Mission Mission

Longtime resident David Enos remembers the old days:

Everyone was unbelievably poor, too poor to drink or even have more than one meal some days. We worked like dogs for minimum wage. I think it was 6.25 back then. It was imperative to hold more than one job. Almost no one you knew owned a cell phone or had internet at their house. Sometimes there was communal internet, downstairs on a massive Dell with a thousandfold viruses and mouse covered in the black film of human hands. It was cause for laughter when you’d see a businessman with furrowed brow storming down the street, absorbed in the Blackberry pressed to his ear, getting surprised by car horns. A different time of the world.

Read on for more photos and more story.

In the wake of our post about local historian David Enos’s old photo of the Key Man/Mr. Key storefront on Mission Street, Mr. Enos talked a bit on Facebook about what it’s like to be a local historian:

The neighborhoods honestly did not change all that much for the greater bulk of the two decades I’ve been here. The little laundromat/alteration place in our neighborhood is currently being terraformed into a craft brewery. I just hope they don’t think to install sidewalk seating or a parklet so we have to cringe past yet another pop-up Oracle Convention every day. [link]

Local historian David Enos takes us down memory lane:

The Key Man/Mr. Key in front of his shop, Mission & 19th (2001).

[link]

UPDATE: From the comments section…

Mr Keyman was my father, Carlos Vela, he originally worked for one of the major newspapers in El Salvador. He also was also a successful Mission real estate agent, at one time. He was proud being a local entrepreneur and self employed. He had several different businesses, over different periods of time, all in the Mission. He was well known by the local latino community, in his time. He passed away in 2005.

Is there a way I can get a copy of this photo?

Looks like a background painting in a silent film or something, right? But that’s an actual photograph of an actual building. Maybe it’s because the architecture is so gnarly, it makes us think of something fake we’d only see at Disneyland nowadays? It also looks very precariously — impossibly? — balanced out there on the cliff.

[via Nika]

RIP

(Click that pic if you wanna blow it up.)

[via Found Photos]

David from OpenSFHistory hipped us to these in the comments section of our last post about the building.

Thanks, David!

RIP

[via punkgirls]

We’ve come a long way I guess? I dunno, vote for Tom Temprano!

[via The Fog Bender]

Local record shop Groove Merchant shared this on their Instagram about 1w ago, and then our pal Josh sent it to us after we posted that hecka old flyer from when Amnesia was the Chameleon.

A commenter on the Instagram post said, “Sleep by Voice Farm is my jam, so good!” Let’s check it out:

Now please enjoy this hecka old blog post from when Loló was almost an American Apparel way back in 2009.