This week, neighbors noticed that when they visited Jocelyn’s Bakery and juice bar on 20th and Lexington Street, they didn’t see people coming to get Mexican pastries or juices or chat with the owner. Instead, they saw boarded up windows and a sign that says, “Out of business, thank you forever.”
A neighbor and reader wrote of Jocelyn’s, “The owner was a glowing fount of friendliness and warmth every time I came in. It’s been there since 1994! And it’s a perfect Latina-owned alternative to all the bourgeois new juice bars.”
Regulars highlighted the owner’s attention and care for her customers. A coffee would often be accompanied by a free pan dulce, and customers often spent extra time in the shop chatting.
Chris Siebert, who has lived near the bakery on Lexington Avenue for 16 years, remembered the owner of Jocelyn’s as “gracious, terrific,” and “always smiling.”
Despite its name, Jocelyn’s Bakery was beloved for its juices, formulated to alleviate various ailments and staunchly affordable. Tucked between Mission and Valencia, the shop offered a run-down paradise with the best of two worlds, according to former Mission Local reporter Andrea Valencia.
Unlike newer, more upscale juice shops currently in vogue, which promise to detoxify and cleanse, no questions asked, “The names of Jocelyn’s juices were blunt and shameless, pointing to the ugliness of your body,” Valencia wrote. “Luckily for the customer, this created a magical bond between the buyer and seller who prepared your elixir. You could order the acne juice and Jocelyn would tell you she remembered what it was to be young. You could order the constipation juice and she would ask how your tummy’s been doing.”
But the clientele apparently ran out. Micaela Lazcano, whose family owns and manages the building that housed Jocelyn’s, said the shop went out of business last week and that the family is looking for a new tenant in the space.
This is one in what Siebert called a “tidal wave” of closures that have happened in the neighborhood in the last few years. It is unclear what led to the bakery’s closure – though Siebert guesses that it has to do with the largely Central American clientele moving away.
One neighbor appears to have left a note for the now departed shop owner:
We will update this post if more information becomes available.
I think it is Lexington STREET ???? RIP beautiful Mission District and best wishes to all of us who care and especially to those who are activists trying to stop the ruin of SF
You are correct. Fixed!
“When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.”
— Eric Dolphy
I documented East Palo Alto’s Whiskey Gulch small business district on video on practically a storefront-by-storefront basis before is was redeveloped in 2000. But the whole block was going away in a few weeks so it was possible to be ready to do this. But in the Mission where the cultural space that made the neighborhood what it was is disappearing space by space there should be some sort of Mission Cultural Spatial Legacy alert system so when someone gets wind a place will close there could be a way to videotape activities, conduct oral histories and digitize artifacts for some future archive. Kind of like those people who went in for cryogenic facilities In hopes of some future solution, it would be good to create a Mission Cultural Space archive for some future reconstruction like when consumer virtual reality becomes big and we can create a virtual Mission Cultural Space District to overlay whatever comes after. Anyone connected with Grey Area Foundation or another entity to sponsor a project like this?
I remember the place and it’s sad it’s gone.