Mission Mission

Sneaking peeks into The Shop Barbershop from inside Dirty Pigeon Clothing, at the corner of Potrero and 24th. They have been around since 2013, but I finally made my way in to see their well-designed hoodies, shirts, starter jackets and hats with cool pigeons on them.  Mission Local did a brief interview with shop owner Ron Perez, which you can check out here for more info on/photos of the shop. Or just go and visit the shop for yourself.

Artist, transit activist, and Mission Mission reader Ilyse, whose projects we’ve posted about before, has been leading a series of pub crawls on public transit routes (aka PUBlic Transit Crawls) to raise money for the SF Transit Riders Union. The next crawl takes place this Thursday in the Mission, and in honor of Valentine’s Day, it’s along the 14 bus route.

Here are the details:

Starting Point: 16th/Mission BART
Date/Time: Thursday, February 12, 6-10pm

Schedule:
6PM: Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, 2323 Mission St (btw 19th St and 20th St)
7PM: El Rio, 3158 Mission St (at Precita Ave)
8PM: St. Mary’s Pub, 3845 Mission St (at College St and Crescent St)
9PM: Pissed Off Pete’s, 4528 Mission St (btw Santa Rosa St and Ocean Ave)

Read more about the crawl at the SF Transit Union’s website.

RSVP and invite your friends!

3D City is a year long stereoscopic photography project by Doctor Popular.

Another rainy weekend. Another batch of rainy day wigglegrams. (Ilford film shot on my Nimlso 3D cam)

(more…)

See the top one?? And how about the one closer to ground? Gettin’ lowwwww. You almost touch it. (Or at least fly your drone into it.)

[via Corntard]

In case you missed it, Capp Street Crap did a great writeup today on Mission-based non-profit Círculo de Vida losing their lease as tech company Double Dutch expands into their space in the Bay View/US Bank building.

Círculo, which serves primarily low-income immigrants who lack health insurance, provides a wide range of services – from support groups for people with cancer and their children to wigs and prostheses, case management, and in-home support for the terminally ill. Founded in 1992, it has spent the last 11 years at 2601 Mission. Now, it must leave by March 31.

Carmen Ortiz, Círculo’s founder and executive director, said that another non-profit on her floor had to leave after its lease wasn’t renewed last year and that DoubleDutch is now in that space. Even so, Ortiz said she was still surprised to receive a notice from her landlord, knowing the kind of work Círculo does.

Double Dutch claims that they didn’t know their growth was at the expense of Círculo de Vida’s displacement. Nevertheless, it’s a bad sign for our future when we lose a resource for low income Latino families dealing with cancer, so that a tech tool that helps with marketing and events can grow larger. There’s nothing wrong with Double Dutch, or the service it provides, as far as I know (and I didn’t know about them before today), but this city is becoming increasingly unable to take care of the citizens that need its help the most. I have worked for a San Francisco non-profit for almost eleven years and we have had to do a lot of restructuring over and over to be able to stay alive and effective. Even with our efforts, we would not be where we are without the grace of a landlord that truly understands what it means to invest in this city. Unfortunately, Círculo de Vida does not have such a landlord. SF real estate tycoons Vera and Robert Cort have long been targets of community & housing activists, for destroying historic murals, threatening and harassing tenants into leaving, and, in DotCom1, kicking out non-profits to bring in tech companies (number 14, under “Small-Time Scum”). Read on for the larger story on Capp Street Crap.

[pic from Círculo de Vida's Facebook page, via Capp Street Capp]

UPDATE: CSC has a response from Vera Cort.

Ooooh baby! I always look forward to happy hour, but this is a whole nother story.

Also, great to see Seoul Patch back in action!

[via Chef Eric on Instagram]

As part of SF IndieFest, a very special presentation at our little neighborhood movie house:

Channeling the inner recesses of our TV-addled brains, SF IndieFest seeks to settle the age-old question: What was REALLY better, the 1990 line-up of ABC’s TGIF Friday night pre-teen programming block (Full House, Family Matters, etc.) or the absurdist oasis that was Nickelodeon’s 1993 iteration of SNICK (we’re talking Clarissa Explains It All, The Adventures of Peter & Pete, The Ren & Stimpy Show and Are You Afraid of the Dark?)

(SNICK rules, no contest, right?)

RSVP and invite your friends!

Tomorrow night is Wood Shoppe SF‘s 3 Year Anniversary show at Brick and Mortar! Wood Shoppe SF is a free music series held on the first Tuesday of every month, that seems to continuously be presenting the next best thing in music. Tomorrow night’s show follows in that pattern, featuring the smooth, electro-soul sounds of Astronauts, Etc, the SF debut of 90s-R&B-influenced indie-soul artist Caroline Smith, “romantic funk” with Harriet Brown, plus a DJ set by Trails and Ways. Should be a very fun night of FREE music!

From the Borderlands blog, here’s the deal:

In November, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly passed a measure that will increase the minimum wage within the city to $15 per hour by 2018.  Although all of us at Borderlands support the concept of a living wage in principal and we believe that it’s possible that the new law will be good for San Francisco — Borderlands Books as it exists is not a financially viable business if subject to that minimum wage. Consequently we will be closing our doors no later than March 31st.  The cafe will continue to operate until at least the end of this year.

Many businesses can make adjustments to allow for increased wages.  The cafe side of Borderlands, for example, should have no difficulty at all.  Viability is simply a matter of increasing prices.  And, since all the other cafes in the city will be under the same pressure, all the prices will float upwards.  But books are a special case because the price is set by the publisher and printed on the book.  Furthermore, for years part of the challenge for brick-and-mortar bookstores is that companies like Amazon.com have made it difficult to get people to pay retail prices.  So it is inconceivable to adjust our prices upwards to cover increased wages.

Just can’t win. Read on for more of the story.

(Thanks, Jeremy.)

[Photo by Google Maps]

Andrew Dalton, for SF Weekly, takes a look at some changes coming soon to one of them:

On a Wednesday night in January, in the cafeteria of a private high school just across Interstate 280 from the Balboa Park BART station, a group of 100 or so neighbors and activists gather to discuss the future of the neighborhood. Specifically, they come to deliver their opinions regarding what should be done with the Balboa Reservoir, a nearly 18-acre plot of city-owned land next to the City College of San Francisco.

The Balboa Reservoir is an odd space, not least because it doesn’t look much like a reservoir at all. It’s an open and flat parking lot (unusual for the area) smack in the middle of a neighborhood mostly populated by single-family homes. The reservoir sits, sunken a few feet below the surrounding area, between Mt. Davidson to the north, CCSF to the east, and a new low-rise condo building with a ground-floor Whole Foods to the south. New residents of the complex, which fronts Ocean Avenue, can look straight out their third-floor windows and enjoy a view of the three-story earthen dam that separates the reservoir from the quaint Westwood Park neighborhood to the west. On a recent Saturday, the parking lot that serves as the reservoir’s asphalt bottom was empty save for a man on a recumbent tricycle pedaling laps around the perimeter while a woman waited for him in the passenger seat of a parked Prius.

Read on for lots more background and astute reporting. (Also, take a walk around this area if you get a chance. I was there a lot when I was a CCSF student in ’03 or so, and there’s heaps of history and geography and interesting vibes around there. Randy’s Place, am I right??)