The start at Pearl St.

It is 7 a.m, 59° and headed to 74°. Details for today and the next ten days are here.

Today’s block: Pearl to Elgin Park, Duboce to Market.

I ventured to the northern tip of the Mission District with Gabrielle Le Roux, an artist and activist for social justice from South Africa who is in San Francisco to present her “Proudly Trans” portraits this week at the LGBT Center on Wednesday and at Galería de la Raza on Thursday.

I was interested in seeing if there was anything on this northern tip of the Mission that suggested a Mission identity (“Burrito Me” scrawled into the sidewalk answered that question.) and also in seeing what someone new to the area would notice. Gabrielle took the photos and I trailed along. She said later that she noticed she looked up a lot and also found herself interested in how people try to make security systems aesthetically pleasing.

Details on how to participate in the project to document the Mission waking up are here. You can see all of the photo essays here.

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

As founder/executive editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.

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