Despite the Elbo Room’s impending displacement from its 647 Valencia St. location, its owners plan to stay rooted in the Mission and on Monday the city granted it legacy business status – a possible financial lifeline. “We got officially approved yesterday,” said Matt Shapiro, one of the bar’s owners, adding that he and co-owner Erik Cantu are currently working with...
Four people are displaced, and two were sent to the hospital, after a fire in the top unit of a building at 119 Randall Street near Chenery Street. A disabled senior and her daughter were sent to the hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation, one firefighter said. “[The senior] came out with burned soot all over her face,” said Battalion Six...
Growing up next to an amusement park may have inspired Carl Pisaturo’s life-long fascination with light and motion – but the Mission District is where the “lumino-kinetic” sculptor found an affordable space to transform scientific concepts into art. After seeing rents triple and arts organizations drop one by one in a gentrifying- Boston in the 80s, Pisaturo said he...
The San Francisco Planning Commission voted unanimously on Thursday to move forward legislation that would regulate new businesses opening along the Mission’s 24th Street corridor. Already distinguished by the city as a Latino Cultural District in 2014, the five-block section of 24th Street running from Mission Street to Potrero Avenue and some of the surrounding area would be recognized as...
The new year marked the end of an era for the proprietors of Junko’s, a once clandestine thrift-store cabaret in the Mission and a two-decade stronghold of the city’s underground scavenging movement that unearthed everything from a letter from Ronald Reagan to a manuscript by Beat icon Neal Cassady. The owners, Derek Felten and Michael McQuate, made careers out of...
Valencia Street’s steady evolution into an increasingly upscale commercial corridor is claiming yet another local casualty as the two-decade old vintage and costume shop Retro Fit informed Mission Local of its exit. A bid on the shop’s space and a lease-less existence have made its continued survival on the corridor impossible, said owner Steven LeMay, adding that Retro Fit will be...
The owner of the Graywood Hotel, a single-room occupancy hotel damaged by a June 2016 blaze that displaced more than 50 people, has put the building up for sale amidst extensive renovations. The commercial leases in the building are now terminated, while advocates for the residential tenants are working to ensure they exercise their right to return. “We just don’t...
On the two-year anniversary of a fire at 22nd and Mission streets that killed one man and left more than 50 tenants homeless, few have received definitive word on what will happen to them. And for some, the deals that have kept them in temporary housing will expire in the next month or so. A city program that could help...
Tenants displaced by two major Mission fires gathered at the Brava Theater on Saturday for a holiday dinner, sponsored by community donations, and to discuss new housing solutions. Many of the low-income tenants and families suffered devastating losses after the fires, and most are still in need of permanent housing – some of them urgently so. Over a warm buffet...
A former go-go dancer and taxicab robber who had hoped to start life afresh at the Graywood Hotel is the last tenant displaced by the June fire who remains on the streets. Michelle Thompson’s story demonstrates how difficult it is to place some clients who resist housing because of what they have to leave behind: their personal belongings, friends and...
Since a five-alarm fire in June displaced Kimberly Walley and her husband, Henry Texada, from the single room occupancy hotel where they had been living for some five years, the couple had fallen on hard times, seemingly unplaceable by officials who had promised to find homes for all of those displaced in the fire. But on Thursday, Walley stood in...
Local band Soltron will play at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts this Friday to mark the release of its self-titled album celebrating the Mission District’s culture and exploring themes of gentrification and displacement. Soltron began as a trio of drummers in 2014 after percussionist Anthony Sierra went to Cuba, where his father is from, to study the batá,...
Rush hour drivers honked their support on Tuesday afternoon as anti-eviction organizations, community groups, and Mission residents protested what they say is a lack of community engagement by housing developers. The crowd of nearly 50 people spilled off the sidewalk and into the street as they listened to speeches calling for more community involvement in housing issues and greater transparency...
It is impossible to quantify the exchanges and relationships that have formed in the spaces that artist Todd Brown has created and curated in the Mission for nearly two decades. He’s been heavily involved in the Mission Arts & Performance Project, known as MAPP, which started in 2003 when Brown saw a need to connect local artists living within blocks from...
Despite promises from city leaders that the 58 tenants displaced by the fire at 29th and Mission streets would be housed, at least two tenants from the Graywood Hotel, which was ravaged by a five-alarm fire in June, are again homeless and living in a tent on 16th Street near Folsom Street. “The mayor said that none of us was gonna go...
