Mission Mission

[via Idiot Tempers]

While apartment hunting over the weekend, our pal Emily got some crummy advice from a prospective landlord who’d asked her what neighborhoods she was interested in:

When I said the Mission, he gave me a strange look and kind of shook his head. “You’re at an idealistic age. The Mission isn’t for you. Maybe you’re tougher than you look, but, I don’t think you should live there. I once had a tenant from New York, thought she was real tough. After two weeks in the Mission, she begged me for her old lease.”

This coming from a guy who lives in Modesto or something. And THEN, another run-in the next day, with yet another old person:

[A] coworker and I were talking about places we have been looking at. A customer overheard us and chimed in on the conversation. “I used to live in Telegraph Hill back when it was affordable. I used to hang out in North Beach before the neighborhood went to shit.” The typical “San Francisco isn’t what it used to be blah blah blah” lecture ensued. She moved out of the city to have kids, surprise, surprise. She started to outline every neighborhood, what was wrong with them, and then she got to the Mission.

“I won’t even go to the Mission now that I have children. My brother lives in a condo there and I don’t go. I avoided that neighborhood fifteen years ago, and I avoid it now. A cop once told me ‘While girls shouldn’t be in the Mission.’ And, well, white girls shouldn’t be in the Mission.”

Ugh. Read on for more of Emily’s thoughts on the whole thing.

[Photo by Emily]

Unclear on the message.

Hmm, graffiti or art?

I do like the koi:

The ants are OK (though the artistic merit of something I am currently battling in my kitchen is debatable.)

What the hell? Does this suck or did they get interrupted? (Also, no Sutro? get with the program.)

It’s that time of year again, when the sun lines up just right with some San Carlos Street window panes and light buttons (AKA sun buttons) result. Be on the lookout!

[Photo by our own Mike Chino]

Mission Local reports:

A man named Michael jumped onto the 24th Street BART tracks just as a Daly City-bound train was approaching. Wearing a shirt that said Viva la Revolucion and yelling “You have the power,” he said he was occupying the tracks because he was sick of sleeping on the streets for six years.

Witnesses on the platform began waving their arms frantically at the driver, and the train came to a screeching halt just within a foot of hitting him. [link]

They spend a few minutes trying to talk him into climbing back out, he explains that he won’t leave until TV cameras show up, so they turn off the third rail and jump down there and cuff him and haul him away.

Let’s zoom in on the cop with the giant weapon and the bystander snapping pics:

From our Contact Us page:

Saturday, 4/14, 2:30 AM, Mission between 16th and 17th (mcdonald’s side): any idea what caused the fresh trail of wet blood running the entire length of the block? (and possibly farther, I didn’t check.) A stabbing?

They have bowling too, but MAN look at Mission Bowling Club‘s new brunch menu. 11AM-3PM Saturday and Sunday both.

Photographer Stephanie Janney spotted this natural wonder the morning after the big storm. Click it to blow it up.

Thanks, Stephanie!

Turns out The Mission ain’t what it used to be:

San Francisco is a place that offers at least a semblance of social life in the streets and has a mass-transit system that, being at least semi-functional, can get you home even after chasing large doses of MDMA with multiple Irish carbombs, resulting in an uncontrollable throwing up of copious amounts of last nights frozen pizza onto strangers who you had drunkenly mistook for childhood friends. Who doesn’t want to live in a place where you can simply exit your apartment, walk a few blocks, and end up at a bar filled to the brim with a battalion of apparently creative, interesting patrons? Or, at least, so went my daydreams.

As it stands, the reality is much different. Upon exiting BART and walking down the streets of the Mission, it becomes apparent that San Francisco has transformed in ways that I cannot appreciate. Newly Ipe-planked luxury condominiums with fancy, all glass, automatic underground garage doors, and heated post-industrial concrete polished floors, sit adjacent to coffee shops whose patrons sip on $6-7 dollar coffee while they guiltily donate some small, insignificant pittance towards “saving the third world” on their new high-end Mac gadgets.

Read on at Oakland Local. Also here’s what ipe is.

[photo]