Late Sunday morning, Chris Sarantos stood in front of Manny’s, surrounded by a sea of bright orange trash bags. He picked up his aluminum reacher tool as the morning cleanup ended and stayed to talk about the event.
“Just meeting people and helping out in the neighborhood,” Sarantos said, when asked what brings him out every Sunday. “If the city is not allocating enough funds to picking up trash, it’s good to step in if we can.”
Caledonia Street, just around the corner from Manny’s, was clean by 11:20 a.m., with about five people sitting in the shade as the sun warmed the block.
Julian Avenue too remained quiet and orderly. Around 11:24 a.m., about six people waited outside the Kailash Hotel until someone let them in a few moments later.
Wiese Street had more movement. Around six people, some with bicycles and rolling suitcases, made their way up the littered street. As they moved north, more individuals appeared along the edges, sitting on curbs and resting in patches of shade.
At 11:31 a.m., the southwest 16th Street plaza looked clean. An SFPD cruiser was parked beside the Mobile Command Two unit. The vehicle appeared empty and no officers were nearby. Several people sat on the plaza’s ledges, some chatting, others looking at their phones.
The northeast 16th Street plaza was also clean. A woman stood near the BART station with a microphone, reading religious passages from a notebook while another person stood quietly behind her. About a dozen people sat nearby on the plaza’s ledges.
Directly across the northeast plaza, vendors sold food like pupusas and tacos beneath blue tarp canopies. Others offered bagged vegetables, soaps, olive oil, and coffee at folding tables lined along the sidewalk. No one disturbed the unpermitted vendors.
At 11:49 a.m., Capp Street except for a man dressed in yellow and sitting on his wheelchair.
All your pictures and storyline are all in the early part of the day! When traveling down 16th St in the late afternoon into the night there is not as much loitering or garbage but it does have people still doing drugs in public and selling of unlicensed food and other stuff. It also seems that it all just moved up mission st. To 24th and mission! So my suggestion is to report a little later in the day to show that all not as bright on 16th after hours.
I’m a volunteer captain @ Manny’s Sunday morning Disco Trash Pickup. We call the tool we use to pick up litter a “grabber” not a “reacher”.
For years, on Saturdays and Sundays, Mission St.’s between 14th-16th St.’s, hold a FLEA MARKET. It has nothing to do with any of the (what some view as) chaos at 16th St. Bart Plaza. It’s completely separate from that scene, is always calm, and runs at a respectful volume. There are no fights or heavy drug use, the same (and more) food that is sold at Bart during the week, moves down the block to be sold on these two streets over the weekend. It’s where plenty of SF residents (from other neighborhoods) make the majority of their income for the week/month.
Don’t lump the Mission Flea Market in with the other scenes that this city’s gov’t and SFPD can’t get a handle on and figure out how to resolve.
Flea Markey huh? It’s a messy sidewalk sale if stolen good, stolen food (raw meat) folks are to drugged out to fight… instead they are passed out in the sidewalk preventing to the folks that live in the buildings at that corner to pass freely. There are always human feces on the sidewalk leading up to the church. It is awful. It’s also the place that people pull up box trucks to sell stolen goods. Plenty drug dealing out of cards parked along the block as well. D9 Supervisor- Jackie Fielder, what are you doing about this?