Over the whole month of October 2025, San Francisco Heritage’s Heritage in the Neighborhoods program will spotlight the South of Market Street area (SOMA). For most of the city’s history South of Market was a warehouse, industrial, and manufacturing district, home to machinists, iron workers, longshoreman, farm workers, and arriving immigrant populations from Ireland, Scandinavia, Greece, and the Philippines.
In the late 19th century, the neighborhood had the nickname “South of the Slot,” a reference to the conduit of the Market Street cable car lines. While the south side of Market Street featured the Grand and the Palace hotels, the soaring Claus Spreckels “Call Building” tower, and large business and office buildings, the blocks to the south between 1st and 12th streets were blue-collar. Alongside factories, breweries, and smelting works were the flats and apartments of most of their workers.
South of the Slot had its own mores, idioms, and dialect. John J. Jordan, a former “South of Market boy,” wrote a poem in his later years using the pseudo-Brooklynese of his old neighborhood. One stanza illustrates the area’s rough-edged reputation:
Put me down sout’ o’ Market
Where dey didn’t play Bridge or Whist
An a guy would have to beat it
If he couldn’t use his fists
Excepting a few significant landmark buildings, including the Old Mint on 5th Street and the U.S. Post Office and Courthouse on 7th Street, the 1906 earthquake and fire almost completely eradicated South of Market.
Warehouses and light industry returned with the city’s reconstruction. St. Patrick’s Catholic Church (City Landmark no. 3), the Palace Hotel (City Landmark no. 18), and the Oriental Warehouse at 650 Delancey Street (City Landmark no. 101), were rebuilt. Notable South of Market buildings and historic districts associated with San Francisco’s recovery and rebuilding period include the Jackson Brewery at 11th and Folsom streets (City Landmark no. 199), the Hotel Utah at 500 4th Street (City Landmark no. 282), and the National Register-designated South End Historic District.
Despite the construction of flats, apartments, and SRO hotels on both its main streets and numerous alleys, South of Market never fully recovered as a residential district after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Most of the Irish, German, and Northern European families displaced by the disaster found new homes in the Mission, Noe Valley, or elsewhere and did not return to South of the Slot. The neighborhood’s pre-quake population of nearly 60,000 was down to just over 5,000 by 1980.
Newly arrived Eastern European Jews, Greeks, Ukrainians, and Japanese created South of Market enclaves in the first half of the 20th century, with additional migrations of African Americans, Filipinos, and Central Americans arriving during and after World War II.
There has been increased recognition and historic designation of places, businesses, and institutions associated with the diverse cultural communities associated with South of Market history and life, including St. Michael’s church at 355 7th Street (formerly Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox), the New Pullman Hotel at 228-248 Townsend Street (City Landmark no. 280), and the Mint Mall and Hall on Mission Street. We will take closer looks at these local cornerstones over the course of the month.
In the 1960s and 1970s, displacement hit the 3rd and 4th street corridors with redevelopment for the Moscone Convention Center and Yerba Buena Gardens projects. At the same time an LGBTQ+ leather and dance culture began to flower along Folsom Street and adjoining blocks from 3rd to 12th streets.
The 1990s brought museums, loft construction, high-tech companies, more displacement, a mini-residential boom (a doubling of population between 1980 and 2000), and a rebranding of the neighborhood as SOMA.
The rapid changes to the neighborhood at the turn of the 21st century led SF Heritage and other groups to push for greater recognition and protection of its unique architecture, businesses, and subcultures. SOMA Pilipinas, established in 2016, was one of the first recognized cultural districts. Two years later, the Leather and LGBTQ District was added to the city’s program, with The SF Eagle bar on 12th Street, legacy business and City Landmark no. 295, as its unofficial headquarters.
Each weekday in October we will share more on South of Market history, architecture, businesses, cultural zones, and artistic communities. We will also highlight the neighborhood’s contributions to the overall city’s identity and vitality. As with all Heritage in the Neighborhoods spotlights, we will also explore how our work at SF Heritage and preservation can ensure its future is just as vibrant.
Thanks for coming along!
