Ever since the tracks were laid, SoMa has been on the wrong side of them.

When engineer James O’Farrell proposed cutting a long and unusually broad thoroughfare through nascent San Francisco in 1847, landowners threatened to lynch him for dramatically slicing up their property. He fled by boat to Sausalito, laying low while workers leveled the sand dunes to make way for the “grand promenade.” From its inception, Market Street was a bitterly protested divide.

Market Street and 3rd Street, Circa 1856. (SFMTA)

The avenue not only physically partitioned the city, but quickly became an emblem of social division. In the 1880s, tracks running up the middle spawned a nickname: the Slot. “North of the Slot were the theaters, hotels, and shopping district, the banks and the staid, respectable business houses,” wrote Jack London in 1909. “South of the Slot were the factories, slums, laundries, machine-shops, boiler works, and the abodes of the working class.”

The steep-sloped neighborhoods north of Market Street were given pleasant names: Hayes Valley, Nob Hill, Pacific Heights. But South of the Slot were large and indistinguishable flatlands, occupied year-round mainly by working-class Irish, English, and German immigrants, and seasonally by migratory casual laborers and destitute hobos. Small factories, canneries, butcher shops, gas works, warehouses, and foundries made up the bulk of new development. The last remaining affluent families, who had built elegant estates in doomed Rincon Hill, fled the area.

In the 1860s, businesses in South of Market began catering to migratory workers who came to San Francisco in between stints on farms, railroads, or in the gold mines. Flophouses and cheap hotels sprang up, and the area became a single men’s playground, with pool halls, saloons and gambling houses interspersed with the factories. In 1872, an observer noted the concentration of vagrants in the area, whom he called “blanket men,” adding that they seemed mostly to be “runaway sailors,” “old soldiers,” and “bankrupt German scene painters.”

The area was largely inhabited by unskilled workers, who slept in flophouses if they had the money, or on the street if they didn’t. In 1880, writes Alvin Averbach in his economic history of the neighborhood, “nearly one-third of the city’s boarding houses, a quarter of its hotels, and half of its 655 lodging houses were found there… troops of the industrial army were called up, as it were, for active duty.” In his book on the homeless in American history, Kenneth L. Kusmer called SoMa “the most important center of transient and casual labor on the West Coast.”