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Why the Mission District? Check out this article which appeared in the November 20, 2005 edition of the New York Times.

San Francisco's Mission District: Eclectic, Eccentric, Electric

DaSilva for The New York Times

One of the murals along Balmy Alley. San Francisco has a tradition of murals.

By GREGORY DICUM

Published: November 20, 2005

FROM the rooftop patio of Medjool, a new restaurant in the Mission district of San Francisco, the entire neighborhood is laid out like a flamboyant mosaic. Ranks of painted ladies - San Francisco's ornate wooden Victorians - rise to Twin Peaks in the west, the hills that block the city's infamous fog and make the Mission one of the city's warmest and sunniest neighborhoods. This terrace is the perfect spot for watching the cottony wave of evening fog roll into downtown, for the sky in the Mission remains crystalline.

At the intersection below, an animated scene of daily life unfolds: sidewalk vendors sell yucca flowers and avocados, blue-haired anarchist daddies push strollers, young men loiter at the corner, Central American housewives and vegan lesbian tattoo artists shop for fresh handmade tortillas.

"I try to get anybody coming to San Francisco to come to the Mission," said Dave Eggers, the best-selling author who set up the first of his community writing schools here. "Not to misuse the word 'authentic' - I think that's such a troubling word - but the Mission really does have all the best parts of San Francisco intersecting here."

Three years ago, Mr. Eggers and his crew turned the storefront at 826 Valencia into the Pirate Supply Store, (415) 642-5905. "When we were renovating, we found strange

Peter DaSilva

The Pirate Supply Store, which carries eyepatches and doubloons.

old beams and wooden floors, and it really had the look of the hull of a ship," he said. "It made us laugh so we thought we'd go for it."

Inside the store, a tiny velvet-curtained enclosure contains a handful of theater seats. Visitors can sit and contemplate a tank of bright tropical fish that glide lazily in front of a map of the Soviet Union. Tinny 1920's French radio tunes play from somewhere overhead, as though from a levitated Victrola. On the wall, a framed piece of parchment reads "Please Do Not Judge the Fish."

With six of these writing schools around the country, 826 remains the flagship, forming the core of the Mission's literary scene. "I don't think there's a neighborhood where more writers live," Mr. Eggers said. "There is no neighborhood in the world - and I've looked - with more independent bookstores in such a small area."

The district grew up around the oldest building in San Francisco: the Mission Dolores, built in 1776 as part of the network of West Coast Spanish missions. In the 20th century, the Mission was a solidly working-class immigrant neighborhood until the early 1970's, when construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system tore up Mission Street for three years, killing the vibrant Latino neighborhood and turning the area into an urban wasteland.

Only now is it coming into its own again. A dynamic culture combining the best of many influences is unfolding: The jingling bells of Mexican ice cream vendors' carts blend with the sounds of anarchic marching bands; strange electronic music flies out of open windows to mingle with throbbing Norteño in the sunshine.

"The history of the Mission has a lot to do with waves of radicals who came here to escape failed revolutions elsewhere," says Chris Carlsson, a historian whose San Francisco work can be seen at shapingsf.org.

Along with the rest of the Bay Area, the Mission was thrown on its ear five years ago when oceans of dot-com money threatened to turn the place into a heedless boomtown. But a long tradition of tenant activism helped the area retain its character even as property values headed for escape velocity.

This continuing tension is told on the neighborhood's walls, in a mural tradition that goes back to Diego Rivera's San Francisco work. "This is the most flourishing mural scene in the country," said Andrew Schoultz, an artist identified with the Mission School - the colorful, graphic-inflected and street art-inspired sensation of the last decade. Mr. Schoultz has five murals here, including one each on Balmy Alley and Clarion Alley, the form's twin epicenters.

His flying birdhouses, evocative of the housing anxiety that underlies every Mission resident's daily life ("Will I be evicted?" "Will I be able to make the payments on my million-dollar fixer-upper?"), share the walls with paeans to Latino pride, bicycle activism, idealized farm workers and revolutionary movements (riot police are a recurring demonic icon).

Galeria de la Raza, on 24th Street, has nurtured this artistic vitality for 35 years. Arising from the Chicano civil rights movement, Galeria de la Raza is a grandparent to the small galleries that come and go here with only slightly less turnover than the street art.

The galeria's director, Carolina Ponce de León, said: "We look at traditional forms by revamping them - giving them new meaning, new life, new aesthetics, new media."

Here masked lucha libre wrestlers and Aztec demigods rendered in skateboard anime share space with woodcuts of heroic Zapatistas and expressive collages examining Latino stereotypes. "There is a strange cohesion in the Mission between what we do and what goes on in other spaces that don't have a Latino focus," added Ms. Ponce de León. "The street art aesthetic gives it all a certain unity."

On weekends, gallery openings blend into a nighttime party scene, especially along Mission and Valencia Streets. Mariachi bands rub shoulders with a tipsy bridge-and-tunnel crowd on the teeming sidewalks, eclipsing the neighborhood's more subtle qualities - events like the annual Day of the Dead procession in early November.

This evening parade of haunting, skull-faced locals riffs on Mexican village traditions, but as befits the Mission, participants - who are as likely to hail from Michigan as Michoacán - incorporate social commentary, surging percussion and a spirituality that obscures cultural boundaries beneath layers of face paint.

Peter DaSilva

The Papelote Taqueria, which is known for its veggie burrito.

The same kind of eclectic appropriation is embodied in the Mission's signature dish, the burrito. This field worker's lunch of beans, rice and meat rolled in a flour tortilla first became part of the urban smorgasbord in the 1960's, when El Faro on Folsom Street put the first super burrito on its menu. Fierce loyalty to a favorite taqueria is a point of pride and a subtle indicator of where one falls in the neighborhood's protean social landscape. And that's even before looking at the choice of fillings, which can range the gamut from marinated steak to brains to braised pork to tofu.

"The Mission is the burrito vortex," said Charles Hodgkins, who has visited every one of the city's more than 150 taquerias - nearly a third of them are in the Mission - rating each burrito for his Web site, burritoeater.com. (Taqueria San Francisco, an unassuming neighborhood hole-in-the-wall on 24th Street, boasts the highest-rated burrito in the city.)

The unsectarian burrito orthodoxy underlies a culinary aesthetic that prizes inventiveness and tradition in equal measure. Thus, the Mission is host to inspired restaurants like Delfina on 18th Street and Osha on Valencia Street that bring an urbane California sensibility to the cuisines of Tuscany and Bangkok respectively. By the same token, Limón, on Valencia Street, brings Peruvian food the attention it deserves with ceviche as precious as the finest sushi, but with the added appeal of a sparkling bite that sends shivers though a diner's body.

If food is, so far, the most upscale element in the Mission (a corollary of the fact that virtually every two-bedroom apartment here now costs substantially more than half a million dollars), other cultural elements are catching up. Growing out of the concentration of junk stores that once lined Valencia Street, a new wave of design and fashion is doing for the eclectic "Mission Thrift" look what the Mission School did for the area's graphic arts: bringing it to a wider audience, but also codifying an informal aesthetic.

Outside, colors are everywhere. They're in the urgent sidewalk stencils and the Virgin of Guadeloupe sport shirts. They leap from the psychedelic-baroque tattoos on every other arm to the man selling blow-up toys. He's covered in them from head to toe, a figure fallen from one of Mr. Schoultz's murals. It's a rich swirl: deeper meaning beneath a haphazard, found style - synthesis rather than pastiche - alive and without judgment in the Mission sun.