Mixt, the salad-serving place, will open in a few weeks, but the La Rondalla signs will remain and will be refurbished in place, according to Leslie Silverglide, the co-founder and CEO of Mixt.
Our initial posting incorrectly assumed the signs were coming down permanently. My apologies for the error. Turns out they aren’t coming down at all, and will be restored without being removed.
“We are definitely keeping the signs and believe they are an important part of the neighborhood,” Silverglide wrote in an e-mail. “The signs are in bad shape, so we are rebuilding them and adding Mixt, but the format will be the same.”
Right in front of La Rondalla is the old sign for a flower shop that remains, and I can’t even remember the flower shop being open. Does anyone?
Photo by Lydia Chávez
Just down the block, a restaurant kept the sign from an old records store.
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.
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Hopefully the Henry Schrumpf sign will be preserved as is, with the patina of the years, and not repainted over.
I always liked the sign because I remembered my mother mentioning that she had taken a floriculture class from Henry Schrumpf at San Francisco City College. He apparently was the first instructor there, teaching an introductory course in 1940 or 1941. According to a Chronicle feature article of 8/31/1952, the class then “was crowded with women eager to find their place in a business that had been, until a few years before, completely and exclusively a man’s field.” (My mother went on to work at the Lagomarsino flower stand in the St Francis Hotel, which survived in some form until just five or ten years ago.)
According to old phone books, the Schrumpf flower shop at 911 Valencia began around 1941 and ended its run in 1997. It was next leased to a company called E Net.
Henry Schrumpf apparently had a signature style of flower arranging which was noted by other florists. The proprietor of Pinelli Flowerland on Clement (which has been there since before 1930, making it the oldest store on the street) told me that Schrumpf always used lots of tea leaves in a paticular rosette configuration. Also that Valencia Street was a good site for a florist shop since the Valencia streetcar or bus that passed by eventually ended up at the Colma cemeteries.
Of Schrumpf’s City College, the Chronicle writer, in a kind of no-nonsense voice of the time, says that it’s “a school where those who think it would be good for the soul to work with flowers are discarded like faded roses and those who want to keep on with the hard, exacting work of a florist are nurtured like hothouse orchids.”
I used to live in the apartment above the flower shop from 1993-2001, and the flower shop was operating at that time. In fact, I used to have to pay my rent to the flower shop itself. I think it closed shortly after when the women there passed away.
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Hopefully the Henry Schrumpf sign will be preserved as is, with the patina of the years, and not repainted over.
I always liked the sign because I remembered my mother mentioning that she had taken a floriculture class from Henry Schrumpf at San Francisco City College. He apparently was the first instructor there, teaching an introductory course in 1940 or 1941. According to a Chronicle feature article of 8/31/1952, the class then “was crowded with women eager to find their place in a business that had been, until a few years before, completely and exclusively a man’s field.” (My mother went on to work at the Lagomarsino flower stand in the St Francis Hotel, which survived in some form until just five or ten years ago.)
According to old phone books, the Schrumpf flower shop at 911 Valencia began around 1941 and ended its run in 1997. It was next leased to a company called E Net.
Henry Schrumpf apparently had a signature style of flower arranging which was noted by other florists. The proprietor of Pinelli Flowerland on Clement (which has been there since before 1930, making it the oldest store on the street) told me that Schrumpf always used lots of tea leaves in a paticular rosette configuration. Also that Valencia Street was a good site for a florist shop since the Valencia streetcar or bus that passed by eventually ended up at the Colma cemeteries.
Of Schrumpf’s City College, the Chronicle writer, in a kind of no-nonsense voice of the time, says that it’s “a school where those who think it would be good for the soul to work with flowers are discarded like faded roses and those who want to keep on with the hard, exacting work of a florist are nurtured like hothouse orchids.”
James: This is wonderful history. Thank you. Henry Schrumpf sounds like a great guy and one who ought to be remembered.
My brother sent me flowers from that shop on my 30th birthday!
I used to live in the apartment above the flower shop from 1993-2001, and the flower shop was operating at that time. In fact, I used to have to pay my rent to the flower shop itself. I think it closed shortly after when the women there passed away.