Last Wednesday, I found a wallet on the northwest corner of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue that belonged to a guy in his 20s. He lived a few blocks away, in a part of town that, despite being only blocks from City Hall and running along one of San Francisco’s major thoroughfares, somehow doesn’t belong to any neighborhood at all.
As I set about returning the wallet to its owner, I realized that I finally had the chance to investigate a question I’ve been obsessed with since I moved to San Francisco — and which has recently fueled a spicy neighborhood debate. What the hell do we call this area?
A vaguely cleaver-shaped hood, running along Market from about Octavia Boulevard to Van Ness, the area in question is really a nexus of six neighborhoods, patching together bits of Hayes Valley, the Lower Haight, the Mission, Civic Center, Mid-Market, and SoMa. It’s best known as the home of Zuni Cafe and Martuni’s, but it mostly feels like negative space, a jumble of diagonal-running alleys south to the Central Freeway and 13th Street…