Last Wednesday, I found a wallet on the northwest corner of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue that belonged to a guy in his 20s. He lived a few blocks away, in a part of town that, despite being only blocks from City Hall and running along one of San Francisco\u2019s major thoroughfares, somehow doesn\u2019t belong to any neighborhood at all.<\/p>\n
As I set about returning the wallet to its owner, I realized that I finally had the chance to investigate a question I\u2019ve been obsessed with since I moved to San Francisco \u2014 and which has recently fueled a spicy neighborhood debate<\/a>. What the hell do we call this area?<\/p>\n A vaguely cleaver-shaped hood, running along Market from about Octavia Boulevard to Van Ness, the area in question is really a nexus of six neighborhoods, patching together bits of Hayes Valley, the Lower Haight, the Mission, Civic Center, Mid-Market, and SoMa. It\u2019s best known as the home of Zuni Cafe and Martuni\u2019s, but it mostly feels like negative space, a jumble of diagonal-running alleys south to the Central Freeway and 13th Street.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the 20th century, when it was an industrial precinct crisscrossed by streetcar lines, the neighborhood was known as \u201cThe Hub (opens in new tab)<\/a>.\u201d In the 2010s, to accompany a wave of new high-rise residential development, there was a short-lived push to rebrand it\u00a0 \u201cThe Quad (opens in new tab)<\/a>.\u201d More recently, office brokers have included it (or some of it, anyway) in the attempted rebranding of the wider Mid-Market neighborhood as \u201cLower Hayes<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n When I handed the wallet over to the security guard at the guy\u2019s building, I asked what neighborhood she considered it to be. \u201cLower Haight?\u201d she offered. When the wallet\u2019s owner messaged to thank me, I asked him the same question.<\/p>\n \u201cI used to say Mint Hill, but nobody knew where that was,\u201d he texted, referring to the nearby looming federal edifice (and karaoke bar of the same name (opens in new tab)<\/a>). \u201cNow I say \u2018around Duboce\u2019 to people in SF and \u2018between Mission and Hayes\u2019 to people not familiar with SF.\u201d<\/p>\n Official maps are of little use. Neither the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency nor the Planning Department (opens in new tab)<\/a> gets granular in delineating neighborhood boundaries; in fact, they don\u2019t acknowledge the existence of Lower Haight, Mid-Market, or Civic Center at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rather than stand at the intersection of Franklin and Market screaming, \u201cWhere the hell am I?\u201d into the void, I kept asking locals.<\/p>\n Two Community Ambassadors on patrol said they think of it simply as the \u201cMarket Street corridor.\u201d Ditto a server at Rocket Sushi. A rep at Enterprise Rent-a-Car called it the \u201cborder of SoMa and the Mission.\u201d An employee at Bob\u2019s Custom Framing said, \u201cNo Valley\u201d \u2014\u00a0not to be confused with \u201cNoe Valley\u201d \u2014 then corrected himself. \u201cHayes Valley, I mean. Or Lower Haight.\u201d<\/p>\n Others triangulated via landmarks. \u201cI usually say I\u2019m just outside Hayes Valley,\u201d said the proprietor of mattress store Bedroom and More, who has been there for 22 years. \u201cOr I just say Zuni. They usually find me.\u201d<\/p>\n A Zuni hostess who answered the phone was uncertain. \u201cThat\u2019s a good question,\u201d she said. \u201cI would consider it Hayes Valley, but I don\u2019t consider myself a professional.\u201d Typically, Hayes Valley is understood to be north of Market Street, so she was correct.<\/p>\n No consensus emerged. When I called a rep at McRoskey Mattress, which recently vacated its home of 100 years on Market Street for the Design District, he said staff had referred to their former neighborhood as Civic Center. Suzanne Ford, executive director of San Francisco Pride, said her Mission Street office is in SoMa. An e-cyclist stopped at a red light had the most definitive reply. \u201cIt\u2019s a transitional zone between Lower Haight and the Mission,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some of the neighborhood\u2019s newer residential buildings seem eager to leverage the confusion to their advantage. The Ansel (opens in new tab)<\/a>, on the south side of Market Street, describes itself as part of Hayes Valley. But its marketing copy claims it\u2019s also \u201cnestled at the meeting point of Mission, Upper Market, and SoMa.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n