In the comments section of our post from last week about long-gone Mission rock club 12 Galaxies, reader Skyscraper offers another little remembrance:
I miss that place! I worked there from ’05-the end. We used to play pool and poker til the cleaners showed up and then go to clooney’s.
Oh the bad old days…
Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
I’m sure it was a terribly wonderful hipster club and all but I seriously miss the Latin grocery that was there before, one of the very best in the neighborhood. They had goods that even Casa Lucas and La Palma don’t carry. Oh well, I’m sure there’s someone older than me who remembers when it was something else even before that.
The club was actually pre-hipster, back when SF was just SF. No ironic fashions, 80′s throwback, lumberjack beards or my new favorite the preppy/rugged computer nerd. Just good music of any genre.
Best show I ever saw there was The Zombies.
From what I remember the pinnacle of the hipster lifestyle didn’t really hit until after 12G’s closed.
The grocery store was before my time, when I arrived it was a shitty little club called Galia that was run by a domineering woman with no class or style. So 12G’s was a welcomed change.
Too bad we couldn’t get the new patrons out and make it a grocery store again or bring back 12G’s.
Haha Galia may have been the most single hipster-polluted spot on all of Mission.
Really? I only went there once and thought that the place sucked so I never went back.
I really don’t remember SF having a hipster pollution at that time period.
Anyway, every generation has there hipster element and the people that hate it.
Hepcats,Beats,Mods,Hippies,Punks,Metalheads,Grunge,Hipsters(modern version),Techies etc…
Just so everyone is clear of the origination of Hipster……..
“Hipster or hepcat, as used in the 1940s, referred to aficionados of jazz, in particular bebop, which became popular in the early 1940s. The hipster adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following: dress, slang, use of cannabis and other drugs, relaxed attitude, sarcastic humor, self-imposed poverty and relaxed sexual codes.”
I wish I knew a resource for the history of individual storefronts (burrito justice?), but I have trouble believing it was a grocery. The space has a mezzanine level that would seem to be wasted on a grocer, and would be too expensive a project for a Mission bar in the 90′s/00′s to build (they weren’t always cash cows). So I’d guess the mezzanine had been there since the building was built long ago, which suggests it was long a performance space. I really can’t remember what it was when I got here 20 years ago.
Hey there,
I was the owner of 12 Galaxies. It was there for 5 years from 2004-2009. Before that it was Club Galia, and as far as I know it was a nightclub of some form back through to the ’80s, and I was told it was a rock club in the 80s.
As far as I know it was never a Latin Grocery. I would love to know more about that though. Can you provide any dates or timeline when it was a Latin grocery? Or are you mistaking the location.
As far as hipsterdom, I’m not sure how you are defining it, but we had no specialty cocktails, never muddled anything, didn’t make our own grenadine, and would usually mock anyone who ordered a drink with more than one ingredient. So if 12 Galaxies was a hipster spot, then so was Benders, or The Knockout or Doc’s Clock. If we had been a hipster mecca, maybe we would still be a business. Maybe I should have offered bottle service with locally sourced vodka tinctures.