Johnny0 at Burrito Justice points us to this rendering of the Mission District’s boundaries according the the geotags found on Flickr photographs. Interesting that the northern end of Dolores Park isn’t included. What about all those bike polo pictures?
Johnny also looks at some of the newly coined “micro-hoods” (Transmission, Mastro), and proposes some new ones of his own. La Lengua is definitely one of my favorite areas. Link.
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While somewhat porous, the boundaries of the Mission for me have always been, roughly:
14th Street to the north
Dolores to the west, with a westward jut at the park
Cesar Chavez to the south
and Potrero to the east
The northeast corner gets funky, and that Best Buy complex is arguably NOT the Mission. But for what it’s worth, that’s my map.
The Mission absolutely does not extend north of 14th Street.
Dolores is a good western boundary. Sometimes, I think that’s too far, and that it should stop at Valencia or Guerrero. Guerrero and Dolores are just so much more different than their more western counterparts, but they’re probably still safely in Mission proper.
Cesar Chaves south, definitely.
Potrero east, yep.
So Zeitgeist isn’t in the Mission? What about me? I live next door to the Arco on 14th & Mission. I’m a block from the flea market at Arriba Juntos, which seems decidedly Mission. If I’m not in the Mission, where am I? Certainly not Soma. Hm.
¡Viva La Lengua Libre!
The real estate sites all have their definitions too. For example, Zillow says between Dolores and Potrero, 14th and Cesar Chavez, which is pretty simplistic to me.
More realistic isTrulia and Redfinsays the Mission stops at Bryant and that it goes past 14th. (wha??) But they include La Lengua (!!!), yet break out Mission Dolores as a separate area (hmmm…) For the western border, they have a lazy diagonal from Guerrero in the SW past Valencia to Mission in the NW which seems more reasonable.
I think Dolores Park is a shared resource between the Mission and Castro.
Uh oh, damn HTML ate my link. Zillow’s map.
Take a bunch of pictures at Zeitgeist, label them as “Mission” and presto!
Anyone who says the Mission’s western border should stop at Valencia or Guerrero clearly wasn’t living in the Mission 10-15+ years ago.
Inspired by Jeff, I added a map of my microhoods at the end of my original post, as well as a bunch of places that I think make the Mission what it is. Open to ideas.
I also added a few areas that, while geographically in the Mission, should so *not* be. Anyone who reads MM should be able to figure them out without looking.
Yeah, Noe seems to be encroaching on our western border.
What’s a Mastro?
Fair enough re: Zeitgeist. But, I would caution that we’re getting into one of those concentric areas where neighborhoods start blending together, neither one allowing its identity to fade without a fight. The ‘hood that Zeitgeist borders, of course, is the Deco Ghetto.
@ Tyler: Mastro is a portmanteau of Mission and Castro, natch.
From the north and going clockwise 13th, Potrero, Army, and Valencia are the boundaries of the Mission. Dolores is The Mission, but it’s its own corridor and The Thin Pink Line. South of Army is Bernal and the Outer Mission. Curbed SF keeps talking about something called the Lower Mission, they really should stop, no one but them uses that terrible locution and if they keep it up it may stick to our chagrin. It’s as bad as NOPA. I’m sick of hearing The Mission District. It’s just the Mission, the district part is grating to the ears.
And oh ya Bay Area? What an awful name. I’m sorry if you live in Pinole, but stop saying Bay Area, say Pinole, or say a suburb of San Francisco. So before people said Bay Area they said Northern California. Much better. To the east of Northern California is the Valley and way north is the North State. To the west is Asia, to the immediate south the Central Coast, and to the way south Hell.
Damn you, Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte, for saying “Mission District” in 48 Hours — I think that just encouraged people to repeat it. I’d like to find that cowboy bar though.
Can’t remember if it was mentioned in the Dirty Harry movies or not. They ought to show those at Movies in the Park.
Mission District is the older name. Most older outlying neighborhoods -(non-downtown) are called the _____ District: Richmond, Excelsior, Sunset, Ingleside.
Saying the Mission District as recently as the 60s easily meant anything from what we now call the Inner Mission to BayView, Excelsior and OMI. That large area broke up into smaller neighborhoods as it densified and developed its own commercial districts.
Interestingly, what we’re arguing about calling the Mission here was called Potrero way way way back when. For the population around the Mission San Francisco de Asiz, the flatlands to the east were Potrero Viejo and the hill beyond was called Potrero Nuevo.
If you want to waste a good fraction of a day, check out the 1859 US Coast Survey map of San Francisco where you can see Mission Dolores, Potrero Neuvo and Viejo, Mission Creek and Laguna de Nuestra Senora de los Dolores.
Note this map was made before the San Francisco-San Jose Railway was built in 1860. They basically had to cut between the two horse racetracks you see, which explains part of that funky angle that you can still see today.
While the 1853 Coast Survey map stops at Mission Dolores, it does shows the old plank road which is pretty much where BART runs today.
If you go to the main David Rumsey page, you can get a Google Earth .kml file and get road . Unfortunately the 1859 map isn’t in there, just the 1853 and 1869 Coast Survey maps. But by 1869 most of the roads as we know them are in place. Pretty dramatic change in a decade or so.