spanish-speaking workers in the Mission District. The ILWU gave Alioto additional access to the black community through the Baptist Ministers Union, one of the earliest black organizations to support him. According to Jack Morrison, “The ILWU did more to elect Alioto than anyone. . . . They gave him a liberal cachet and allowed him to get the black vote.”30 The Laborers Union, through its Mission-based caucus, the Centro Social Obrero, a major neighborhood political force, and through the Centro’s influence over the Mexican-American Political Association (MAPA), gave Alioto a powerful base of support within the city’s large Spanish-speaking population.

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Photo, Perretti & Park Pictures, courtesy of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. Figure 7b. [bottom] “We’re not blocking traffic—we are traffic” (Critical Mass biker). San Francisco’s monthly Critical Mass bike ride; Howard Street, passing Moscone Convention Center. Photo, Chris Carlsson. Figure 8. Response to gentrification in the Mission District. Photo, Frederic Stout, stoutfoto. Figure 9a. [top] Cartoon by Ken Alexander, ©San Francisco Examiner; used with permission. Figure 9b. [left] Official seal, San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (“Everyone wants to live in the city of San Francisco.”) Figure 10. San Francisco mayor Willie Brown (1996–2004).

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
by Conor Dougherty
Published 18 Feb 2020

testified in favor: City and County of San Francisco Planning Commission, Public Meeting, December 3, 2015, https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/player/clip/24255?view_id=20&meta_id=470365. would have shut: “City of San Francisco Mission District Housing Moratorium Initiative, Proposition I (November 2015),” Ballotpedia, https://ballotpedia.org/City_of_San_Francisco_Mission_District_Housing_Moratorium_Initiative,_Proposition_I_(November_2015). year getting yelled: David-Elijah Nahmod, “Affordable Housing Activists Take Their Battle to Supervisor Wiener’s Home,” Hoodline, May 31, 2015, http://hoodline.com/2015/05/affordable-housing-activists-take-their-battle-to-supervisor-s-home.

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And it was 180 the experience of the Bay Area, where art seemed to be defined by political activism and the struggle of just being there. This was never more true than it was during one of the region’s periodic tech booms. During the late 1990s dot-com boom, a group called the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project started encouraging residents of San Francisco’s Mission District to vandalize parked SUVs on the logic that this would prompt young professionals to move to neighborhoods where their cars were safer (and the restaurants who catered to them to go out of business). Two decades later, when Sonja arrived at the beginning of a new boom tied to smartphones and social media, the yuppies had traded their SUVs for Ubers, so activists had instead taken to spray-painting the sidewalks with phrases like “Tech Scum” in nicely stenciled lettering.

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This pushed Brian’s fair housing idea to the sidelines and made enforcing the Housing Accountability Act the guiding mission behind the California Renters Legal Advocacy & Education Fund (CaRLA), which was the name of the formally incorporated nonprofit that Brian and Sonja co-founded just before she filed the Lafayette suit. “Thirty‐five years of wonky liberals trying to induce localities to build housing has been a complete failure,” Brian declared at CaRLA’s first public event, which was held in a small classroom in a Mission District community center. “So, why not just sue the suburbs?” The event consisted of a panel discussion with two lawyers and an economist. Brian DIY catered it with a spread of wine, persimmons, and a blue-gray eggplant dip that came with crackers and an origin story. Toward the end, the panel went over Sonja’s Lafayette suit, which alleged that the city had illegally browbeaten Dennis O’Brien into abandoning his original 315-unit apartment project for the 44-home compromise that the city had now approved.

Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area
by Nick Edwards and Mark Ellwood
Published 2 Jan 2009

Internet start-ups. It has retained its cultural cachet, too, with the development of the Yerba Buena Gardens and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. SoMa’s waterfront, longneglected South Beach, has been rezoned for housing and businesses, anchored by the Giants’ baseball stadium. Inland, the Mission District was built around Mission Dolores, the oldest building in San Francisco. The neighborhood’s diverse population, which includes a large Hispanic community, is privy to a dense concentration of cafés, restaurants, and entertainment that runs along Valencia Street. Just west is an equally energetic quarter, the Castro, the nominal center for San Francisco’s gay population and home to most of the best gay bars and clubs.

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| AC TIVITIE S | CONSUM E | E V E N TS | NATURE | S I GHTS | 12 02 Gay Pride Page 280 • If you’re here in late June, be sure to check out the exuberant Gay Pride parade, which takes over the Castro district. 04 Musée Méchanique Page 84 • Relive your misspent youth with this bizarre but entertaining collection of classic arcade games and amusement park slot machines. 03 Cable cars Page 55 • Famous for good reason, these glorious old trams furnish irresistible photo opportunities as well as a leisurely way of climbing Downtown’s steepest hills. 06 05 Año Nuevo State Reserve Page 345 • No matter what time of year, you’ll see clusters of elephant seals lounging on the beach, but to see hundreds of them at once stop by during December’s mating season. | AC TIVITIE S | CONSUM E | E V E N TS | N ATURE | SI GHTS | Taquerias Page 196 • Nowhere is San Francisco’s Mexican heritage more evident than in the taquerias of the Mission District, where you can enjoy tacos, burritos, and enchilladas, among other delights. 07 Chinatown Pages 63 & 168 • Chinatown bustles with sumptuous dim-sum restaurants, traditional herbal stores, and steamy teahouses. Head to local legend the House of Nanking, on the eastern edge of Chinatown, for a superb meal at a bargain price. 08 Baseball Pages 107 & 273 • From the upper seats at AT&T Park you can enjoy a fine view of the Bay in between innings when the Giants have a home game.

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The last day-tour ferry returns at 4.30pm in winter, 6.30pm in summer; the night-tour ferries leave at 6.10pm and 6.50pm and return at 8.40pm and 9.25pm (day tour $24.50, night tour $31.50). Along Market Street Downtown, MUNI shares station concourses with BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit; t510/465-BART or 415/9892278, wwww.bart.gov), which is the fastest way to get to the East Bay – including downtown Oakland and Berkeley – and south of San Francisco, not to mention the bustling Mission District. Tickets aren’t cheap ($1.50– 6.30 depending on how far you ride), but the service is efficient and very dependable; trains follow four routes on a fixed schedule, usually arriving every ten minutes, although fewer trains run after 8pm, which means transfers and longer waits. Tickets can be purchased on the station concourse; save your ticket after entering the station, as it is also needed when exiting the station via the turnstiles.

San Francisco Like a Local
by DK Eyewitness
Published 4 Oct 2021

Reservations are impossible, but line up outside at 5pm and you should snag the first seating (doors open 5:30pm). » Don’t leave without sharing the burrata-topped, deep-fried garlic bread – it’s a mainstay on the nightly changing menu for good reason. g Special Occasion g Contents Google Map BLUE PLATE Map 4; 3218 Mission Street, Bernal Heights; ///loans.cabin.laptop; www.blueplatesf.com Right where the happening Mission district meets sleepier Bernal Heights, this blue-brick mainstay is where the city’s top chefs head for a taste of fresh California fare, without the sky-high price. Industry insiders love how the region’s finest produce is used to comforting, unfussy effect, like chicken wings smothered in local Point Reyes blue cheese.

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g California Fusion g Contents Google Map CALIFORNIOS Map 4; 3115 22nd Street, The Mission; www.californiossf.com; ///loser.likely.afford “Californios” are Hispanic people native to California; it’s a term suited to this modern Mexican restaurant, run by a Mexican-Venezuelan chef in the Latin-flavored Mission district. Val M. Cantu blends the region’s seasonal pickings with the cookery of his lineage, to Michelin-starred effect. The upshot is an incredibly personal menu that raises the neighborhood’s street taco fare more than just a notch. » Don’t leave without savoring the “three beans,” which supercharges the Mexican food staple to indulgent and delicious levels.

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The owners, brothers Dominic and Matt, started collecting in their DJ days in the mid-1990s, and are often around to share nerdy rare record chat. g Record Stores g Contents Google Map STRANDED Map 4; 1055 Valencia Street, The Mission; ///soap.cakes.slowly; www.strandedrecords.com The reincarnation of Mission district darling Aquarius Records, Stranded carries a well-curated selection of records that you generally wouldn’t find in a regular record store (we’re talking post-punk, avant-garde, and experimental). And we can’t forget the relentlessly smiley staff, who are only too happy to point you in the direction of a stellar record.

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food
by Chase Purdy
Published 15 Jun 2020

Scooting my metal stool up to the edge of a tabletop in JUST’s impressive food laboratory, I peer around me. This thing I’m waiting to see is supposed to be the powder keg that sets off a culinary shift—much talked about, rarely seen, and almost never tasted. The company’s headquarters sits in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, at the corner of Sixteenth and Folsom streets. It’s two stories tall and sprawls across 98,000 square feet of space—all enclosed behind thick, pinkish-beige walls that once housed the Joseph Schmidt Confections chocolate factory and later a Disney Pixar studio. JUST has married the building’s food and technology pasts.

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But of course I don’t. Any restaurant could have served the same dish to me and I would have been fooled. The seasoned chorizo tasted and felt just as I might expect, as moist and richly flavored as anything I’d get from the myriad taco stands outside JUST’s office in the historically Latino Mission District. And on a biological level, there was no difference between my lab-concocted taco and the chorizo I could get at the taco stand outside. Are we ready? I wondered. Josh Tetrick is the kind of person who forces you to pause and squint. There’s a quiet anxiousness inside him, making him at once curious and confusing.

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Noyes eventually leads us back down a long hallway from the office space, down a flight of stairs and back to the entrance of the building, where we emerge onto Folsom Street again. It’s wet from rain. We slide into a cab and I wonder, briefly, what we’ll have for dinner later. I wonder how much the two of us might mentally grapple with the meat on our plates, knowing there’s another way to produce it. We drive by a stretch of the Mission District that’s heavy with colorful hole-in-the-wall taquerías. Pink and pastel-green storefronts are framed by inviting signs and meat-laden menus taped to their windows. Little do these shop owners know that a man just a few blocks away is pouring millions of dollars into a promise that could fundamentally challenge their future generations from taking on some of these same recipes.

9Tail Fox
by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Published 19 Oct 2005

For Natalie it was positively rude. All the same, she’d talked to Bobby and that was more than she’d done to anyone else in the last forty-eight hours. CHAPTER 2 Friday 6 February ‘So,’ said a voice. ‘Worked your magic?’ The drawl was unmistakable. Pio Xavier Sanchez had left the Mission District a good Hispanic boy and returned a cowboy, in most senses of that word. Pete liked to keep cases simple and was rumoured to play fast and a little loose with his fiancée, Beatrice de la Paix; but he worked hard, said the right things at seminars, always arrived ten minutes early for each shift and did everything with a smile.

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‘Weird,’ said Bobby. ‘I’d have thought he’d be angry and protective. I would have been if I was that age and you were my sister.’ ‘You don’t get it,’ Flic said. ‘I never do stuff like this. And I spend my life telling Felipe not to do it either.’ She shook her head and lengthened her stride, as if leaving the Mission district behind her might make the problem go away. ‘How about we get some coffee?’ ‘Not sure I have time,’ said Flic, as she reached into her pocket and checked her phone for messages. ‘I mean it,’ she added, catching his expression. ‘I’m on early shift.’ ‘Good,’ said Bobby, ‘I’ll come with you.’ CHAPTER 31 Wednesday 3 March And that was where Sergeant Sanchez found Bobby.

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‘And that gun was for the dead guy?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, you forgot to include ammunition.’ Latif’s grin in the mirror was merciless. ‘And you should have made the gun an Uzi.’ CHAPTER 34 Thursday 4 March COP KILLER CONFESSES In a surprise move SFPD officers yesterday arrested Carlos Nero, a resident of the Mission District and a man known to the police on a number of previous occasions. ‘We were acting on a tip-off,’ admitted Captain Kravitz. A spokesperson from the mayor’s office said that for once the police seemed to have acted swiftly. ‘HE’S INNOCENT!’ Carlos Nero’s wife insists her husband is the victim of police brutality.

San Francisco
by Lonely Planet

➡ Look the part Define your own Mission hipster style with local designers at Mission Statement (Click here ), Nooworks ( Click here ) and Dema ( Click here ). Getting There & Away ➡ Bus In SoMa, the 30 and 45 lines run down 4th St from Union Square and the 14 runs through SoMa to the Mission District along Mission St. The 27 runs from Mission to Nob Hill via SoMa, the 47 runs along Harrison through SoMa and up Van Ness to Fisherman’s Wharf, while the 19 runs up 8th and Polk Sts to the wharf. In the Mission, bus 49 follows Mission St and Van Ness Ave to the wharf, while the 33 links Potrero and the Mission to the Castro, the Haight and Golden Gate Park

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Barflys can be merciless in these streets, relieving themselves on notable works by muralists who’ve gone on to become art stars – but when historic Balmy Alley works are tagged, muralists carefully restore them. 24th St & Around When 1970s Mission muralistas disagreed with US foreign policy in Latin America, they took to the streets with paintbrushes in hand – beginning with Balmy Alley (Click here ). Bod­egas, taquerias and community centers lining 24th St are now covered with murals of mighty Mayan goddesses and Aztec warriors, honoring the Mission District’s combined native and Mexican origins. At the corner of 24th and Bryant, the Galería de la Raza ( Click here ) has reserved billboard space for its Digital Mural Project, broadcasting messages such as ‘Trust your struggle.’ Valencia St & Around Before Barry McGee and Chris Johansen sold out shows at international art fairs, they could be found at Clarion Alley ( Click here ), gripping spray-paint cans.

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As soon as Andrew Hallidie made the formidable crag accessible by cable car in 1873, Nob Hill sprouted mansions for millionaires, including the ‘Big Four’ railroad barons: Leland Stanford, Collis P Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. Wherever there was green in the city, real-estate speculators saw greenbacks, cleverly repackaging even the flea-plagued cattle pastures of the Mission District and Cow Hollow as desirable residential districts. The Gold Rush was officially over; the land rush was on. Naturalist John Muir came through San Francisco in 1868, but quickly left with a shudder for Yosemite. However, the early environmentalist organization he founded, the Sierra Club, would eventually find its major backers in San Francisco.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

Perhaps because I didn’t really give a damn, I breezed through the gauntlet of interviews, rederiving the probabilities around the birthday paradox with a newly minted PhD named David Kauchak, and together with the VP of Research, filling a wall-sized whiteboard with some long-winded calculation or another. All I really remember is that I managed to cadge a Ford Mustang out of the rental agency, and once released from interview hell at six p.m. I still had a good three hours until my flight. I then embarked on what had really drawn me to SF: I hightailed it to the Mission District, parked the rental in that somewhat dodgy neighborhood, and went to Zeitgeist for one of their Bloody Marys.* It was as epic as I remembered. I bolted the pint of vodka, chili pepper brine, tomato juice, heap of horseradish, and phallic arrangement of pickled string beans and two olives, and hopped back into the Mustang, barreling it to the airport.

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After I finally got the money in my hot little hand, Narasin distracted himself by pointing out the photos of his children he had in his wallet, which he had spread out on the bar while digging around for his “bail me out of jail” check. “Look . . . this is who you’re working for right here.” He proceeded to give us the full proud-father walk-through. I looked at MRM, who had come along, and hoped he wouldn’t say something tactless. Finally done, we walked out into the stink and sunlight of the Mission District. “Well, what about my kids we’re working for, huh?” MRM asked. Of course MRM would say that. Like many hardcore engineers, the man was incapable of lying and/or reading a social situation. I’m glad he held his tongue for all of thirty seconds. More firewood on the AdGrok bonfire. The next chunk of change came from a more mysterious if not as amusing source.

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I didn’t realize it at the time, but Facebook was on its way to full-on Google levels of employee pampering, and the food in the kitchens would trend more upscale as time went on, going from Snickers to Toblerone, Doritos to authentically spicy Indian chaat snacks. The coffee also improved, forgoing a generic corporate roast for that of Philz Coffee, the locavore’s coffeehouse that had started in the trendy Mission District. By the time I left, there would be a full-on Philz retail location on campus that served as caffeine fill station, social gathering point, and informal meeting venue. But that was in the still-distant future. Glucose levels reupped, back into Pong we went. Calmly sitting square in a lone chair up front was an Indian-looking dude with curly hair.

San Francisco
by Lonely Planet

➡ Look the part Define your own Mission hipster style with local designers at Mission Statement (Click here ), Nooworks ( Click here ) and Dema ( Click here ). Getting There & Away ➡ Bus In SoMa, the 30 and 45 lines run down 4th St from Union Square and the 14 runs through SoMa to the Mission District along Mission St. The 27 runs from Mission to Nob Hill via SoMa, the 47 runs along Harrison through SoMa and up Van Ness to Fisherman’s Wharf, while the 19 runs up 8th and Polk Sts to the wharf. In the Mission, bus 49 follows Mission St and Van Ness Ave to the wharf, while the 33 links Potrero and the Mission to the Castro, the Haight and Golden Gate Park

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Barflys can be merciless in these streets, relieving themselves on notable works by muralists who’ve gone on to become art stars – but when historic Balmy Alley works are tagged, muralists carefully restore them. 24th St & Around When 1970s Mission muralistas disagreed with US foreign policy in Latin America, they took to the streets with paintbrushes in hand – beginning with Balmy Alley (Click here ). Bod­egas, taquerias and community centers lining 24th St are now covered with murals of mighty Mayan goddesses and Aztec warriors, honoring the Mission District’s combined native and Mexican origins. At the corner of 24th and Bryant, the Galería de la Raza ( Click here ) has reserved billboard space for its Digital Mural Project, broadcasting messages such as ‘Trust your struggle.’ Valencia St & Around Before Barry McGee and Chris Johansen sold out shows at international art fairs, they could be found at Clarion Alley ( Click here ), gripping spray-paint cans.

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As soon as Andrew Hallidie made the formidable crag accessible by cable car in 1873, Nob Hill sprouted mansions for millionaires, including the ‘Big Four’ railroad barons: Leland Stanford, Collis P Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. Wherever there was green in the city, real-estate speculators saw greenbacks, cleverly repackaging even the flea-plagued cattle pastures of the Mission District and Cow Hollow as desirable residential districts. The Gold Rush was officially over; the land rush was on. Naturalist John Muir came through San Francisco in 1868, but quickly left with a shudder for Yosemite. However, the early environmentalist organization he founded, the Sierra Club, would eventually find its major backers in San Francisco.

Frommer's California 2007
by Harry Basch , Mark Hiss , Erika Lenkert and Matthew Richard Poole
Published 6 Dec 2006

The Castro One of the liveliest streets in town, Castro is the epicenter of gay tradition in San Francisco. At the end of Market Street, between 17th and 18th, the Castro supports dozens of shops, restaurants, and bars catering to the gay community. Open-minded straight people are welcome, too. Mission District This is another area greatly affected by the city’s new wealth. The Mexican and Latin American populations—along with their cuisine, traditions, and art—still make the Mission District a vibrant area to visit. Some parts of the neighborhood are still poor and sprinkled with homeless GETTING AROUND people, gangs, and drug addicts, but young urbanites have heavily infiltrated, forging the oh-so-hot restaurants and bars that stretch from 16th Street and Valencia to 25th and Mission streets.

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Bay to Breakers Foot Race, San Francisco. One of the city’s most popular annual events, it’s more fun than run. Thousands of entrants show up dressed—or undressed—in their best costumes for the 71⁄2-mile run. Call & 415/777-7770 or log on to www. baytobreakers.com. Third Sunday of May. Carnival, San Francisco. The Mission District’s largest annual event is a 2day series of festivities culminating with a parade on Mission Street. Half a million spectators line the route, and samba musicians and dancers continue playing on 14th Street, near Harrison, after the march. Call & 415/9200125 or visit www.carnavalsf.com. Memorial Day weekend.

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If you’re visiting on a weekday, try Fong-Torres’s standard Chinatown tour, another authentic introduction to delicacies in the vicinity. Work off lunch (included in the tour price) with a visit to Golden Gate Park (p. 115), where you can explore, lounge in the grass, or ride a paddle boat. Head to the bustling Mission District for dinner at Delfina , one of the city’s best Italian restaurants, with its hip, young, fun patrons and casual setting (p. 110). Day 4: Union Square Spend your last day in the city shopping at Union Square department stores and boutiques. Lunch at the elegant Campton Place restaurant , where Swiss chef Daniel Humm creates gorgeous European cuisine in a sophisticated, quiet, yet comfortable setting (p. 77).

A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
by Rebecca Solnit
Published 31 Aug 2010

On his rounds, Schmitt obliged some petty thieves to put back the boxes of cigars they had taken (and regretted it when the cigars went up in smoke soon after), shut some saloons, shot wounded horses, brought a dead Italian grocer out of the rubble, and finally got permission to go home and check on his family. A passerby had told him, wrongly, that all the houses in his part of the Mission District had been destroyed, and he feared for his family but found the house damaged but standing. His wife and daughters came down to greet him from a friend’s house, glad to see him after hearing exaggerated reports that made them fear he had been killed. Rumor is the first rat to infest a disaster.

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Morris, like much of the occupying army, may not have known the city very well. The fires had ravaged many mansions, luxury hotels, and the central business district almost as soon as it burned the poor neighborhoods nearby. Other working-class districts—Telegraph Hill, Potrero Hill, and the Mission District—came through with earthquake damage but little fire damage. The authorities’ fear was not precipitated by anything the public did in those days, but by earlier anxieties in that era of upheaval. They believed uncontrolled crowds routinely degenerated into mobs, and they doubted the legitimacy of the system they dominated, since they expected mobs to tear it apart given the least opportunity.

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A hundred men at a time pulled houses down by ropes and removed the dismantled structures from reach of the flames. A miller reported that ten of the Globe Grain and Milling Company’s employees were prepared to save the mill, and could have, in his opinion, but were driven away at gunpoint. Losses totaled $220,000. The Mission District was saved by sheer manpower, and the crucial battle was near the kitchen operated by Officer Schmitt’s family at Dolores Park. A volunteer named Edwards worked for twenty-four hours without stopping, and when the fire was out, his shoes had burned through and the soles of his feet had been so badly scorched he could no longer walk.

San Francisco Like a Local: By the People Who Call It Home
by Dk Eyewitness
Published 5 Apr 2023

Reservations are impossible, but line up outside at 5pm and you should snag the first seating (doors open 5:30pm). » Don’t leave without sharing the burrata-topped, deep-fried garlic bread – it’s a mainstay on the nightly changing menu for good reason. g Special Occasion g Contents Google Map BLUE PLATE Map 4; 3218 Mission Street, Bernal Heights; ///loans.cabin.laptop; www.blueplatesf.com Right where the happening Mission district meets sleepier Bernal Heights, this blue-brick mainstay is where the city’s top chefs head for a taste of fresh California fare, without the sky-high price. Industry insiders love how the region’s finest produce is used to comforting, unfussy effect, like meatloaf with mashed potatoes and Blue Lake green beans.

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The owners, brothers Dominic and Matt, started collecting in their DJ days in the mid-1990s, and are often around to share nerdy rare record chat. g Record Stores g Contents Google Map STRANDED Map 4; 1055 Valencia Street, The Mission; ///soap.cakes.slowly; www.strandedrecords.com The reincarnation of Mission district darling Aquarius Records, Stranded carries a well-curated selection of records that you generally wouldn’t find in a regular record store (we’re talking avant-garde and experimental). And we can’t forget the relentlessly smiley staff, who are only too happy to point you in the direction of a stellar record.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification
by Peter Moskowitz
Published 7 Mar 2017

And white people have multiplied too: between 2000 and 2013, in Freret’s most gentrified census tract, the African American population dropped from 82 to 72 percent, while the white population climbed from 13 to 22 percent. Freret feels like so many gentrifying neighborhoods in US cities. If you spun around a couple of times, you might think you were in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or San Francisco’s Mission District. The Mojo Coffee on one of Freret’s corners could be in Brooklyn or Portland, or really anywhere with enough twentysomethings with MacBooks to sustain a business that makes most of its money from $4 cups of coffee. The tattoo place could come from Austin, Texas. The burger joint could be in Uptown Minneapolis.

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To the person just moving to New Orleans, all the white hipsters biking around the Bywater is not the sign of the displacement of 100,000 black people; to someone moving to Williamsburg now, the glass condos are as much a natural part of the cityscape as anything else. In this way, gentrification suppresses and displaces memory, and makes it harder to build lasting justice. This ignorance benefits the powerful—a new resident who has no memory of the old Mission District in San Francisco is much less likely to protest what others may see as its destruction when a condo comes along. So if we are committed to fighting for an ungentrified future, the first step is to build consensus about what a city should be. Through my research on gentrification, I’ve learned of dozens of policy solutions to gentrification and displacement that are realistic and proven to work.

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New York City still manages 328 housing projects that house some 400,000 residents—impressive by US standards, and proof that public housing is still viable in this country. End protectionism, add infrastructure. Why do Presidio Heights in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York look remarkably similar to how they did fifty years ago, while the Mission District and East New York are expected to bear the brunt of new development? Cities in the United States are several times less dense than their European and Asian counterparts. (New York is an exception, but its density is very uneven from neighborhood to neighborhood.) The flocks of people moving to New York undoubtedly would rather live in Manhattan than East New York, yet because the city protects much of Manhattan’s residential areas with restrictive zoning but allows upzoning in poorer areas, gentrifiers are funneled into areas that are least capable of dealing with waves of new residents.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

Some hacker houses were attached to startup investment incubators or shared workspaces. Others amounted to little more than flimsy bunks in a windowless room. A number of trend-savvy real estate investors purchased or leased dozens of residential properties around the Bay Area to rent out in this fashion. I had my eye on one special property in the Mission District. It was called 20Mission, and it had been designated San Francisco’s “best hacker hostel” in 2014 by a local alternative newspaper, SF Weekly. The paper said 20Mission was a 41-room complex founded by Bitcoin trader and entrepreneur Jered Kenna, who recruited an international group of start-up founders and artists to coexist there.

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The murals were a neighborhood fixture, but frequently updated, and so they, too, began to depict the Man’s new manifestations, with tech-worker shuttle buses and condo towers surrounded by the righteous masses. Every cloying marketing slogan was subject to petulant revision by the black marker brigades. A few sarcastic strokes improved the sign outside an ostensibly charitable “economic development corporation” in the Mission District, which was buying up apartments around the neighborhood to renovate as offices: The Mission longtimers had no sympathy for robot butlers. They worked starvation wages to deliver meals, pour drinks, and mop up messes left behind by the digital colonizers. What did they get in return? Bad tips and an eviction notice.

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But prosecutors showed how Ulbricht had tried to hire a hit man from the Hells Angels to kill another drug dealer who’d threatened to extort him. In reality, Ulbricht was plotting with and against undercover federal investigators who already had him surrounded. A month after the feds shut Ulbricht down, another former Eagle Scout from Texas launched Silk Road 2.0. Ulbricht’s successor, a twenty-six-year-old SpaceX employee and Mission District resident named Blake Benthall, lasted less than two months before his arrest on charges of “drug dealing, computer hacking, money laundering, and trafficking in fake identification documents.” Benthall awaits trial as of this writing. The prosecuting U.S. attorney, Preet Bharara of Manhattan, made a statement intended for overzealous entrepreneurs: “Let’s be clear—this Silk Road, in whatever form, is the road to prison.”

Frommer's California 2009
by Matthew Poole , Harry Basch , Mark Hiss and Erika Lenkert
Published 2 Jan 2009

Amenities: Access to adjoining health club and lar ge, heated indoor pool; courtesy car weekday mornings; room ser vice (breakfast only); same -day laundr y ser vice/dry cleaning; saf e. In room: A/C, TV, free Wi-Fi, minibar, hair dryer, iron. 87 S A N F R A N C I S CO 88 W H E R E TO S TAY 5 Finds Elements: A Hip Mission District Hotel Bad credit? No problem. There’s finally a place for the perpetually young and broke to stay and play in the heart of the Mission District. The Elements Hotel is sort of a cross between a boutique hotel and a hostel, offering private rooms and shared dorms, all with private bathrooms. Add to that Wi-Fi access throughout the hotel, a free Internet lounge, rooftop parties, free movie nights, lockers, free continental breakfast, luggage storage and laundry facilities, free linens, TVs (in private rooms), a lively restaurant and lounge called Medjool, and a plethora of inexpensive ethnic cafes in the neighborhood, and, baby, you’ve got it made.

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If you’re visiting on a w eekday, try Fong-Torres’s standar d Chinato wn tour , another authentic intr oduction to delicacies hidden throughout Chinatown. Work off lunch (included in the tour price) with a visit to Golden Gate Park (p. 124), where you can visit the amazing de Y oung Museum (p. 128), lounge in the grass, or ride a paddle boat. H ead to the bustling , Mission District for dinner at Delfina one of the city ’s best I talian r estaurants, with its hip, young, fun patrons and casual setting (p. 116). SUGGESTED ITINERARIES 64 A F O O D & W I N E LO V E R ’S M O VA B L E F E A S T I N 1 W E E K 4 contemporary architecture, as well as for its Carneros District pinot noirs (p . 200).

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Lincoln Way C lar O R I E N TAT I O N Cr iss y GOLDEN GATE NATIONAL RECREATIONAL AREA Los Angeles Wood Aveside . d Fie ld 69 San Francisco Bay Pier 41 (Ferries to Alcatraz) Fisherman’s Wharf PIER 39 Aquatic Park Fie ld St . h 5t . St 280 101 Rhode Island St. Harrison St. . . St h 7t 16th St. 17th St. Bryant St. . MISSION DISTRICT 101 Potrero Ave. Mission St. Guerrero St. Dolores St. Church St. Ave South Van Ness 14th St. t. tS ke ar M . St h . St t. h S 9t th 10 101 Duboce Ave. Castro St. St. Ashbury St. Clayton Castro St. ket St . . St h . n d St io ar iss w om . o M s l H St 80 Fo on SOMA rr is . Ha St nt 6th ya r St B .

Lonely Planet Pocket San Francisco
by Lonely Planet and Alison Bing
Published 31 Aug 2012

Getting Around BART Best for... travel between downtown and the Mission, East Bay and SFO. Throughout this book, venues readily accessible by BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit; www.bart.gov; 4am-midnight Mon-Fri, 6am-midnight Sat, 8am-midnight Sun) are denoted by followed by the name of the nearest BART station. Destinations Downtown, Mission District, SF & Oakland airports, Berkeley & Oakland. Schedules Consult http://transit.511.org. Tickets Sold in BART station machines; fares start at $1.75. Bicycle Best for... sightseeing west of Van Ness Ave. Rentals Near Golden Gate Park (Click here ) and Fisherman’s Wharf ( Click here ).

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Be sure to double check compatibility with your phone service provider. Operator Services International operator 00 Local directory 411 Long-distance directory information 1 + area code + 555-1212 Operator 0 Toll-free number information 800-555-1212 Toilets Top Tip Haight-Ashbury and the Mission District have a woeful lack of public toilets; you may have to buy coffee to access locked customer-only bathrooms. › Citywide Self-cleaning, coin-operated outdoor kiosk commodes cost 25¢; there are 25 citywide, mostly located in North Beach, Fisherman’s Wharf and downtown. Toilet paper not always available. › Downtown Clean toilets and baby-changing tables can be found in Westfield San Francisco Centre ( Click here ). › Civic Center San Francisco Main Library (Click here ) has restrooms, as do public library branches and parks throughout the city.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 12 Nov 2019

As a result, the real wage after subtracting the cost of living is indeed much higher for the lawyer in New York than in the Deep South (37 percent), but the opposite is true for the janitor (he would make 6 percent more in the Deep South). It makes no sense for a janitor to move to New York.76 The Mission District in San Francisco has become a symbol of this phenomenon. Until the late 1990s, the Mission District was a working-class neighborhood dominated by recent Hispanic immigrants, but its location made it attractive to the young workers of the tech industry. Average rents for one-bedroom apartments have been going up steeply, from $1,900 in 2011 to $2,675 in 2013 and $3,250 in 2014.77 Today, the average rent of an apartment in the Mission District puts it entirely out of reach for someone earning minimum wage.78 The “Mission yuppie eradication project,” a last-ditch effort to drive tech workers away by vandalizing their cars, drew considerable attention to the gentrification of the Mission District, but ultimately was doomed.79 Of course, more houses can be built near booming cities, but it takes time.

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Average rents for one-bedroom apartments have been going up steeply, from $1,900 in 2011 to $2,675 in 2013 and $3,250 in 2014.77 Today, the average rent of an apartment in the Mission District puts it entirely out of reach for someone earning minimum wage.78 The “Mission yuppie eradication project,” a last-ditch effort to drive tech workers away by vandalizing their cars, drew considerable attention to the gentrification of the Mission District, but ultimately was doomed.79 Of course, more houses can be built near booming cities, but it takes time. Moreover, many of the older cities in the United States have zoning regulations designed to make it hard to build up or build densely. Buildings cannot be very different from what exists, property lots have to be a minimum size, and so on. This makes it harder to transition to high-density neighborhoods when housing demand goes up.

The Passenger
by AA.VV.
Published 23 May 2022

And yet we continue to pretend we all exist in the same time zone. That’s why the prejudices that a citizen of one country projects on to another are so interesting. That’s why it’s so fascinating to perceive how customs and traditions are transmitted and modified. Imagine you’re an Italian and you step into a café in the Mission District, that once run-down but now very gentrified San Francisco neighbourhood, and you order an espresso. The tattoo-covered barista (note the Italian word) sets a small timer and calculates how long the infusion will take, with the result being a green beverage that has a decidedly sour taste. When you complain, the barista says, “That’s how it’s done in Italy!”

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NC HERNANDEZ Photographs by Josh Edelson and Jana Ašenbrennerová TUESDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2012 I had begun to notice cars with giant fuzzy pink mustaches attached to their frontsides since the time of the San Francisco Pride parade in June, so I thought they were holdover revelers from the city’s vibrant gay scene traversing the gridded streets of the Golden City. I had cleared my morning schedule that day so I could cast a ballot, still preferring in-person voting to voting by mail. I was among the three-quarters of California’s registered voters to cast a ballot by the end of the day. The polling station was only a block from my Mission District building—I saw two of the pink-mustachioed vehicles on that short walk—located in the rec room of an apartment complex for seniors. The makeshift nature, slovenly dressed poll watchers, and confused poll workers crossing names off paper lists, belied the gravity of a presidential election, but most polling stations in San Francisco are set up in unused common areas of apartment buildings or in someone’s garage with the door propped open.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017

Not only could you chart the location of an object on a map but, since the earliest models of the phone had an accelerometer, you could also tell if the car was moving or not. That meant that an iPhone could function like a taximeter and be used to charge passengers by the minute or the mile. He talked it over that year with many of his friends. The author and investor Tim Ferriss first brainstormed with Camp about the then-unnamed Uber at a bar in the Mission District. He thought it was a great idea, then forgot all about it. A month or two later he got a call from Camp, and when they started talking about Uber again, Ferriss was shocked. Camp “had done an incredibly deep dive into the flaws of black cars and a kind of lost utility, the downtime of black cars and taxis,” he says.

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In 2008, before they entered Y Combinator, when Chesky and Joe Gebbia were still flopping around San Francisco and soliciting everyone they could find for advice, the Marine turned venture capitalist Paige Craig introduced them to Hoffer and the three of them met for pizza one night in the city’s Mission District. Chesky and Gebbia peppered Hoffer with questions about Couchsurfing and the challenge of building trust between total strangers who are sleeping under the same roof. The dinner was friendly, but Hoffer sensed there was trouble ahead. “They were clearly approaching it intelligently and they seemed smart.

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The city that celebrated its bohemian past and distinctive neighborhoods was at the nexus of several converging trends: the acceleration of the internet economy, the migration of Silicon Valley startups up Highway 101 and into the city, and the infusion of millennials into cities. Home prices in the city were skyrocketing as a result, and gentrification was rapidly changing beloved neighborhoods, such as the predominantly Latino Mission District. It all produced a kind of poorly articulated rage. The convenient culprits included the street-clogging double-decker company buses that ferried employees to the offices of Google, Facebook, and Apple; the tech companies themselves; and the so-called tech bros, vaguely defined stereotypical males who could be relied on to regularly Tweet or blog something racist, sexist, or generally insensitive, thereby indicting the entire tech industry.

Patricia Unterman's San Francisco Food Lover's Pocket Guide
by Patricia Unterman and Ed Anderson
Published 1 Mar 2007

The prices are not cheap, but the cookware, small appliances, and utensils carried here at the flagship store are high quality. RESTAURANTS BURGER JOINT 700 Haight Street (at Pierce); 415-864-3833; www.burgerjointsf.com; Open daily 11 A.M. to 10 P.M.; Inexpensive; Credit cards: MC, V Like its Mission District location (at 807 Valencia, between 19th and 20th Streets), this diner-style hamburger shop uses naturally raised Niman Ranch ground beef for its burgers and Double Rainbow ice cream for its thick shakes. BURGERMEISTER 86 Carl Street (near Cole); 415-566-1274; www.burgermeistersf.com; Open daily 11 A.M. to 10 P.M.; Inexpensive; Cash only This tiny place does the hamburger right, featuring flavorful Niman Ranch ground beef, grilled to exact specification.

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TAQUERIA EL BALAZO 1654 Haight Street (between Clayton and Cole); 415-864-8608; www.elbalazo.net; Open daily 10:30 A.M. to 10:30 P.M.; Inexpensive; Credit cards: MC, V The food here—in particular an aromatic chicken mole in burritos and tacos, or moist and buttery carnitas in soft tacos—reaches the best Mission District standards. Freshness is key, nothing sits around, and flavors are authentic, although an awful lot of salt is used in practically everything. THEP PHANOM 400 Waller Street (at Fillmore); 415-431-2526; Open nightly 5:30 P.M. to 10:30 P.M.; Inexpensive; Credit cards: AE, DC, D, MC, V Aficionados of Thai cooking consider this one of their favorite local Thai restaurants.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 11 Oct 2021

One of them refused to be with a roommate, but now she’s got a place to stay with a roommate. She’s off the streets going to homeless health care for her drug treatment program. I’m almost thinking now that for some people, it’s not Housing First, it’s Medication First.”42 10 Not Everyone’s a Victim When Jabari Jackson was a teenager growing up in the Mission District of San Francisco in the 1980s, he started losing friends. “We went camping up in Lake Sonoma, and Kermit drowned. He was the baby of the crew. We all grew up together. A year after that, Gerald got shot in the head. Then this guy Kala got killed. A couple of other people got killed. It was like somebody was dying every month.”

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“Ah, fuck that,” he said. “I’m going ridin’. I’m going to do this. I’ll call you later.” “No, come on,” she begged, pulling on his arm. “Let’s go home. Come on, let’s go home.” But she couldn’t change his mind. Jabari hopped in the car with his friends and drove off to Twenty-Fourth and Shotwell in the Mission District. Jabari grew up middle-class, not poor, in the Mission, and went to Catholic school. “I went to good schools,” he said. “After grammar school, I went to Riordan, an all-boys Catholic school.” Jabari rebelled. “The big homies in the neighborhood was either in and out of prison, sold dope, pimping, gangbanging, and so those was the people that I idolized.

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I wanted to be the guy with the girls all around me with the jewelry. I want to be this person with the gold chains, the beeper, the fly clothes, the money in the pocket, all the girls standing by the cars.” Jabari started dealing drugs in the open-air market around Twenty-Fourth Street and Hampshire Street in the Mission District. “Drinking, hanging out on the block, coming home late. Around this time I started dabbling with cocaine, snorting cocaine. Drugs were always a part of the thing because all my friends was drug dealers. We all sold dope, we all hustled on the block. Then it was just crazy after that. Boom: girlfriends, buying cars.

Northern California Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

October 6Vineyard Festivals California’s wine regions celebrate their harvest with star-chef food-and-wine shindigs, grape-stomping ‘crush’ parties and barrel tastings; some events start in September. zLitquake San Francisco’s thrilling literary festival features readings, storytelling hours, workshops, author appearances, guided walking tours and a ‘LitCrawl’ between Mission district pubs. 5Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival Pays homage to pumpkins, art, wine and community, not necessarily in that order. The event (http://pumpkinfest.miramarevents.com) has been held in the ostensible world pumpkin capital for more than 45 years. November Rain and snow begin to fall and ski season begins at the end of the month.

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The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are cold and dark; nobody travels at this time, and hotel rates plummet. zDía de los Muertos Mexican communities honor ancestors on November 2 with costumed parades, sugar skulls, graveyard picnics and candlelight processions. Join the colorful festivities in San Francisco’s Mission District. December Hoards descend for skiing in Tahoe. Roads to Yosemite are closed in the winter, and rain can sometimes flood Wine Country. San Fran is lit up with holiday lights and music performances. zGreat Dickens Christmas Fair Over several winter weekends, San Francisco’s Cow Palace is transformed into a scene out of Victorian London, where lamp-lit, treasure-filled shops line the street and vendors hawk their wares.

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San Francisco begs exploration – its hills, cable cars, glorious bay and dynamic culture are unique in the world. Wander hidden alleyways in Chinatown, see Beat-poet hangouts in North Beach and ascend Telegraph Hill beneath flocks of wild parrots. Head to Golden Gate Park for gorgeous gardens and thrilling museums, then make for the Mission District to find colorful murals and delicious tacos. Cross the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin Headlands and hike cliffs rising straight from the Pacific. Or wander among redwoods – the world's tallest trees – at cathedral-like Muir Woods National Monument. For a full-day trip, go whale-watching on the rugged coast of Point Reyes National Seashore.

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream
by Arianna Huffington
Published 7 Sep 2010

David Brooks has written about the need to replace our “atomized, segmented society” with a society “oriented around relationships and associations”—an approach advocated by conservative British writer Phillip Blond in his book Red Tory.152 “Volunteering, especially among professional classes and the young,” Blond wrote, “has doubled in recent months”—proof, he suggests, that “the wish to make a difference is a common and rising aspiration.”153 Those who are working to address the devastation in their own communities are willing to experiment, try many things, fail, and try again, the way you do when you really care. And there is extraordinary creativity in local philanthropy. In 2002 in San Francisco’s Mission district, author Dave Eggers and teacher Nínive Calegari opened 826 Valencia, a writing lab that provides free tutoring to local kids and has attracted hundreds of skilled volunteer instructors.154 Offering drop-in, one-on-one instruction with a focus on the creative and fun aspects of writing, as well as other learning programs including field trips and in-class learning, 826 Valencia has since fanned out across the country, opening chapters—and enlisting volunteer tutors—in Los Angeles, New York City, Michigan, Seattle, Chicago, and Boston.

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Harlem Children’s Zone, www.hcz.org. 140 Susie Buffett offers another shining example: Quotes and materials provided by Susie Buffett to the author in conversation and by email, May 2010. 141 In The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin: Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (New York: Penguin, 2009), 12. 142 New scientific data tells us: Ibid., 47. 143 “An individual,” said Martin Luther King: Martin Luther King Jr., The Measure of a Man (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001), 43. 144 the Huffington Post published a story about Monique Zimmerman-Stein: Julian Hattem, “Mom Goes Blind So Her Daughters Can See,” 28 Sep. 2009, www.huffingtonpost.com. 145 The Stein family’s story struck: Victoria Fine, “Help the Steins: Mother Who Went Blind to Save Her Children’s Sight Struggles with Medical Debt,” 13 Oct. 2009, www.huffingtonpost.com. 146 “We are on the cusp of an epic shift”: Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (New York: Penguin, 2009), 3. 147 “Seven billion individual connections”: Ibid., 594. 148 In his 1963 work “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” www.africa.upenn.edu. 149 Conservative commentator Tony Blankley: Left, Right and Center, 15 Jan. 2010, www.kcrw.com. 150 As America’s Misery Index soars: www.miseryindex.us. 151 “We have to lean on one another …”: Barack Obama, eulogy for West Virginia Miners, 25 Apr. 2010, www.whitehouse.gov. 152 David Brooks has written about the need: David Brooks, “The Broken Society,” 18 Mar. 2010, www.nytimes.com. 153 “Volunteering, especially among professional classes and the young”: Philip Blond “Cameron’s ‘Big Society,’ ” 25 Apr. 2010, www.guardian.co.uk. 154 In 2002 in San Francisco’s Mission district: “About 826,” www.826valencia.org. 155 In Brooklyn, New York, FEAST: Danny LaChance, “An Idea Grows in Brooklyn,” University of Minnesota Alumni Association, spring 2010, www.minnesotaalumni.org. 156 Matthew Bishop, U.S. business editor for the Economist: Howard Davies, “A New Take on Giving,” 10 Jan. 2009, www.guardian.co.uk. 157 Social entrepreneurs pinpoint social problems: Caroline Hsu, “Entrepreneur for Social Change,” 31 Oct. 2005, www.usnews.com. 158 Providing microcredit to small businesses: Devin Leonard, “Microcredit?

The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives
by Lisa Servon
Published 10 Jan 2017

It can be as simple as a mindset: wanting, as Murphy says, “to serve all of the clients in our community, from the low-income and underbanked to the wealthiest.” MISSION ASSET FUND The office of Mission Asset Fund (MAF) sits in the middle of a busy commercial block in San Francisco’s Mission District. The brightly painted space buzzes with activity. José Quiñones started MAF in 2008, convinced that he had a better way to combat financial exclusion compared to the strategies he saw being promoted. Where policymakers saw an unbanked community, Quiñones saw people, all over San Francisco’s Mission District, saving money. They just weren’t saving it in banks. They were using ROSCAs like the ones described in Chapter 7. Rather than try to change their behavior, Quiñones thought, why not try to make what they were already doing work better?

California
by Sara Benson
Published 15 Oct 2010

Daily rates range between $18 and $28. Public Transportation BART The Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART; 415-989-2278; www.bart.gov; 4am-midnight Mon-Fri, 6am-midnight Sat, 8am-midnight Sun) is a subway system linking SFO, the Mission District, downtown, San Francisco and the East Bay. Downtown, the BART route runs beneath Market St, and it’s a quick 10-minute ride to the Mission District; take any train heading south. BART is convenient, economical and generally quite safe, although caution is required around some BART stations at night. One-way fares start at $1.25 within San Francisco, and range between $2 and $5 from downtown to various outlying areas.

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The most famous grapes grow in the Russian River Valley, Sonoma Valley and Napa Valley. After all this rural meandering, get a dose of big-city culture by crossing the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, sitting proudly on its often foggy bay. Peek into the mural-filled alleyways of Chinatown and the Mission District, bite into inspiring nouveau California cuisine at the waterfront Ferry Building, then hop on a boat over to infamous Alcatraz prison, aka ‘the Rock.’ South of San Francisco, Hwy 1 traces a beautiful stretch of coast. Stop at wacky Santa Cruz and historic Monterey before reaching pint-sized Carmel-by-the-Sea, the gateway to beguiling Big Sur, whose timeless charms have inspired generations of poets and painters.

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* * * Nicknamed ‘the Paris of the West’ more than a century ago, San Francisco still has as much romance, sophistication and gaiety as the French capital. Steal away with your honey for a long weekend, starting with classic cocktails at the Top of the Mark. Uncover the alleyways of Chinatown and wander the mural-adorned Mission District, then take our literary walking tour through Italian-flavored North Beach and Russian Hill. Brave the fog on a cruise over to Alcatraz or lose yourself on a sunny day in Golden Gate Park, stopping to smell the flowers where hippies danced in the ‘Summer of Love.’ Escape the city’s 7-sq-mile peninsula via the landmark Golden Gate Bridge to hike across the Marin Headlands or take the ferry from Tiburon over to Angel Island and go kayaking, hiking and mountain-biking.

Coastal California
by Lonely Planet

The parking garage under Portsmouth Sq in Chinatown is reasonably priced for shorter stops; ditto for the St Mary’s Square Garage ( 415-956-8106; California St), under the square, at Grant and Kearny Sts. Daily rates range between $20 and $35. BART Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART; 415-989-2278; www.bart.gov; 4am-midnight Mon-Fri, 6am-midnight Sat, 8am-midnight Sun) is a subway system linking SFO, the Mission District, downtown, San Francisco and the East Bay. The fastest link between Downtown and the Mission District also offers transit to SF airport, Oakland ($3.20) and Berkeley ($3.75). Within SF, one-way fares start at $1.75. MUNI MUNI (Municipal Transit Agency; www.sfmuni.com) operates bus, streetcar and cable-car lines. Two cable-car lines leave from Powell and Market Sts; a third leaves from California and Markets Sts.

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You’ll never be able to eat or drink your fill here, but that just gives you an irresistable excuse to come back and do it all over again. Top of section TOPexperiences San Francisco’s Neighborhoods 1 As anyone who has clung to the side of a cable car can tell you, this city (Click here) gives you a heck of a ride, from the Marina’s chic waterfront to the edgy Mission district. And just when you think you have a grasp on the ‘Paris of the West,’ you turn another corner to find a brightly painted alleyway mural, a filigreed Victorian roofline or a hidden stairway with bay-view panoramas that will entirely change your outlook. Renovated Victorian terrace houses, San Francisco RICHARD I’ANSON/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Big Sur 2 Nestled up against mossy, mysterious redwood forests, the rocky Big Sur coast (Click here) is a secretive place.

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End your trip with a wild night out in San Diego ’s Gaslamp Quarter or the trendy Hillcrest neighborhood. Five Days San Francisco, Marin County & Wine Country In the hilly 7-sq-mile peninsula that is dashing, innovative and ever-evolving San Francisco, you can spend a day uncovering the alleyways of Chinatown, wandering the mural-adorned Mission District and climbing Coit Tower above beatnik North Beach. Then brave the fog on a cruise over to Alcatraz from Fisherman’s Wharf, or lose yourself on a sunny day in Golden Gate Park, stopping to smell the flowers where hippies danced during 1967’s ‘Summer of Love.’ Wherever you roam, eat everything in sight – especially anything being hawked by organic farmers or artisanal cheese and olive-oil makers at the waterfront Ferry Building Marketplace.

Coastal California Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

For weekend escapes, I head south to sunny Santa Cruz or north to the misty, verdant Redwood Coast. Coastal California's Top 25 San Francisco's Neighborhoods As anyone who has ever clung to the side of a cable car can tell you, this city gives you a heck of a ride, from the Marina’s chic waterfront to the edgy Mission District. And just when you think you have a grasp on the ‘Paris of the West,’ you turn another corner to find a brightly painted alleyway mural, a filigreed Victorian roofline or a hidden stairway leading up to bay-view panoramas that will entirely change your outlook. Pier 39 | BLUEBEAT76 / GETTY IMAGES © Top Experiences Driving Big Sur Nestled up against mossy, mysterious-looking redwood forests, the rocky Big Sur coast is a secretive place.

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Itineraries San Francisco, Marin County & Wine Country 5 Days Clamber around the hilly 7-sq-mile peninsula that is dashing, innovative San Francisco. Then soak up the natural beauty of Marin County before indulging in a wine-splashed weekend in Napa and Sonoma Wine Country. Start with a full day in San Francisco spent uncovering the alleyways of Chinatown, wandering the mural-adorned Mission district and climbing Coit Tower above beatnik North Beach. Then brave the fog on a cruise over to Alcatraz from Fisherman’s Wharf, or lose yourself on a sunny day in Golden Gate Park, stopping to smell the flowers where hippies danced during 1967’s ‘Summer of Love.’ Wherever you roam, eat everything in sight – especially at the waterfront Ferry Building on the Embarcadero.

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To/From the Airport SamTrans (%800-660-4287; www.samtrans.com) Express bus KX takes about 30 to 45 minutes to run from San Francisco International Airport to SF's Transbay Transit Center ( GOOGLE MAP ; cnr Howard & Main Sts; g5,38,41,71), and makes two stops in downtown SF (the last at the Transbay Transit Center). Airport Express (%800-327-2024; www.airportexpressinc.com) Runs a scheduled shuttle every hour from 5:30am to 12:30am between San Francisco International Airport and Sonoma ($34) and Marin ($26) counties. BART The fastest link between downtown and the Mission District also offers transit to SF airport (SFO; $8.95), Oakland ($3.45) and Berkeley ($4). Four of the system's five lines pass through SF before terminating at Daly City or SFO. Within SF, one-way fares start at $1.95. Bicycle Contact the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition for maps, information and legal matters regarding bicyclists.

The New Geography of Jobs
by Enrico Moretti
Published 21 May 2012

It is important to recognize that this group can be socially quite distinct from the gentrifiers—the college-educated professionals, the innovators, the entrepreneurs. Almost by definition, a gentrifying neighborhood is one in which many of the original residents, including the property owners, are not particularly wealthy. Take the Mission District, the neighborhood of San Francisco where I live. It is one of the areas of the city that has been most affected by the influx of college-educated high-tech professionals. Since it is close to the freeway, many workers in Silicon Valley who prefer an urban lifestyle end up here. Remarkably, the people who are benefiting most from this influx of high-tech workers are the largely Latino homeowners who have been selling their property to the newcomers—people like the Mexican American couple who owned a nice two-story Victorian near my house that had been in the family for decades.

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See Wages and salaries Salinas–Sea Side–Monterey, California, [>] Salk Institute, [>] Salt Lake City, [>], [>] San Antonio, [>] San Diego, [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] San Francisco, [>], [>]–[>] architects in, [>] artisanal workshops in, [>], [>] bookbinding business in, [>]–[>] college graduates in, [>], [>] college-educated immigrants in, [>] computer science salaries in, [>] cost of living in, [>] land-use regulation in, [>] Mission District of, [>] new housing limited in, [>] and venture capitalists, [>]–[>] waiters in, [>] Zendesk in, [>] San Francisco Bay Area, [>]–[>], [>], [>] biotech firms in, [>] clean-tech companies in, [>] employment gains in, [>] Walmart in, [>] San Francisco Chronicle Building, [>]–[>] San Francisco–Oakland–Vallejo area, [>] San Francisco–San Jose region, [>], [>] San Francisco–Silicon Valley region, as adapting, [>]–[>] San Jose, [>], [>], [>] college graduates in, [>], [>], [>] salaries of, [>] computer science salaries in, [>]–[>] and cost of living, [>] divorce rate in, [>] See also San Francisco–San Jose region Sanmina, [>] Santa Barbara, [>], [>], [>] Santa Barbara–Santa Maria–Lompoc area, [>] Santa Cruz, California, [>], [>] Santa Rosa–Petaluma, California, [>] Schmidt, Eric, [>] Schultz, Howard, [>] Schumpeter, Joseph, [>], [>] Scientific R&D, [>] Scott, Allen, [>] Scott, Eric, [>] Scranton, Pennsylvania, [>] Scripps Research Institute, [>] Seattle, [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] Capitol Hill district in, [>]–[>] college graduates in, [>], [>] and divergence from Albuquerque, [>]–[>] employment gains in, [>] exciting celebrities in, [>] and Microsoft, [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] as anchor company, [>] and software leadership, [>] Pioneer Square in, [>], [>] smart growth policies in, [>]–[>] waiters in, [>] Seattle-Everett, and cost of living, [>] Secular change, [>] Segregation economic, [>] educational, [>] sociological, [>] Semiconductors in Portland, Oregon, [>] and Shockley, [>] and Taiwan, [>] Sequoia Capital, [>] Serbia, PISA scores of, [>] Service ecosystems, [>]–[>], [>], [>] Services sector as hurt by manufacturing loss, [>] innovations in, [>] local jobs in, [>] Microsoft’s effect on, [>] Shah, Dharmesh, [>] Shanghai, [>] innovative concentration in, [>] PISA results for, [>], [>] Sharma, Vinita, [>] Sharon, Pennsylvania, and cost of living, [>] Shen, John, [>] Shenzhen, China, [>]–[>] and Pixar, [>] Shockley, William, [>] Siemens, [>] Silicon Alley (New York), [>] Silicon Laboratories, [>] Silicon Valley, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>] cell phone firms in, [>] clustering in, [>] cricket games in, [>] diversification in, [>] dot-com boom in, [>] ecosystems of, [>] Facebook’s move to, [>], [>] high-tech jobs as driver in, [>] in innovative area, [>] and life expectancy, [>] nondescript locations in, [>] and personal computer industry, [>] as possible Microsoft location, [>] post-WWII Detroit compared to, [>], [>] San Francisco as residence for workers in, [>], [>] Trulioo success in, [>] Simmons, Russel, [>] Singapore iPhone parts from, [>], [>] PISA scores of, [>] Sivadasan, Jagadeesh, [>] Skype, vs. side-by-side work, [>] Slaughter, Matthew, [>] Slovenia, PISA scores of, [>] Small businesses, [>] Smart growth policies, [>], [>] in Seattle, [>]–[>] Smith, Vaughan, [>] Social class, [>]–[>] Social multiplier effect, [>]–[>], [>] Social Network, The (movie), [>] Social return on education, [>] on research, [>]–[>] (see also Knowledge spillovers) Software industry, jobs in, [>], [>] Solar-panel industry, [>]–[>] in Fremont, California, [>]–[>], [>] See also Clean-tech companies Solyndra, [>]–[>], [>], [>] South (American), as convergence example, [>] Soviet Union, and Norilsk, Siberia, [>]–[>] Spain mobility in, [>] PISA scores of, [>] and solar panels, [>], [>] Spartanburg, South Carolina, Chinese factory in, [>] “Spatial mismatch,” [>]–[>] SpringLeaf Therapeutics, [>] Springsteen, Bruce, [>]–[>] Square (company), [>] Stamford, Connecticut, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>] Standard of living innovation as driver of, [>] and productivity, [>] See also Quality of life Stanford University, [>] and Google, [>] and Silicon Valley, [>] Starbucks, [>] Stars, academic, in biotech, [>], [>] Startups, [>], [>] and Austral Capital, [>] and biotech academics, [>] in digital music business, [>] in Seattle, [>] and venture capitalism, [>] Star Wars (movie), [>], [>] State College, Pennsylvania, [>] Stellar Solutions, [>] Stockton, California, [>] Subsidies, [>] in “big push” programs, [>], [>] on Chinese solar panels, [>] of college education, [>], [>], [>] for high-tech industries in Fremont, California, [>] and solar industry, [>], [>], [>] for local investment, [>]–[>] Empowerment Zone Program, [>]–[>] of R&D (research), [>], [>] for thick labor markets, [>] and TVA, [>] varying value of, [>]–[>] Sun-tech, [>] “Supply side approach” to revitalizing cities, [>] Svane, Mikkel, [>], [>] Sweden, PISA scores of, [>] Switzerland, [>], [>] Taiwan, [>], [>] Talent, economic value of, [>]–[>] Tallahassee, Florida, [>] Tax advantages, [>] Taylor, Bret, [>] Taylor, Lori, [>] Technological progress and commercial knowledge, [>] and geography of jobs, [>] and increase in value of innovation, [>]–[>] innovation sector driven by, [>] as job creator, [>] and manufacturing loss, [>] productivity increase in, [>] and skilled-labor demand, [>] and standard of living, [>] in technologies of the earth, [>] See also Innovation Telecommuting, vs. side-by-side work, [>] Television manufacturing industry, [>] Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] Terre Haute, Indiana, and cost of living, [>] Tesla Motors, [>] Texas, “Emerging Technology Fund” for, [>] Texas Instruments, [>] Thailand, PISA scores of, [>] Thiel, Peter, [>] Thomas, Paul, [>] Three Americas, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] 3M, [>] 3scale Networks, [>] T-Mobile, [>] Tocqueville, Alexis de, [>] Toledo, Ohio, [>], [>], [>] Topeka, Kansas, [>] Tourist destinations, [>] Trade Adjustment Assistance, limited allocation allowance for, [>] Traded (tradable) sector, [>]–[>], [>], [>] and innovation, [>] innovative hubs, [>] and multiplier effect, [>] Trajtenberg, Manuel, [>] Travelocity, [>] Travel websites, [>]–[>] Trenton, New Jersey, [>], [>] Trina Solar, [>] Trulioo, [>] Truly Disadvantaged, The (Wilson), [>] TRW, [>] Tulsa, immigrants with little education in, [>] Tunisia, PISA scores of, [>] Turkey, [>], [>] TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] Twilight: New Moon (movie), [>] Ufford, Stephen, [>] Unemployment in Berlin, [>] in Detroit vs.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

Investment Gamified: The Startup Ventureless Capital: The Patience of Crowds Fully Invested—Factors Beyond Capital Chapter Five DISTRIBUTED Digital Distributism Renaissance Now? Acknowledgments Appendix Notes Selected Bibliography Index Introduction WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? One December morning in 2013, residents of San Francisco’s Mission District laid their bodies in front of a vehicle to prevent its passage. Although acts of public protest are not unusual in California, this one had an unlikely target: the Google buses used to ferry employees from their homes in the city to the company’s campus in Mountain View, thirty miles away. As the photos and live updates from the scene filled my social media feeds, I wasn’t sure how to react.

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The company’s stellar growth revived more than a few economic sectors, as well as a few neighborhoods. And for a while, everybody was happy with the way things were going. We all got free search and e-mail. Bloggers got paid to put ads on their Web sites, kids shared in the revenue from YouTube videos, and the Mission District got a bit trendier and safer as hipsters and tech professionals moved in, new coffee and book shops opened, lofts were constructed, and property values went up. Growth is good—at least for those doing the growing. But the influx of Googlers to San Francisco’s most historic neighborhoods also raised rents, forcing out longtime residents and small businesses that were not participating in all this growth.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age
by Virginia Eubanks
Published 1 Feb 2011

Those were strange days in the Bay Area. For a young woman like me with racial and economic privilege, a college degree, no family obligations, and some working knowledge of computers, it was a remarkable time of freedom and excitement. I set myself up as a freelance Web site developer, found a $300 per month room in the Mission District, and started one of the first cyberfeminist ‘zines, a short-lived snarky online periodical called Brillo. But even in the heady atmosphere of the dot-com boom, it would take a powerful brand of denial to not see that something was amiss in the middle of the Silicon Valley miracle. Though my vision was limited by my privileged social and economic position, I was not blind.

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Plugged In provided youth from the community computer access, technology classes, and employment training at its University Avenue address until 1999, when developers razed East Palo Alto’s downtown, including Plugged In’s original home, and replaced it with a Four Seasons Hotel, a convention center, and an IKEA store. Back in the Mission District, I started free Internet and World Wide Web literacy classes for poor and working-class women through a community arts organization called Artists’ Television Access. The classes concentrated on larger social issues—the Internet’s birth in the defense industry, economic justice issues in the neighborhood, and gender issues online—as well as practical skills, such as using the Internet and the Web to find information, HTML authoring, and graphic design.

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
by Janette Sadik-Khan
Published 8 Mar 2016

Similarly, in Portland, Oregon, a 2011 survey in commercial districts across the city found that “customers who arrive by automobile spend the most per visit across all of the establishments, but cyclists spend the most per month.” In particular, cyclists spent $75.66 versus $61.03 for people who drove. In San Francisco, two thirds of merchants along Valencia Street in the city’s Mission District reported increased sales after bike lanes and wider sidewalks were added in 1999. In Dublin, Ireland, shop owners on Henry Street estimated that 19 percent of their customers drove while the actual figure was 9 percent, or less than half the estimate. On Grafton Street, another commercial strip in Dublin, retailers guessed that 13 percent of customers arrived by car.

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(Kings Point), 269 Metrocable, 110, 111 Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Arts for Transit Program, 136 Bridges and Tunnels, 15 bus service, 236–49 Hurricane Sandy, 278–79 Mexico City Avenida 20 de Noviembre, 126, 127 Coyoacán, pocket park, 128, 128, 129 parking, 276–77 pedestrian bridges, 225, 225 population density, 23 Zócalo, 3 Meyers, Seth, 205 Millenials, 183–84 Minneapolis, Minnesota, 117, 261 Misleading Anecdotes Complex, 252–53 Mission District, 258 “Mobility as a Service,” 287–88 Model streets, 49–61 complex intersections, 59, 60, 61 one-way, 49–51, 50 rearranging one-way, 51–57, 52–53 rearranging two-way, 58–59, 58–59 two-way, 56–59, 57 Molinaro, James, 268–69, 271 Monorails, 233 Montague Street, car-free event, 120–21 Moses, Robert battle between Jane Jacobs and, 9–10, 12, 18 “urban renewal” program of, 15–16, 18, 20–21, 242, 268 Move NY, 46 MTA.

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
by Michael Lewis
Published 3 May 2021

But the cost of genomic sequencing had fallen exponentially. “What cost me ten thousand dollars to do in 2001 now costs a penny,” said Joe. In late April 2020, the underemployed Biohub COVID lab teamed with UCSF researchers to test everyone who either lived or worked in a four-square-block area of San Francisco’s Mission District. The area formed a tract in the U.S. Census, number 022901, of special interest to a virus hunter, as it was less a typical American community than aspects of many different American communities. It had charming Victorian houses, less charming housing developments, and densely packed brutalist apartment buildings.

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“This same resident who likely infected the household may have also infected two workers who don’t even live in the Mission,” said Joe, pointing to another household of workers, one step to the right of those residents. “It’s possible there is one degree of separation between them—that he gave it to someone who gave it to them. But no more than that.” Simplified family tree of COVID-19 strains found in workers and residents of the Mission District, San Francisco Source: Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Credit: Elaine He/Bloomberg Opinion Without the genomic information, you might never have any idea that these people had any sort of relationship at all. Even if a test had identified the person who infected the household, and that person were questioned by teams of contact tracers, the connection with the household might never have been made.

Fodor's California 2014
by Fodor's
Published 5 Nov 2013

You can get a ticket if you don’t do this. Muni Travel The San Francisco Municipal Railway, or Muni, operates light-rail vehicles, the historic F-line streetcars along Fisherman’s Wharf and Market Street, trolley buses, and the world-famous cable cars. Light rail travels along Market Street to the Mission District and Noe Valley (J line), the Ingleside District (K line), and the Sunset District (L, M, and N lines); during peak hours (Monday through Friday, 6 am–9 am and 3 pm–7 pm) the J line continues around the Embarcadero to the Caltrain station at 4th and King streets. The T-line light rail runs from the Castro, down Market Street, around the Embarcadero, and south past Hunters Point and Monster Park to Sunnydale Avenue and Bayshore Boulevard.

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Previous Chapter | Beginning of Chapter | Next Chapter | Table of Contents Previous Chapter | Next Chapter | Table of Contents Union Square and Chinatown | SoMa and Civic Center | Nob Hill and Russian Hill | North Beach | On the Waterfront | The Marina and the Presidio | Golden Gate Park and the Western Shoreline | The Haight, the Castro, and Noe Valley | Mission District | Pacific Heights and Japantown Union Square and Chinatown The Union Square area bristles with big-city bravado, while just a stone’s throw away is a place that feels like a city unto itself, Chinatown. The two areas share a strong commercial streak, although manifested very differently.

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A plaque at the base of the flagpole lists the names of past and present openly gay and lesbian state and local officials. | Southwest corner ofCastro and Market Sts. | 94114. Exploring Noe Valley Golden fire hydrant. When all the other fire hydrants went dry during the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake, this one kept pumping. Noe Valley and the Mission District were thus spared the devastation wrought elsewhere in the city, which explains the large number of pre-quake homes here. Every year on April 18rh (the anniversary of the quake) folks gather here to share stories about the earthquake, and the famous hydrant gets a fresh coat of gold paint. | Church and 20th Sts., southeast corner, across from Dolores Park | 94114.

Black Fire: The True Story of the Original Tom Sawyer--And of the Mysterious Fires That Baptized Gold Rush-Era San Francisco
by Robert Graysmith
Published 30 Oct 2012

Washington Allen Bartlett, the first alcalde, ordered Jasper O’Farrell to lay out the city following the natural hilly terrain. The Council overruled his plan and insisted on a gridiron layout to give the most profits upon subdivision. O’Farrell complied, with one deviation. Market Street would intersect the grid at a right angle striking out from the waterfront to the Mission District, dividing San Francisco to this day. The model of the extended city was two sections of right-angle grids with streets running north/south and east/west above Market Street, and northeast/northwest and southeast/southwest below. Thus, San Francisco streets plunge forward as if they were on a flat plane, racing over mountains as if they were not there at all—straight ahead, straight ahead—Onward!

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“Planking has served well in the infancy of the city,” the press commented, “but it is probable that so perishable a material will soon give place to cobblestones or Macadamized paving, or even square-dressed blocks of granite or whinstone.” An enterprising local, Charles Polhemus, built a forty-foot-wide plank road from Third to Sixteenth Street, the edge of the Mission District. He charged a toll: twenty-five cents per horseman, seventy-five cents for a wagon with two horses, and a buck for a four-horse team. Alta editor Edward Gilbert stormed from his office. Though he owned the most important paper in town, he was perpetually discontented. He hated what he saw in the city and wished he could do away with the whole thing.

Lonely Planet's Best of USA
by Lonely Planet

Griffith Observatory / ANDREW KENNELLY / GETTY IMAGES © Huntington Beach / MATTHEW MICAH WRIGHT / GETTY IMAGES © Venice Beach / RICHARD CUMMINS / GETTY IMAGES © USA’S TOP 12 PLAN YOUR TRIP 11 San Francisco Amid the clatter of trams and the thick fog that sweeps in by night, the diverse hill and valley neighborhoods of San Francisco invite long days of wandering, with colorful Victorian architecture, great indie shops and gorgeous waterfront views. Cycle across the Golden Gate Bridge, commune with poets in the Haight and immerse in the Castro’s mighty gay scene. You’ll eat well wherever you go, from tiny dim-sum spots in Chinatown to Michelin-starred bistros to mural-clad taquerias in the Mission District. Cable cars / JEAN-PIERRE LESCOURRET / GETTY IMAGES © USA’S TOP 12 PLAN YOUR TRIP 12 Yosemite National Park Yosemite’s iconic glacier-carved valley never fails to get the heart racing, even when it’s loved bumper-to-bumper in summer. In springtime, get drenched by the spray of its thundering snowmelt waterfalls, and twirl singing to the Sound of Music in high-country meadows awash with wildflowers.

…

The influx of Asian immigrants, especially after the Vietnam War, enriched the state’s urban food cultures with Chinatowns, Koreatowns and Japantowns, along with huge enclaves of Mexican Americans who maintain their own culinary traditions across the state. Don’t miss the massive burritos in San Francisco’s Mission District and the fish tacos in San Diego. Vegetarian & Vegan Dining Some of the most highly regarded US restaurants cater to vegetarians and vegans. Exclusively vegetarian and vegan restaurants abound in major US cities, though not always in small towns and rural areas away from the coasts. Eateries that have a good selection of vegetarian options are noted in our reviews using the vegetarian icon (v).

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

“And however long the rapid progress continues, Gary will still argue it is about to end.” 19 AUTOMATION “IF THE ROOM LOOKED LIKE THINGS HAD GONE CRAZY, WE WERE ON THE RIGHT TRACK.” One afternoon in the fall of 2019, on the top floor of OpenAI’s three-story building in San Francisco’s Mission District, a hand was poised near the window, palm up, fingers outstretched. It looked a lot like a human hand, except it was made of metal and hard plastic and wired for electricity. Standing nearby, a woman scrambled a Rubik’s Cube and placed it in the palm of this mechanical hand. The hand then began to move, gently turning the colored tiles with its thumb and four fingers.

…

* * * — ELON Musk and the other founders of OpenAI saw their lab as an answer to DeepMind. From the beginning, their aim was to reach for enormously lofty goals that were easy to measure, easy to understand, and guaranteed to grab attention, even if they didn’t actually do anything practical. After setting up their lab above a tiny chocolate factory in the San Francisco Mission District, researchers like Zaremba spent weeks walking around this old, rapidly gentrifying Hispanic neighborhood, debating what lofty goal they should chase. They eventually settled on two: a machine that could beat the world’s best players at a three-dimensional video game called Dota, and a five-fingered robotic hand that could solve the Rubik’s Cube.

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
by Joshua Foer , Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton
Published 19 Sep 2016

Palace of Fine Arts Marina District · A piece of San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition survives in the form of this collection of classically inspired buildings, gardens, and fountains. Institute of Illegal Images Mission District · Mark McCloud’s collection of acid blotters, amassed since the 1960s, makes for a uniquely hallucinogenic art gallery. 826 Valencia Pirate Supply Store Mission District · Grab a hook hand and replenish your stock of mermaid bait at this store that raises funds for a kids’ literary nonprofit. Mission Dolores Cemetery The Mission · Established in the 18th century, this is the oldest burial ground in San Francisco.

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Boomeria is a private residence but occasionally hosts public concerts. 37.088791 122.145221 City Guide: More to Explore in San Francisco Golden Fire Hydrant The Castro · The gilded hydrant below Dolores Park earned its special status when it continued to function in the aftermath of the 1906 quake, saving much of the Mission District from burning down. Head of the Goddess of Progress Civic Center · The Goddess of Progress was a 20-foot-tall (6 m) bronze statue on top of San Francisco’s original city hall. Her head, which weighs 700 pounds (317.5 kg), sits in the current city hall. McElroy Octagon House Cow Hollow · This eight-sided powder-blue home is a rare remnant of the octagon-shaped house-building craze of the second half of the 19th century.

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It
by Kamal Ravikant
Published 7 Jan 2020

For example, in writing this book, fear says that I’m risking what people will think of me. Doesn’t matter. My role is to recognize it for what it is—hallucinated snake, not useful, not real—and continue on. I’m in Love “You’re so pretty,” I say. She walks alongside my friend, Gabe, holding his hand. Her dark hair freshly cut, layers. Cool February night in the Mission District in San Francisco. We’re heading for tacos. “I’m in love,” she says. We pause to cross the street. “It’s true,” she says, “that’s why. I’m in love.” She’s pretty regardless, but I get what she’s talking about. She glows. Nonstop smile. Full of life. When I get home, before I go inside, I pause and realize something.

Cuckoo's Egg
by Clifford Stoll
Published 2 Jan 1989

There was music, dance, theater, and comedy in a dozen locations across town, with cable-car shuttles between events. Seven of us piled into a beat-up Volvo and inched into San Francisco, trapped in a raucous traffic jam. Instead of honking, people blew party horns out their car windows. Finally we came to the brightly-lit city, ditched the car, and headed for a flamenco concert. We found our way to the Mission district—the Latin section of town, and discovered a packed Catholic church with an impatient audience. A sheepish face emerged from behind the curtain, explaining, “None of the lights work so we’re delaying the performance.” Amid the catcalls and boos, Martha stood up and pushed me forward. I still had my electrician’s license, and she’d done tech for many an amateur theatrical.

…

Within a few minutes, she and her fellow victims overcame their stage fright and formed themselves into a fairly synchronized chorus line, doing little hand motions like the Supremes. I was never much for dancing, but by two o’clock or so, I found myself jumping and spinning around with Martha, lifting her high in the air … We finally had our fill of high culture and cheap thrills, and went to sleep at a friend’s house in the Mission district. What felt like moments after my head touched the pillow (though it was actually nine the next morning), my beeper woke me up. Huh? The hacker was at work on New Year’s Day? Give me a break. There wasn’t much I could do. Hacker or not, I wasn’t about to call Steve White on New Year’s morning.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 12 Sep 2012

“If I see blacks driving themselves into the gutter, I call it as it is.” May pauses for a moment. “I had the opportunity to either light a candle or teach people how to make candles,” he says. “I had the ideas. But the idea of trying to be Julian Assange gives me the creeps.” John Gilmore and I are looking out onto the shiny wet streets of San Francisco’s Mission District as the entire Cypherpunk Mailing List archive, all 345 megabytes spanning nearly a decade of hacker rants, attacks, critiques, and announcements that once lived on his server, is siphoned onto my thumb drive. When the bits have finished flowing from his tiny laptop to my stick of solid-state memory, Gilmore opens up the first folder.

…

“But at some point my desire to live started to outweigh my desire to be shot in a war zone.” Appelbaum returned to San Francisco and took a job at a security start-up, building software that automatically scanned code for vulnerabilities. The company was acquired and his entire office was laid off. Soon after, he was at a party in the city’s Mission District when news hit that the levees had broken in New Orleans: Hurricane Katrina had left nearly two thousand dead and tens of thousands more stranded in sports stadiums used as shelters. When one of the partygoers tried to turn off the television and lighten the mood, Appelbaum angrily grabbed the remote, turned up the volume, and refused to change the channel.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

So, bitcoin’s more like a scene in a snow globe than a full-blown, dot-com-style bubble. But, as we said, it’s early days. This is just the beginning. * * * If the Bay Area is the most important region from which bitcoin innovation is emanating, its ground zero may well lie inside a nondescript building in San Francisco’s funky, crowded, mini-melting-pot Mission District. The sparks that led to some of the most exciting developments in bitcoin first arose from conversations and brainstorming sessions inside this ramshackle “hacker house.” Sitting on the corner of Twentieth and Mission Streets, with its unassuming entrance behind an olive tree (the first missionaries brought the olive trees with them from Spain and they still dot the streets), the building now known as 20Mission was founded in February 2012 by Jered Kenna, the young bitcoin entrepreneur who’d previously founded Tradehill.

…

More than a year had passed when he suddenly noticed that bitcoin’s price was rising exponentially and remembered his $5 investment. “A cup of coffee,” he explained by way of comparison, “had turned into a laptop.” Lee began attending bitcoin meetups and at one met Kent Liu, an IBM computer scientist. One day in February 2014, they got together at a coffeehouse around midday in the Mission District in San Francisco. By the time they finished their last cup of coffee—at 11:00 P.M.—they had hammered out a proposal that purported to solve two different groups of people’s problems at once and would eventually land them at Plug and Play. First, it would allow those who want to spend bitcoins on goods at Amazon to do so even though the e-commerce site doesn’t accept the digital currency—and at a negotiated discount price to boot.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

Participants have a stake in the space, they’re not simply moving through it and are therefore willing to engage, listen and think about the whole, rather than only their own individual part. The challenge we face, however, is that in the twenty-first century, many independent local stores that contribute to the social fabric and the building of community are under existential threat. The last slice On the corner of 25th and Mission Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District was a café I’d frequent whenever I was in town. It was called Mission Pie. While there was no shortage of cafés in the city, Mission Pie drew me in. It was the comically large neon pie-tin and fork sign outside, coupled with its floor-to-ceiling windows which bathed the yellow-painted dining room in a warm light, that first alerted me to its presence.

…

The tech economy, having outgrown its original Silicon Valley base, expanded into the city bringing with it an influx of highly paid tech workers. This drove up rent and housing prices, making it one of the most expensive American cities to live in.29 The financial pressure was particularly acute for residents and business owners in neighbourhoods like the Mission District, where Mission Pie was located, an area with a distinctly Latino heritage and a sizeable lower-income constituency, located just two short miles from the Mid-Market neighbourhood where corporations such as Twitter, Uber and Zendesk had moved in during the early 2010s, lured by attractive tax breaks.30 And with the shift in the city’s demographics came a change too in how people interacted with local businesses, particularly with local cafés and restaurants.

Ready to Run: Unlocking Your Potential to Run Naturally
by Kelly Starrett
Published 20 Oct 2014

A day laborer in India transporting bricks to a construction site in a basket perched on top of her head. A computer programmer hunched over his laptop with a 7-ounce baseball cap on his head. For the sake of connection, let’s say he’s one of the tech workers waiting for the Google bus on the corner of 18th and Dolores in San Francisco’s Mission District. He starts his day with his head hanging over his phone, and then he climbs into a window seat on the bus and spends the rest of the day caving his head and shoulders over a computer. Let me put it this way: In this comparison, the woman in her sari carrying bricks is showing off the power of midline stabilization.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

His desire to stay in New York, where she’d brought him home from the hospital, where he was close enough to visit her any weekend he desired, waned; coincidentally, his girlfriend, Liz Nagle, had moved to California to get a master’s in English at Stanford. Ohanian packed up out of the Condé Nast annex office, and moved in with Huffman to an apartment on 16th Street in the Mission District, which Ohanian lobbied should be their new home, as it had a more hip, more Brooklyn vibe than the North Beach neighborhood of Crystal Towers. It started out well. Huffman loved hanging out with Nagle; they always liked each other. But for Ohanian and Huffman, being around each other twenty-four hours a day wasn’t healthy.

…

The divorce process took more than a year, which Huffman described as an agonizing experience. Still, the couple remained something like friends; the day they signed the divorce papers they went home together and watched a Redskins game. Katie continued to live with Huffman’s Hipmunk cofounder, Adam Goldstein, in the original home they’d all shared in San Francisco’s Mission District. Huffman moved a few blocks away; his car was still parked at Katie’s. Huffman has since despised brief blips of singlehood. He’s prone to insecurity when by himself. “I’m really bad at being alone,” he said. “I always have friends—or someone—with me.” AMAgeddon July 2, 2015, began almost like any other morning for Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s blonde-haired AMA chief.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle
Published 2 May 2022

He and Heather settled into a two-bedroom house in the city’s Castro neighborhood, a bustling valley nestled between several parks. San Francisco hadn’t yet been subsumed by the technology industry. It remained a city of bohemians and bankers, a place rooted in counterculture, where Jack Kerouac and the Beats had given way to Haight Street hippies and the Castro’s openly gay community. Its Mission District had a vibrant, collaborative art scene that fused folk art with graffiti concepts, and warehouse raves in the gritty SOMA neighborhood put the city at the forefront of the country’s electronic dance music scene. Ive threw himself into work, logging seventy to eighty hours a week. He ditched his spiky hair for a crew cut and often wore sharply tailored tweed suits and big boots.

…

“There’s no way Apple”: Interview with executive recruiter Rick Devine, who recruited Cook for Steve Jobs. Chapter 4: Keep Him Jony Ive’s yellow Saab convertible: Interviews with Robert Brunner and Clive Grinyer. San Francisco hadn’t yet been: “San Francisco in the 1990s [Decades Series],” Bay Area Television Archive, https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/227905. Its Mission District had: “Look Back: Pioneers of ’90s Mission Arts Scene,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, https://www.sfmoma.org/read/mission-school-1990s/; Stephanie Buck, “During the First San Francisco Dot-Com Boom, Techies and Ravers Got Together to Save the World,” Quartz, August 7, 2017, https://qz.com/1045840/during-the-first-san-francisco-dot-com-boom-techies-and-ravers-got-together-to-save-the-world/.

Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy
by Irvin D. Yalom
Published 24 Feb 2015

I replied immediately, offering her an appointment a week later, giving my address, and informing her of my fee. Her first words as she appeared in the doorway of my San Francisco office, perspiring profusely and fanning herself with a folded newspaper, were “Water, please!” She had raced to catch a bus at the corner near her apartment in the Mission district and then climbed two steep blocks to my office at the top of Russian Hill. Aging and small in stature, about five foot two, apparently inattentive to her appearance, with tangled hair that cried out for brushing, loose, shapeless clothing, and no jewelry or makeup, Ellie struck me as a faded, wistful flower child, a refugee from the sixties.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose
Published 9 Mar 2021

So, they embarked on a bold turnaround plan, which included many steps that no traditional cost-cutting consultant would have recommended. They turned down investment offers and kept Heath’s manufacturing local, rather than sending it abroad. They moved their main production facility to a more expensive building in San Francisco’s Mission District, and began offering factory tours, so that customers could see their bowls and mugs and tiles being made. They started the Heath Clay Studio, a kind of experimental lab where master potters could produce one-of-a-kind designs, and the Heath Newsstand, which sells hundreds of hard-to-find magazines from around the world.

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World
by Neil Gibb
Published 15 Feb 2018

And an intelligent consumer like Jay should clearly have gone with a Samsung phone, but she didn’t. The reason fans took to Instagram was about something far more fundamental than clever tech. While the app was developed in San Francisco, the source of its success wasn’t a high-tech design studio in the city’s Mission District or a hipster café in SoMa. In fact, it wasn’t even in the city. It can be traced back to a decidedly unhip small town way over on the other side of the country in upstate New York. More specifically, to the bedroom of a twenty-something man who still lived with his mum. He had all the hallmarks of a geek: part hipster, part nerd, socially gregarious and awkward in equal measure.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017

The cost of forfeiting control over these things is too high, and too mysterious. We need to expect better, to demand more. It’s time that we own and govern what is ours already. 3. HOW PLATFORM COOPERATIVISM CAN UNLEASH THE NETWORK TREBOR SCHOLZ In 1998 I moved into a small Buddhist temple in San Francisco’s Mission District. My spiritual comrades in this commune could not understand why I would spend all the money that I had saved on an IBM laptop when the community already owned a computer. As someone who studies the social impact of the Internet, I was surprised by the proposal to collectively use one computer.

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America
by Dan Conway
Published 8 Sep 2019

My plan was to drastically reduce my spending and start a one-person PR consulting practice that would generate $10,000 per month or more. I’d sock it away, bite the bullet and accumulate enough so I had options for how I’d live the rest of my life. I figured I’d eventually get a small, rent-controlled apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco and keep it for decades or move to Eureka up north, a low-cost-of-living destination full of Bay Area cast-offs I’d visited a few times. I could write for a living, start a small one-person business, or find some other way to make enough money to live frugally without having to rejoin the traditional workforce.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020

Employee number three, Charlie Lee, had given himself over to creating new privacy features for Litecoin, the bitcoin rival he had created a decade before. Olaf Carlson-Wee, who had arrived to join Coinbase with lumberjack sap on his clothes and only a friend’s couch to sleep on, had transformed from jester to king. His crypto hedge fund, Polychain Capital, had moved from improvised, ramshackle offices in San Francisco’s Mission District to a palatial suite of offices on the city’s waterfront. It’s hard to avoid such trappings when you control more than a billion dollars of investor funds. But Olaf refused to renounce his eccentricities entirely, dedicating nooks of his corporate palace to his literary hero, David Foster Wallace.

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber
by Susan Fowler
Published 18 Feb 2020

On the worst days, I would stand in the shower, turn on the water, cover my mouth with my hands, and scream into my hands until my voice was hoarse. Part of what felt so scary was the randomness of it all: I never knew what to expect. But later that spring, I met Sarah Lacy, the journalist who had been the target of an Uber smear campaign a few years earlier. We met for drinks in a small, quiet bar in San Francisco’s Mission District, and she told me what Uber had done to her—the way its executives had publicly threatened her and her family, the things that they’d discovered about her through their investigations that they tried to use against her—and I shared the strange and distressing experiences I’d had. It was surreal: I would be describing something that had happened, like seeing a strange car following me, and she would be able to finish the story because she had experienced the exact same thing; she could even describe exactly what the car looked like.

Food Trucks: Dispatches and Recipes From the Best Kitchens on Wheels
by Shouse, Heather
Published 19 Apr 2011

Place the empanadas on a the prepared baking sheet and brush them with the egg yolk. Bake until golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes. ( SAN FRANCISCO’S UNDERGROUND FOOD CART REVOLUTION ) A cluster of hipsters of all stripes streaming in and out of an art gallery on a Saturday night is a fairly common sight in San Francisco’s Mission District. But at Olivia Ongpin’s Fabric8 Gallery, there’s also often a guy out front cooking Thai curries in propane-fueled woks mounted to a cruiser bike’s sidecar. Next to him is another guy using a three-foot metal pipe as the bellows to stoke the fire inside his “FrankenWeber,” a twenty-two-inch Weber kettle grill on wheels that he’s turned into a pizza oven by constructing a concrete dome to contain the heat of flaming hardwood charcoal.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance
by Parag Khanna
Published 11 Jan 2011

It’s about more than just the first world helping the third world—it promotes what its name means: unity. Kiva has zero interest on capital—people lend for the emotional satisfaction, and they keep on lending, rarely pulling money out of the Kiva system as outstanding loans are repaid. Kiva employees work there for the same reason. Its headquarters in the Mission district of San Francisco resembles a dormitory common room. All but one world map are upside down—the symbol of solidarity with the global “South”—and rooms are named after third world capitals such as Kabul and Dili (of East Timor). A digital ticker on the wall counts the number of loans disbursed through Kiva—more than one hundred thousand by mid-2009—to everyone from Afghan carpet weavers to Ugandan goat herders.

For the Love of Money: A Memoir
by Sam Polk
Published 18 Jul 2016

I always listened to Tupac on the walk home; it made me feel aggressive, my angry face a protective shield against the bums and dealers. At home I’d drink NyQuil and a forty-ounce Bud Light, and my shoulders would relax as warmth spread through my body. Sometimes at lunch, I hustled a mile into the Mission District and through the door of a squat, dingy building, an underground kickboxing gym filled with the sounds of knees hitting bags and fists hitting heads. I changed into shorts, wrapped my hands, and worked myself until sweat dripped off me like a rain gutter. Then I showered, changed back into my button-down shirt and glasses, and headed back to the office.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
by Mark O'Connell
Published 28 Feb 2017

He gave me a copy of a book he’d recently self-published called The Transhumanist Wager, an unwieldy novel of ideas about a freelance philosopher named Jethro Knights (a character with certain key biographical particulars in common with his creator) who sails around the world to promote the need for life extension research, and winds up establishing a floating libertarian city-state called Transhumania—a haven for unhampered scientific research into human longevity, a regulation-free utopia of tech billionaires and rationalists—from which he wages an atheist holy war on a theocratic United States. A couple of days later, at a café in San Francisco’s Mission District, he told me of how the novel had not gone over well with any of the 656 agents and publishers he’d sent it out to over the previous year. He’d spent over a thousand dollars, he said, on postage alone. Self-publishing had been the only available option, but he was pleased with how the book was selling, the impact it was having within the transhumanist movement.

We're Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True
by Gabrielle Union
Published 16 Oct 2017

We had this same conversation, over and over: Me: You better fuck that girl. Ray: I’m not ready. Chorus: What the hell?! Looking back, this is the worst-case scenario of peer pressure for a young gay man, and we just kept right on. At seventeen, we realized you only had to be eighteen to see the live sex shows in the Mission District in San Francisco. We were good bluffers, so we’d head into San Francisco and drag Ray with us, basically forcing him into these clubs. “This is how to be straight. Look, that guy likes it! You will, too.” WHEN I WAS A JUNIOR, RAY’S SISTER SOOKIE BECAME MY CUTTING BUDDY. We’d ditch school and go into Oakland, because we had both developed a deep and abiding love of black boys.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel
by Jarett Kobek
Published 3 Nov 2016

Karacehennem and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter had dated for a few years, long distance, with him going to San Francisco and her going to Los Angeles. It was rocky until it wasn’t. At some point it became solid. J. Karacehennem went north. He moved into the apartment of The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, which was located on Bryant between 23rd and 24th in the Mission District, a historically Latino and working-class neighborhood which was ground zero for gentrification driven by obscene Internet wealth. The apartment sported several strange features. It was 1,000 square feet but it had no interior walls. It was one giant room. The floors were all grey masonite.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

There are plenty of opportunities to become fabulously wealthy, but it’s also very punishing to be poor. It’s not all bad here, though. Walking around the city reveals defiant enclaves of hope that have resisted displacement despite wave after wave of capital. Murals about solidarity and resistance adorn walls in the Mission district, and Coit Tower still has its New Deal-era murals depicting the 1934 general strike. Wedged between startup offices in SoMa and the Mission are union offices and hiring halls, a memento of a different chapter of labour history. Schools and streets bear the names of labour organisers and social activists fighting for a different world than the one in which they grew up.

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet
by Joseph Menn
Published 26 Jan 2010

Barrett decided to junk all that and just dump the fob with the other stuff from his pants pockets on the table while they ate, hoping that Darren wouldn’t examine it too closely. At first they talked about uncontroversial things: Barrett’s wedding and where other Prolexic alumni had ended up. They stopped for lunch at a food court in the second mall. After more shopping, they went for a tapas dinner at Medjool, in the Mission District, and Barrett encouraged him to have mojitos. Thinking again about how he had tried to do the world some good and gotten suckered into working for the mob, Barrett went for the close. He invited Darren back to the house and poured his good wine. Darren began to enjoy himself. He laughed about Sacco buying a thirdhand plane with a Panamanian pilot and about Brian Green, classy guy that he was, traveling to the ecological wonderland of the Galapagos Islands—to go hunting.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
by Andrew Blum
Published 28 May 2012

Even the most social of networking guys know the geek that lies within. No doubt he isn’t alone at Equinix’s Silicon Valley offices, which he commutes to from his home in San Francisco. For a period of time after Adelson left the company, he commuted to his job at Digg from New York, sharing a crash pad with Troyer in the Mission District. The Internet is a small world. And—or so it seemed that morning in Ashburn—a secure one. Getting inside Ashburn required an elaborate identification process. Morgan, the director of operations, had previously registered a “ticket” for my visit in his system, which the guards behind bulletproof glass then checked against my driver’s license.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

These evictions are up by 170% over the same period.50 The Internet’s so-called sharing economy has compounded the problem, with the increasing profitability of unregulated Airbnb rentals being one reason for the surge in Ellis Act evictions.51 One San Francisco tenant even sued his Russian Hill landlords for “unjust eviction” in 2014 because, rather than moving into the apartment themselves, they rented his $1,840-a-month apartment out on Airbnb for up to $145 a night.52 “Warning: Two-Tier System.” Protesters in San Francisco’s Mission District waved such a construction-style sign outside the Google buses.53 “Public $$$$$$$$$ Private Gains,” another sign said.54 Others were less polite about these mysterious buses’ whisking their expensive cargo of privileged, mostly young white male workers down to Silicon Valley. “Fuck off Google,” came the message from West Oakland.55 Rebecca Solnit’s drawing attention to the “Google Bus,” which rides on public infrastructure and stops at public bus stops but is a private service run by private companies, has become the most public symbol now of this economic division between Silicon Valley and everyone else.

The Comedy Film Nerds Guide to Movies
by Graham Elwood and Chris Mancini
Published 31 May 2012

S&M and sex scenes in a coal bin. Wear your leather and drink strong coffee. You’ll still fall asleep. FILM NOIR By Greg Proops When I was in college my pal took me to see a double bill of Out of the Past and Murder, My Sweet at the York Theater in San Francisco. The York stood down in the Mission District and was a remnant from the days when it was an Irish neighborhood. The St. Francis ice cream parlor was nearby, with its red vinyl stools and wooden booths and it felt like you could get whacked by a passing car full of hoodlums at any time, but that only added to the mood as we scored a chocolate malted and swung well refreshed into the old deco joint to reach back and join the glory of black and white picture shows.

Stealth of Nations
by Robert Neuwirth
Published 18 Oct 2011

Still, the orders kept coming—first from little independent stores, which he could handle from his home kitchen, then regional coffee bar chains like Philz and Ritual Roasters, which he could handle with the addition of a small staff who worked in his kitchen to help him bake and ice. And then, suddenly, Mission Minis (the name is an homage to the Mission District, the neighborhood where Arnovick lives) hit the big time: Whole Foods was willing to stock its cupcakes in all their stores in the region. That was when Arnovick realized: “This could potentially be awesome.” But awesome doesn’t always mean uncomplicated. To serve the big supermarket chain, Mission Minis would have to operate on a scale that would have taken over his home rather than simply occupying it for a few hours every day.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by Richard Florida
Published 9 May 2016

“You are not innocent victims,” a flyer that was handed out to the bus passengers read. “You live your comfortable lives surrounded by poverty, homelessness and death, seemingly oblivious to everything around you, lost in the big bucks and success.” Several protesters climbed atop a Yahoo bus, and one, as was widely reported, vomited on its windshield. In San Francisco’s Mission District, protesters dressed as clowns formed human pyramids, bounced giant exercise balls, and performed the can-can in front of a Google bus. For the San Francisco–based activist and writer Rebecca Solnit, those buses were akin to “spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.”

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
by Kevin Carey
Published 3 Mar 2015

It wasn’t hard to guess where those competitors would come from: Silicon Valley, a place with enough money, smart people, and cultural prestige to compete head-to-head with the hybrid universities, using a profoundly different philosophy about what to do with information technology and what the future should bring. — IT WAS FOUR in the afternoon on a gorgeous spring day in the Mission District of San Francisco. I was standing on a sidewalk with Michael Staton, waiting for an Uber to arrive. Michael came to the Bay Area in the early 2000s to launch an Internet start-up company that builds social networks for incoming college freshmen. He had recently switched to the investment side of the deal-making table and become a partner in a venture capital firm specializing in technology and education.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime
by Julian Guthrie
Published 15 Nov 2019

The little boy who used to love to ride his BMX bike and play T-ball was now an offensive lineman at the academically challenging Colgate. He weighed in at 260 pounds; MJ was half his size. He had grown into a smart, emotionally intelligent young man and a leader among his friends. MJ’s elder daughter, Kate, had graduated from Stanford and was living in San Francisco’s Mission District, looking for her first job and finding her way. Hanna, her youngest, was a high school sophomore excelling at a top private school that she loved. As the kids got older, MJ felt that her ability to intervene in their lives and help solve their problems was diminished. Instead of diaper rash and playground mishaps, their issues revolved around boyfriends, girlfriends, partying, cliques, mental health, academic pressure, and peer pressure.

Microserfs
by Douglas Coupland
Published 14 Feb 1995

You just feel so sorry for the mind set that would treat a beautiful mountainside like it was a button at a trade convention. "If they changed it to POSTINDUSTRIAL city, it might be meaningful," said Karla. * * * Anyway, we couldn't find the bar and wound up in a coffeehouse somewhere in the Mission District. San Francisco is a weird tesseract of hipness: lawyers don tattoos and listen to the Germs' first album. Everyone here is so young - it's like Microsoft that way - a whole realm composed of people our own age. Because of that, there's an abundance of dive bars, hipsterious coffeehouses, and cheap-eats places.

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone
by Eric Klinenberg
Published 1 Jan 2012

She has grown tired of living alone, and as she approaches her late thirties she finds herself longing for a long-term romantic partner. A husband, even. “I’ve always been open to the possibility of finding the right guy and getting married,” she tells me as we share lunch in San Francisco’s Mission District. “And Quirkyalone was never about being alone—it was about being connected, to yourself and to other people too. Now I’m ready for a different experience. I’ve lived alone for a long time, and at this point in my life I’d grow a lot more if I were partnered. To be honest, I worry that if I keep on making this the center of my life I’m going to wind up being single forever.”

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

Alongside its proprietary tendencies, the Bay Area tech culture still provides leaven for experiments in social organization. Pop-up [freespace] sites have turned unused downtown storefronts into drop-in hackathons—before the founders moved the model to refugee camps in Greece and Africa. In the gentrifying Mission District, there is the famous (and notorious) hackerspace Noisebridge, together with the original location of its feminist rejoinder, Double Union. On the Oakland side of the border with Berkeley, a cavernous nightclub-turned-community-center called the Omni Commons is home to Sudo Room, a hackerspace with an anarchist bent, and Counter Culture Labs, where civilian scientists tinker with donated instruments and synthesize new forms of vegan cheese.

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
by Randall Stross
Published 4 Sep 2013

They are working on Graffiti World, which combines digital Legos and the social aspects of the building game Minecraft.12 Graffiti World’s users will be invited to submit drawings of objects, which other users will use to build scenes, their own Graffiti Worlds. Much coding needs to be done before it will be ready for a beta release, however. Kantor and Tim Suzman live in an apartment in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco and their front room serves as the company’s office. Ted Suzman has his own apartment in the Mission district, so the three are not housed as compactly as the Ridejoy trio. But to an observer watching them work, the Graffiti Lab’s threesome is a seamless unit. • In the middle of the summer, the Graffiti Labs founders find themselves, most unexpectedly, working on two different ideas simultaneously.

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture
by Guy Branum
Published 29 Jul 2018

When I ran into Berkeley friends and they asked me what firm I was at, I was filled with shame, but not enough shame to change me. Shame isn’t good at changing me. Love changes me. One night in the latter part of 2001, after 9/11 but before my twenty-sixth birthday, I went to an open mic in the Mission District of San Francisco with a word-for-word printout of my set in hand.9 I got up, the room responded, and I felt alive in a way I hadn’t since I’d gone to Minnesota. That is also not the first time I did stand-up. After the show, an established comic said to me, “You seem like you’d make a really good writer.”

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

“Guys, you work for a major shareholder and board member,” I said. “Facebook needs to be aware that this is going on.” They told me they would look into it. Whether that actually happened, I have no idea. With a Facebook board member now apparently on the case, I went to a party in San Francisco’s Mission District, where a Facebook VP was expected to be among the guests. As it turned out, the party was filled with Facebook employees. The look was standard-issue Silicon Valley—form-fitted gray T-shirts—and it was hard to get through a conversation without hearing a progress report on a keto fasting diet, drinking Soylent meal replacements, and why food was becoming “overrated.”

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans
by Eben Kirksey
Published 10 Nov 2020

Sharp and I met up with Matt Chappell, an administrator at Stanford Health Care, who says that he was cured of HIV by Sangamo’s gene-editing treatment. Chappell has closely cropped gray hair, a perfect white smile, and stylish horn-rimmed glasses that evoke a 1950s look. We were eating dinner together at a taqueria in the Mission District. As the two Matts swapped war stories about protesting together in the streets with ACT UP and their adventures as experimental guinea pigs, I pressed Chappell for more details about his cure. Chappell stopped taking his HIV meds after the Sangamo study. Following the experiment, his body has kept the virus in check without any help from conventional pharmaceutical drugs.

The Stolen Year
by Anya Kamenetz
Published 23 Aug 2022

Elisa immigrated to this country from Peru about ten years before the pandemic. Serena attends Buena Vista Horace Mann, a K–8 public school in San Francisco. The two speak primarily Spanish, as do most of the students in the school. Buena Vista Horace Mann occupies a large city block in the heart of the Mission District, a gentrifying hipster neighborhood spangled with bright murals. The nineteenth-century classroom buildings surround a garden and play yard. This is a community school. That means it partners with nonprofits and city agencies to provide as many services as possible to its students. A few years ago, Buena Vista Horace Mann converted one of its gyms to become the country’s first public school to host a homeless shelter for families.

USA's Best Trips
by Sara Benson
Published 23 May 2010

Follow Church four blocks south across Market to 16th St and turn right – you’ll see the spectacular cake-frosting churrigueresque towers of Mission Dolores. Duck inside to peek at spectacular stained-glass windows depicting California’s 21 missions and San Francisco’s gentle namesake saint, and pay respects to the native Miwok and Ohlone who built this mission at the memorial hut. The Mission District has more than 250 murals hidden on side streets, and two blocks up on Valencia between 17th and 18th St is San Francisco’s best open-air graffiti art gallery, Clarion Alley. Only the strong murals survive here: anything that fails to inspire gets peed on or painted over. Half a block further down Valencia, you’ll spot San Francisco’s biggest mural, Maestrapiece, a show of female strength that wraps around the trailblazing Women’s Building.

…

* * * PANISSE PROTéGéS “When you operate a restaurant for 37 years, a whole lot of people come through the kitchen,” Waters says. Of her alumni in San Francisco, try Michael Tusk, who offers shrewd Italian-French fusions at Quince (www.quincerestaurant.com), or Gayle Pirie, who operates Foreign Cinema (www.foreigncinema.com), a gourmet movie house in the Mission District. More casual eats are across the bay, where Charlie Hallowell offers immaculate wood-fired pizzas at Pizzaiolo (www.pizzaiolooakland.com), and Alison Barakat marries classic comfort food with ’50s kitsch at Bakesale Betty (www.bakesalebetty.com). * * * The full effect of Chez Panisse may hit the next day when, in the thrall of culinary inspiration, you mysteriously find yourself at the Berkeley farmers’ market, run by the Ecology Center since 1987.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
by E. Gabriella Coleman
Published 25 Nov 2012

The reason for this dramatic change of heart was a surprise to me: it was the abundance of humor and laughter among hackers. As I learned more about their technical world and was able to glean their esoteric jokes, I quickly found myself enjoying the endless stream of jokes they made in all sorts of contexts. During a dinner in San Francisco’s Mission district, at the office while interning at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or at the monthly gatherings of the Bay Area Linux User Group held in a large Chinatown restaurant, humor was a constant bedfellow. Given the deep, bodily pleasures of laughter, the jovial atmosphere overcame most social barriers and sources of social discomfort, and allowed me to feel welcome among the hackers.

American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
by Nick Bilton
Published 15 Mar 2017

“Well,” Ross said, “I have some work to do, so why don’t you go and wander around the stores and we can meet up later?” “That’s fine. I’ll do some shopping.” After breakfast Ross handed her a set of keys and walked in the direction of Monterey Boulevard, toward his apartment. Julia turned and walked the other way, toward the Mission District. Julia had planned to be out all morning, maybe picking up a few dresses or some sexy lingerie, but she wasn’t dressed for the San Francisco cold. Each time she left a store, a frigid wind engulfed her, pushing her back in the direction she had come. After an hour of this she’d had enough.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou
Published 20 May 2018

He’d pricked his own finger so much while running internal tests that he no longer had any feeling in it. With Tony’s permission, they put the Edisons in the trunk of Aaron’s Mazda and drove up to San Francisco. Their plan was to take them around to friends’ startups in the city. First, they stopped at Aaron’s apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District to do some staging. They placed the machines on the wooden coffee table in Aaron’s living room and made sure they had everything else they needed: the cartridges, the lancets to draw the blood, and the small syringes called “transfer pens” used to put the blood in the cartridge. Aaron took photos with his digital camera to document what they were doing.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol
by Holly Glenn Whitaker
Published 9 Jan 2020

Except it is working, because as I am going through the motions of my alcohol-centric life—going to weddings and baby showers and happy hours and nights out with my friends—I am all of a sudden acutely aware of how entirely pointless it is that we drink. It was like: noticing you’ve lost ten pounds without trying. Two weeks after diagnosing myself with BPD, I’m out with a friend in the Mission District of San Francisco, when over my protests she picks up two men. They are Canadian, and the one she guns for loses interest in her by the second bar; the one I am stuck with—who can’t stop talking about the fucking Lumineers and rubbing his pierced nipples—basically wants to marry me. This is not a situation I’m particularly winning at, but it’s also a situation my friend can’t abide.

Little Failure: A Memoir
by Gary Shteyngart
Published 7 Jan 2014

My hipster interlocutor looks at me as if I am a complete idiot. Which I suppose I am. As an immigrant, my job is to fucking learn. And what Oberlin has to teach me is how to become a part of the cultural industries in a handful of American cities. How to move back to Brooklyn’s Williamsburg or San Francisco’s Mission District and be slightly known among a select group of my own duplicates. How to use the advance for the Serbian rights to my memoir to throw a killer party featuring the world’s second-worst banjo player and absolutely worst snake charmer. There’s a knock on the door of a labor seminar with my favorite Marxist professor.

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
by Sarah Frier
Published 13 Apr 2020

THE SURPRISE “He chose us, not the other way around.” —DAN ROSE, FORMER VP OF PARTNERSHIPS AT FACEBOOK, ABOUT KEVIN SYSTROM’S DECISION Gregor Hochmuth needed a few seconds to answer his phone because he was engrossed in the challenge of eating his dinner—an enormous burrito from San Francisco’s Mission District, with a tortilla stretched tight around an unwieldy pile of ingredients. Any mishandling could cause dollops of guacamole and salsa-soaked rice to roll out. The call was from Krieger. It was rare for Hochmuth to hear from his boss so late on a Sunday night. “Everything okay?” Hochmuth asked.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
by Henry Grabar
Published 8 May 2023

Because the predominant California neighborhood is composed of single-family homes, it’s tough for anyone who’s not in a traditional, nuclear family to find a place that’s even the right size, let alone the right price. There were two areas in Fullerton with apartment buildings, where Orange County’s young teachers and firefighters doubled and tripled up in apartments, as if this were the tightly packed Mission District of San Francisco and not the unending sprawl of the Southland. Fortunately, almost every single one of those sprawling homes—and certainly most of the one-story ranch homes in Fullerton—had a large, separate space that had never really been used as intended: the garage. Which was where Trinidad Castañeda was planning to live.

Little Brother
by Cory Doctorow
Published 29 Apr 2008

For the 30th anniversary of the store, they put together an anthology of stories by Bakka writers that included work by Michelle Sagara (AKA Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Tara Tallan --and me!)]] [[BakkaPhoenix Books: http://www.bakkaphoenixbooks.com/ 697 Queen Street West, Toronto ON Canada M6J1E6, +1 416 963 9993]] I'm a senior at Cesar Chavez high in San Francisco's sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced "Winston." Not pronounced "Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn" -- unless you're a clueless disciplinary officer who's far enough behind the curve that you still call the Internet "the information superhighway."

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy
by Mehrsa Baradaran
Published 5 Oct 2015

One way to remedy some of the shortcomings outlined above is to formalize these lending circles. One example of such an arrangement was initiated by the Mission Asset Fund in San Francisco, which has linked a lending circle called a “cesta” (which means “basket” in Spanish) with Citibank. See Alexa Vaughn, “Mission District Lending Circle Helps Low-Income Earners Pursue Dreams,” SFGate, June 6, 2011, accessed March 15, 2015, www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/kalw/detail?entry_id=90450. See Jen Haley, “The Mission Asset Fund: A Bridge between Informal and Formal Banking,” Dowser, February 17, 2011, http://dowser.org/the-mission-asset-fund-a-bridge-between-informal-and-formal-banking/. 62.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

I didn’t want to reenact the “splitism” about ideas that made Marxists ridiculous. But Barlow was an organizer. He eventually put me in a position where I had to choose. 19. How We Settled into a Seed for the Future Virtual Rights, but Not Virtual Economic Rights In 1990, I was invited to a lunch at a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District to consider cofounding a new organization to fight for cyber rights. Chuck, VPL’s prime hacker, and I went up and met Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, and Barlow. The three of them eventually moved forward, founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But I held back. (Chuck was too busy coding to pay any of us much mind.)

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
by Charles Montgomery
Published 12 Nov 2013

*According to the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index (http://htaindex.cnt.org), an average household in 2008 in Weston Ranch emitted more than eleven metric tons per year from auto use and spent more than $5,000 on gas (assuming that they did not commute outside of Stockton for work). In comparison, the average household in San Francisco’s Mission District emitted about four metric tons per year from auto use and spent about half as much on gas. *In Sarasota County, Florida, for example, Minicozzi found that it would take about three times as long for the county to recoup the land and infrastructure costs involved in developing housing in a sprawl pattern as compared with downtown.

How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir
by Cat Marnell
Published 30 Jan 2017

I left the mood stabilizers and antidepressants. A few days later, I was on a plane heading to sunny, gorgeous Northern California! Life was about to be beautiful again. I could tell. * * * Someday I will write at length about the surreal half-year that I lived with Alex, SAME, the Fat Jew, Alden, and Sebastian in a Mission District minimansion—but we have a lot of life-murdering to get to. So for now, all you need to know is that after my Adderall ran out in February, I spent four months in bed. The crash was death! It felt like I had mono or something. I was so beat. I started taking the tranquilizers I’d stolen to get through it, and that made everything worse.

The Push: A Climber's Search for the Path
by Tommy Caldwell
Published 15 May 2017

At twenty-five Dickey was the oldest member of our expedition. Six feet tall, dark and handsome, he gave off a well-adjusted but shaggy cool vibe. In comparison, the rest of us were kids. For Dickey, raised religious in Texas, recreation had meant Bible trivia competitions, at least until he rebelled and headed west. He landed in the Mission District of San Francisco, got into climbing and gravitated toward Yosemite and the High Sierra, where he’d made some quality ascents. Along the way he’d graduated from San Francisco State with a degree in recreation and leisure studies, making him the educational dean of our trip. Beth, in second place, had done a semester of college.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
by Edward Tenner
Published 1 Sep 1997

Compare, too, the Tangshan casualties with those of an equally powerful earthquake that struck Valparaiso, Chile,* in 1985: it killed only 15o of one million residents. Seismic design of Chilean urban buildings made the difference. In the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, the high-rises of the financial district, designed to meet seismic codes, survived. The low frame buildings of the Mission District, built before the enactment of stricter codes enforcing new engineering standards, collapsed and burned. The greatest risks, human and material, may not be where earthquakes have caused the greatest damage recently but where they are likely but less familiar. Lisbon, despite the fame of its Richter 9.o earthquake of 1755, may be ready for another that could once more produce record fatalities.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr
Published 14 Jun 2017

I had no idea what she was talking about. I left, that night, in a daze, my head heavy with visions of the brrccccchhhhhxxxssszzzzz future and with medical marijuana. The singularity, polyamory, roasted broccoli, Pinochet . . . it was enough. I thought I’d clear my head by walking back from the Mission district, where 20Mission is based, to my downtown hotel. About forty minutes into my journey, I entered an area of Market Street that looked as if it had been set-designed by the Devil. Hanging in the glow of a twenty-four-hour liquor store was a scattered wolf-pack of ghouls, hustlers and the deranged.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

In addition to regularly joining the Kings at their table, he hosted his own dinners. One night he invited his high school friends—now married—Joanna and John Edson to supper. The Edsons had moved to San Francisco so John could complete his residency at San Francisco General Hospital, and Brand had suggested that they look for housing in the Mission District. “Isn’t that all Mexican?” Joanna had replied. Despite having left Rockford and studied at college in the East, her midwestern provincialism was still intact. (She and John ended up renting a house in the Sunset District, then a largely white working-class neighborhood.) In response, on their second night in the city, he invited them for a Mexican dinner at his apartment that he prepared with his girlfriend of the moment, a young Mexican named Rose, who had become a regular visitor first to the barge and then for several months afterward in San Francisco.

Stacy Mitchell
by Big-Box Swindle The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (2006)

Carmen Herrera-Mansir, interview, Jan. 20, 2006; Donna Jones, “El Pajaro Helps Latino Residents Start Businesses,” Santa Cruz Sentinel, Jan. 24, 2004; Carol James, “Assisting Retail Businesses,” NBIA Review, Oct. 2003. 20. Alex Padro, interview, Feb. 7, 2006. Washington, D.C., has a Commercial Property Acquisition Program to help local business owners buy their buildings, but it has not been funded. The Mission Economic Development Association (MEDA) in the Mission District of San Francisco also has a Commercial Ownership Program that provides technical assistance and gap financing, but MEDA business consultant Oscar Dominguez said property values rose so fast during the dot-com boom that, even with the extra help, ownership is out of reach for most of the business owners he works with.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

It’s also home to a violent, often unaccountable police department, which has been operating under federal oversight for over a decade. The police abuse has been playing out against a backdrop of increasing gentrification fueled by the area’s Internet boom and the spike in real estate prices that goes along with it. In San Francisco, neighborhoods like the Mission District, historically home to a vibrant Latino community, have turned into condos and lofts and upscale gastro pubs. Teachers, artists, older adults, and anyone else not making a six-figure salary are having a tough time making ends meet. Oakland, which for a time was spared this fate, was now feeling the crush as well.

The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan, and the Climbing Life
by Mark Synnott
Published 5 Mar 2019

For a split second he was facing outward, away from the rock, looking right at us. Then he peeled off and went airborne. * * * — SIX MONTHS EARLIER, I had been reminiscing with a buddy from college about our few triumphs and far more numerous mishaps as fledgling alpinists, in the front lobby of a warehouse turned corporate headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission District. John Climaco and I had met at Middlebury College in Vermont after my brightly colored climbing rope—conspicuously displayed in the doorway of my dorm room—caught his eye. Climaco, a far more experienced climber, took me under his wing and introduced me to ice climbing and mountaineering. Climaco had called me a few weeks earlier with the news that he had just scored his dream job producing websites for an Internet startup called Quokka that was hoping to be a Bloomberg-type terminal for sports.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

She interviewed with Hurley and Chen and faced a tougher grilling from Botha, the investor. YouTube extended an offer, but Levine was ambivalent, and much of her uncertainty stemmed from the DMCA. She called a friend and fellow lawyer, Fred von Lohmann, and asked him to meet after work at her usual watering hole, the Rite Spot Cafe, a dive bar in San Francisco’s Mission District. Levine arrived with pages printed out from the law, slapping them down on a table in front of her friend. Under poor bar light, she read directly from Section 512. A website with copyright-infringing material—say, a clip from SNL—would not be held liable if one of three things happened: (1) the website lacked “actual knowledge” that the material was infringing; (2) the website didn’t get any “financial benefit directly” from the infringing material; or (3) the website, once it was notified of the material, took it down “expeditiously.”

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
by Michael Pollan
Published 22 Apr 2013

The bread was so powerfully aromatic that, had I been alone, I would have been tempted to push my face into it. But I was at a dinner party in Oakland with people I didn’t know very well, so I limited myself to eating as much of it as possible and asking questions about it. One of our hosts worked in San Francisco and had stopped by a bakery in the Mission District to pick it up on his way home. It seemed that the bread made at this bakery didn’t come out of the oven till late in the afternoon, which explained why when I first tasted it the bread was still slightly warm. When I started baking bread, this memorable loaf loomed large in my mind, as an unattainable ideal, perhaps, but a loaf to shoot for anyway.

A Crack in the Edge of the World
by Simon Winchester
Published 9 Oct 2006

Later Schmitz explained: ‘While the orders issued at the time were perhaps without legal authority, and were extraordinary, they were accepted by the people with good nature and good will, and there was a general desire to carry out the suggestions made in my written and verbal messages.’ But he demanded that the orders be printed. The most controversial of these was rushed out by the Altvater Printing and Stationery Company, whose works down in the Mission district were still functioning, though without electric power. Soldiers commandeered passers-by to operate the treadles. The mayor had 5,000 handbills letterpressed, each sternly (and technically illegally) telling the citizens: The Federal Troops, the members of the Regular Police Force and all Special Police Officers have been authorized by me to KILL any and all persons engaged in Looting* or in the Commission of Any Other Crime.

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Dec 2010

None of his recommended drugs or injections would fix the problem. They were nothing more than Band-Aids designed to mask symptoms, to dull the senses. I had graduated to terminal pain management. My second day on prednisone, a strong immunosuppressant drug, I spent the entire afternoon stumbling around the Mission district in SF in a daze, looking for a car I’d parked just an hour earlier. I gave up after three hours and took a cab to a dinner meeting. The next morning, I woke up looking like a pug and couldn’t remember who I’d had dinner with. Enough was enough. If conventional medicine couldn’t fix the problem, it was time for more drastic measures.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
by Steven Levy
Published 18 May 2010

He was, as she described him, “very shy—but capable of functioning in the world of Community Memory.” The group flourished for a year and a half, moving the terminal at one point from Leopold’s to the Whole Earth Access Store, and placing a second terminal at a public library in San Francisco’s Mission District. But the terminals kept breaking down, and it became clear that more reliable equipment was essential. A whole new system was needed, since CM could only go so far with the Hulking Giant XDS-940, and in any case the relationship between CM and Resource One (its funding source) was breaking down.

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Jan 2012

The key was peppering my calligraphy teacher with questions, which leads us to the next complementary tool: interviewing. INTERVIEWING: SHOOTING BASKETBALL 3-POINTERS “You’re doing a terrible job on your drink.” Start-up veteran Babak “Nivi” Nivi was finishing his sake as I took my first sip. We were well en route to inebriated at Eiji, a tiny Japanese restaurant tucked in between the Castro and Mission districts of San Francisco.10 Daiginjo was the perfect fuel for our discussion of odd skills and physical tracking. He had recently picked up Olympic lifting for fun, and I had a glucose monitor implanted in my side to track spikes in blood sugar. At one point, Nivi randomly offered: “If you ever want to deconstruct basketball, I have the DVD for you: Better Basketball.”

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

It attached to a standard color television set and had a slot in the top that accepted plug-in game cartridges. Ray McClure was trained as an artist but took a job at Odeo—the company that ended up creating Twitter—back when it was just a few artsy, hacker-y people working out of an apartment in San Francisco’s hip Mission district. Bob Metcalfe coinvented Ethernet—the interoffice networking protocol—at Xerox PARC and then founded 3Com to commercialize the standard. He is one of a select few in Silicon Valley to have his own “law.” Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users.

The Enlightened Capitalists
by James O'Toole
Published 29 Dec 2018

It was clean, quiet, well-lighted, and situated in a largely residential neighborhood some distance away from the grimy, rat-infested areas where most of the city’s manufacturing was conducted. The architecturally significant building is still in use today as a Quaker school in the city’s now-trendy Mission District. After Jacob Davis retired, his son became the firm’s head of manufacturing, running the business as if he owned it. As creative as his father, Simon designed a one-piece button-up-the-front denim overall for toddlers called Koveralls, a product that became almost as popular as Levi’s iconic 501 jeans.

Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Published 23 Oct 2011

Meigs and spent much of the war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he occasionally found himself in minor trouble and never rose above the rank of seaman. Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the Turks in Armenia, and they moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when she was a child. She had a secret that she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had been married before, but her husband had been killed in the war. So when she met Paul Jobs on that first date, she was primed to start a new life. Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that, when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful life.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

And yet the more time I’ve spent learning about large language models like ChatGPT, the more I’ve realized something ironic: in important respects, their thought process resembles that of human beings. In particular, it resembles that of poker players. In June 2023, I visited the OpenAI offices in San Francisco to meet with Nick Ryder, who describes himself as a “proud co-parent” of ChatGPT. The offices, in an unadorned warehouse space in the Mission District, almost go out of their way not to draw attention to themselves. But they’re where the action is, and Ryder is another one of the restless young nerds who sniffed it out, joining OpenAI after completing a PhD in theoretical math at Berkeley. “I loved teaching, I loved learning, I loved the community.

Western USA
by Lonely Planet

LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art puts on provocative and avant-garde shows, as does LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, which specializes in post-1950s pop and conceptual art. To see California-made art at its most experimental, browse the SoCal gallery scenes in downtown LA and Culver City, then check out independent NorCal art spaces in San Francisco’s Mission District and the laboratory-like galleries of SOMA’s Yerba Buena Arts District. Top of section The Land & Wildlife Crashing tectonic plates, mighty floods, spewing volcanoes, frigid ice fields: for millions and millions of years, the American West was an altogether unpleasant place. But from this fire and ice sprang a kaleidoscopic array of stunning landscapes bound by a common modern trait: an undeniable ability to attract and inspire explorers, naturalists, artists and outdoor adventurers.

USA Travel Guide
by Lonely, Planet

SWEET AUBURN Sweet Auburn Curb Market MARKET $ Offline map Google map (www.sweetauburncurbmarket.com; 209 Edgewood Ave SE; mains $5-9; 8am-6pm Mon-Sat) This small market allows foodies to browse countless stalls for cooking ingredients or hot meals served on the premises, from organic coffee to Italian deli fare. Bell Street Burritos is particularly worthy of a trip here, serving up the sort of fresh, fat burritos that evoke San Francisco’s Mission District. LITTLE FIVE POINTS Vortex Bar & Grill BURGERS $ Offline map Google map (www.thevortexbarandgrill.com; 438 Moreland Ave; burgers from $6.45; 11am-midnight Sun-Thu, to 3am Fri & Sat) A scrappy joint where alterna-hispters mingle alongside Texas tourists and Morehouse College steppers.

…

While there is little actual Spanish food today, the Spanish brought cattle to Mexico, which the Mexicans adapted to their own corn-and-chile-based gastronomy to make tacos, tortillas, enchiladas, burritos, chimichangas and other dishes made of corn or flour pancakes filled with everything from chopped meat and poultry to beans. Don’t leave New Mexico without trying a bowl of spicy green chile stew. Steaks and barbecue are always favorites on Southwestern menus, and beer is the drink of choice for dinner and a night out. Don’t miss the fist-sized burritos in San Francisco’s Mission District and fish tacos in San Diego. California: Farm-to-Table Restaurants & Taquerías Owing to its vastness and variety of microclimates, California is truly America’s cornucopia for fruits and vegetables, and a gateway to myriad Asian markets. The state’s natural resources are overwhelming, with wild salmon, Dungeness crab and oysters from the ocean; robust produce year-round; and artisanal products such as cheese, bread, olive oil, wine and chocolate.

Eastern USA
by Lonely Planet

SWEET AUBURN Sweet Auburn Curb Market MARKET $ (www.sweetauburncurbmarket.com; 209 Edgewood Ave SE; mains $5-9; 8am-6pm Mon-Sat) This small market allows foodies to browse countless stalls for cooking ingredients or hot meals served on the premises, from organic coffee to Italian deli fare. Bell Street Burritos is particularly worthy of a trip here, serving up the sort of fresh, fat burritos that evoke San Francisco’s Mission District. LITTLE FIVE POINTS Vortex Bar & Grill BURGERS $ (www.thevortexbarandgrill.com; 438 Moreland Ave; burgers from $6.45; 11am-midnight Sun-Thu, to 3am Fri & Sat) A scrappy joint where alterna-hispters mingle alongside Texas tourists and Morehouse College steppers. The snarky menu boasts loads of gourmet burgers, but don’t discount the sublime black bean veggie melt.

1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed.
by Patricia Schultz
Published 13 May 2007

The menu follows the seasons with lots of surprises thrown in. A host of other local favorites include Nancy Oakes’ Boulevard, with its modern French-American cuisine and breathtaking views of the Bay Bridge; Anne and Craig Stoll’s Delfina, with hearty and deeply satisfying Tuscan fare in the Mission District; and the stylish longtime favorite Zuni Café on Market Street, where seminal chef Judy Rodgers cooks up Mediterranean specialties (and a legendary Tuscan roast chicken) and the bar is abuzz with the city’s glitterati. GARY DANKO: Tel 415-749-2060; www.gary danko.com. Cost: 3-course menu $68.