Mission Mission

After Sunday’s fire displaced at least 37 Mission District residents, Ellen from the McCoppin Hub Neighborhood Association writes to let us know:

The San Francisco Friends School at 250 Valencia St is hosting a quick
donation drive [Tuesday] through Friday in their lobby from 8am-6pm daily.
Top requested items are new/gently-used clothing for adults and kids,
toiletries, blankets. (Housewares and other items may be part of a
future drive at another location when the immediate needs have been
met.)

SF Friends School is also hosting a Neighborhood Meeting to discuss
what is needed and co-ordinate efforts on Thursday May 10th, 5-6pm. A
Red Cross Representative will attend. All community members and other
aid organizations are welcome. Please join to show your support and
brainstorm what we can do next.

[photo by nancymancias]

My best guess here is that the rental market in San Francisco is so competitive that two desperate people from Baton Rouge are advertising their creative, nerdy and humorous approach to life in order to charm someone into contacting them to move into their apartment.

My question is, will this work? And if so, would it work again? Looking for apartments in the Mission on Craigslist is to be confronted with a harsh reality – rents are pretty much twice what you want them to be. Showing up at open houses and finding people clamoring over one another, offering hundreds more than the listed rent can be a major bummer. Is this actually a saner, more reasonable approach?

A 2 alarm fire is raging at Valencia and Duboce, at a multi-story apartment building across the street from Zeitgeist.

I can smell it from 22nd and hear the sirens. I hope everyone’s OK.

Update (1:35pm):

It was upped to a 4 alarm fire. Witnesses reported an explosion prior. The blaze is under control now. 37 people will be displaced and there were 5 injured including 3 firefighters who were victims of a collapsed staircase. Scary stuff. Read on at Mission Loc@l.

[photo by nancymancias]

Someone please make a single-serving web site for the status of the Valencia Street Swing.

SFGate posted some great then-and-now shots of Mission locations that you may know. Check out a 1962 Clarion Alley, lined with quaint bungalows:

And now, it’s the only street in the Mission that’s apparently immune to city graffiti citation!

Here’s everyone’s favorite intersection: 24th and Hampshire (AKA “Deuce-four Ham”).

Sadly, Bucket O’ Suds didn’t survive the British Invasion:

I personally think the closing of Bucket O’Suds marked the end of the golden age in Mission. After that, it was only high-tech artisanal laundry facilities. No soul. I long for the days where I’d pop a nickel in the laundry machine and get a shave from Chet while I waited. Maybe someone should start a kickstarter campaign to restore the Bucket O’Suds space to it’s full architectural glory.

Check out the rest of this amazing series at SFGate.

[photos SFGate Archives, Peter Hartlaub]

Talk about adding insult to injury. Or is it adding pointless fine to injury?

Oh SF City dept, citing us for graffiti on our boarded up windows is just poor taste.

— Weston Wear Store (@WestonWearStore) May 3, 2012

On the shitty meter, this just about ranks up there with getting your car stolen and having to pay for towing.

Bender’s has two amazing vegan tacos on its menu: the seitan taco and the grilled veggie taco, which, in addition to grilled veggies, also has smashed-up pieces of their homemade vegan burger in it. Both feature hunks of avocado, tangy pickled red cabbage, and, surprisingly, enough salt that I didn’t need to add any – remarkable since I have never in my life eaten anything and thought it was too salty.

You know what’s great about Bender’s? They don’t refer to the seitan taco as a “fake chicken” taco. I like this because seitan is real food, not fake chicken: it’s just real seitan, in all its chewy, crumbly, mouthfeely glory. Two omnivorous vegan-taco-enthusiast friends joined me for dinner and chose the vegan ones over the meaty ones on the menu. On purpose. Also, a friendly black dog named Mortimer wanted to steal them.

That’s right, friends: Seitan is real. And it’s saltier that the sweat of John Henry’s brow.

You knew it was only a matter of time before the whimsical fun squad struck back against both the city and the fun-hating grinches determined to keep Valencia Street free from pendulum tyranny.  And this time they’ve done it in grand festive style, with glorious streamers to accentuate the riders’ flight as they glide through the air (while respectfully watching out for pedestrians, of course).  Furthermore, eagle-eyed readers may notice that the cord on this new swing matches the orange and black braiding of the original swing before it was hacked down by misinformed neighborhood vigilante Carmen Castillo, suggesting that this may be the work of the originators!

We can only wonder how long this incarnation lasts before the anti-fun police have their way, but for now both the young and young-at-heart have a new toy with which to play.

Previously:

• Fun-hating grinch cuts down Valencia swing
• Valencia swing memorial eulogizes the death of fun
• Site of former Valencia swing commemorated by hanging dog toy
• Valencia swing is back, with steel cables this time
• Valencia swing cut down again, this time by a city official

Over the last month, an unusual amount of the food reporting in the Wall Street Journal has centered around the Mission’s most loved/hyped restaurants.

Today it was a feature on Wo Hing General Store, the new Charles Phan restaurant opened in the original Slanted Door space on Valencia. A couple weeks ago Bi-Rite and Humphry Slocombe were somewhat awkwardly portrayed as rivals in a cookbook review in the national lifestyle section.

The previous week, Mission Chinese Food’s ribs were one of four dishes featured in an article about lamb. A few days before that, the front page of the lifestyle section was devoted to an article on these newfangled “pop-ups” that led with a lengthy profile of Wise Sons, the brand new Jewish deli on 24^th.

Maybe 2012 is the year of the WSJ discovering the Mission, like how the NYT discovered Brooklyn in 2010:

[photo by Sexpigeon]

There’s always a lot of talk around these parts about what constitutes “the REAL San Francisco,” right? Well, anadromy, one of our new favorite bloggers, has a humdinger of an answer:

Last year, I met a girl online. Turned out she had just moved here from Beijing. She kept saying she wanted to see, “Authentic San Francisco.” It would be impossible for me to phonetically spell out the bizarre and borderline incomprehensible grandeur of her accent, but suffice it to say that it took several, “Excuse me’s?” before I understood her meaning.  When I got it, I decided to try to give her what she wanted. We climbed into the beater pickup truck I was driving then and I just started driving. I didn’t know where the hell to go to find “Authentic San Francisco.” But I gave it my best shot. We went up Portola so she could see the view, then cruised down through the Castro and into the Mission. To my shock, there was a parking space right outside of the Latin American Club. Then, to my even greater shock, there was an open booth in the window. So I sat the girl from Beijing down in the booth and went to get us some drinks. When I came back, there were two young Mission kids sitting in the booth with her. I sat down and they said they had been sitting there originally, but that we were more than welcome to join them. About 30 seconds later, they more or less started having sex. I’m only exaggerating a little bit. Zippers were unzipped. Hands were down pants and up shirts. The guy’s knees kept banging into mine, too.

Read on.

[Photo by LLL]