San Francisco - Alison Bing [72]
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SOMA
Drinking; Eating; Shopping; Sleeping
Wander South of Market St (hence the acronym) and find a neighborhood well into middle age that still hasn’t decided what it wants to be when it grows up; instead it’s enjoying a rowdy, experimental second adolescence. Back in its youth, Victorian mansions lorded over SoMa from atop Rincon Hill, which was mostly dynamited in the 20th century to make way for the freeway overpasses. Now, SoMa is dominated by corporate headquarters and swanky hotels from the bay to 3rd St, museums and galleries in the Yerba Buena Arts District from 3rd to 5th, Skid Row from 6th to 8th, and leather bars and nightclubs from 9th to Van Ness. A whole range of career options present themselves within a few blocks: khaki-sporting Gap executive, SFMOMA-celebrated video artist, full-time drunk, weekend leather-daddy, or any combination of the above. Currently, the artists and leather-daddies seem to be having the most fun, with cutting-edge gallery openings attracting overflowing crowds, and Sunday beer busts with exposed, gym-toned pecs.
By day SoMa seems a motley neighborhood of towering edifices, poker-faced warehouses and back-alley motorcycle-repair joints, but by night beckoning neon and strobe lights provide continuity. The real constants in SoMa are parties: drag-show extravaganzas, DJ nights and fetish fests that spring up overnight and disappear just as suddenly.
One such party in honor of the Crimean War victory was thrown in a new upscale gated community called South Park, in 1855, in the hopes of attracting some of San Francisco’s Gold Rush millionaires to the subdivision. Instead, the grand affair degenerated into a cake-throwing food fight and the area ultimately became dominated by rooming houses and longshoremen. After WWII, Filipino American war veterans formed a quiet community in relative obscurity here, until the dot-com boom exploded within these few short blocks. From about 1996 to 2000, South Park lunchtime picnics were comprised of 20-something paper-millionaire CEOs furtively plotting their next moves, while risk-drunk venture capitalists sipped coffee in nearby cafes. Then in late 2000 the money evaporated like mid-afternoon fog, and employees were sent home with company laptops in lieu of their final paychecks. Now it’s happening again (sort of) with Twitter, MySpace and other new companies that are playing it cooler. Locals know South Park for discount designer shopping and some noteworthy restaurants that somehow survived to service the next boom: biotech.
Those shiny glass-clad towers just south of South Park represent Mission Bay, the newest addition to SoMa and the promised home of a biotech industry that’s been slower to arrive than expected because of cuts in federal spending. The area is eerily empty except when commuters arrive at CalTrans station or there’s a game on at AT&T Park. A walkway around the backside of the park provides a free glimpse of games in progress and a rowdy crowd of baseball fans.
Market St is the northern boundary of SoMa, which stretches from Van Ness Ave to the bay on the east. All of SoMa’s streets crisscross at oblique angles, and if you follow them towards Potrero and the Mission, all of them bend in a true southerly direction. These bends are your cue that you’re leaving the South of Market area, and Central Skyway over Division St forms an overhead border. Nearly every street in SoMa is wide and one-way, with long city blocks sometimes broken up by alleyways. Foggy days are best spent in the galleries and museums clustered around Yerba Buena Arts District, and pretty much any kind of nightlife that strikes your fancy (straight, gay, trans, leather, loud, kinky) can be found around Folsom and Harrison Sts between 8th and 11th Sts.
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top picks
SOMA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (below)
Catharine Clark Gallery (opposite)
Cartoon Art Museum (opposite)
Museum of the African Diaspora
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