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On Potrero Hill, you can
relax in brilliant sunshine
while watching fog engulf
the rest of the city.
Bounded roughly by 16th,
Third and Cesar Chavez
streets and Potrero Avenue,
the neighborhood is
relatively isolated by
freeways and large tracts of
industrial landscape, giving
Potrero Hill its own pace
and a feeling of distance
from "San Francisco."
The neighborhood's origins
extend back at least to an
1835 land grant to Don
Francisco de Haro to graze
Mission Dolores's cattle at
the potrero nuevo ("new
pasture"). Gold rush
squatters started pushing
the herd aside and began the
first of many waves of
urbanization and
immigration: Scots in the
1860s, then Irish, Chinese,
Russians, Mexicans and
finally African-American
Southerners in the 1940s,
building battleships at the
bustling wartime shipyards.
Potrero view
While families lived on the
hill, flatland manufacturing
by firms like U.S. Steel,
the Union Iron Works, the
Western Sugar Refinery,
Bethlehem Shipbuilding Co.
and American Can Co., among
others, ensured that the
area remained largely
industrial through most of
the 20th century. But a
combination of
deindustrialization and the
late-1990s Internet boom
began driving the conversion
of factories and warehouses
into housing or offices.
New office construction
continues on the north side,
while condos rise on the
hill's eastern and southern
edges, particularly in
Dogpatch, the name given to
the Third Street corridor
between 16th and Cesar
Chavez. Largely zoned for
heavy industrial use,
Dogpatch doesn't have much
going on past quitting time.
One part of Potrero Hill
that has changed
dramatically is the Safeway
shopping complex along 16th
Street, between Bryant and
Potrero streets. From 1931
to 1959, this was the site
of Seals Stadium, an
18,600-capacity venue that
hosted the San Francisco
Seals and the Missions of
the Pacific Coast League.
When the then-New York
Giants arrived in San
Francisco, they played the
1958 and 1959 seasons at
Seals Stadium while
Candlestick Park was being
built.
Potrero Hill's primary
shopping drag is on 18th
Street, between Connecticut
and Texas streets, along
which you'll see fewer
strollers -- and fewer
weirder dogs -- than in
already-gentrified
neighborhoods like the Inner
Sunset and Noe Valley. In
spite of increasing
yuppiness, 18th Street
remains come-as-you-are.
The hill is also where O.J.
Simpson grew up, and, as a
result, even though Simpson
never visited the area much
after becoming famous, the
hill has the nation's
densest remaining
concentration of O.J.
Simpson murals. One, on
Connecticut at 17th Street,
shows the former football
great in his uniform, with
later spray-painted details
like blue devil horns. The
other is at the Potrero Hill
Recreation Center (see
below).
The residential streets are
unusually clean for San
Francisco, and every house
seems to have a small
garden, flower box or tree
planted out front. This
tradition goes back a ways;
witness a September 1963
Sunset magazine article in
which Hill denizens, clad in
jeans and Jackie Kennedy
clam-diggers, landscape the
twistiest stretch of Vermont
Street. They hope against
hope that the growing
leptosporum will "one day
hide the nearby freeway and
its eight lanes of
around-the-clock traffic."
The city donated irrigation
water, a neighborhood group
coughed up labor and cash
for two new water meters and
someone threaded all the
irrigation pipe in his own
machine shop -- evidence of
a level of neighborly
cooperation that continues
today.
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