The Kink Armory Opens Its Doors to Mission Local

Factual & historical quibble on an otherwise excellent photo essay:

I’ve noticed a trend of calling the creek at the Kink.com Armory “Mission Creek” but it’s actually not. Mission Creek was a tidal inlet that turned a corner a few blocks east of that site, right near where all the streets bend. It turned south along Folsom Street, just about, and ended in a wide, muddy area near 18th and 19th. This creek under the Kink.com building fed into that tidal channel at a confluence around 14th near Folsom or South Van Ness.

Naming it:
This creek is most accurately and historically called “San Souci Creek” because it flowed down 14th and 15th from Church and Duboce, which was the mouth of San Souci Valley, named after the San Souci (carfree) Roadhouse which was once pretty much the only building in the Panhandle area (Fulton and Divisadero, to be precise). I’d say the creek flowed through the Wiggle (bike route) before coming across Market Street, except that in the Wiggle, it mostly just soaked through sand dunes, emerging as a spring at the last big dune near Duboce Park.

There is excellent evidence that this spring was actually the original Dolores waterway “ojo de agua”, after which the Mission was nicknamed, so it is poetically justified to call it Mission Creek, but not historically accurate.

If this kind of nerdy detail intrigues you, you should probably be signing up for my Thinkwalks Water Walking tour on January 2 where, for hours, we discuss the merits of all the evidence.

In the meantime, I want to jump in! I can’t believe you didn’t take the plunge!