Mid-Market Blight - Issues at the Center of our City.

Even though everyone I spoke with before I began my reporting couldn't remember a time when mid-Market was actually nice, digging into the history of the street revealed more damning details, and a longer history of neglect, than I had originally anticipated...

 

After the devastating earthquake and subsequent fires of 1909, Market Street thrived as the burgeoning city’s entertainment mecca, lined with retail and restaurants among grand theaters, the pulsing central artery of a growing, vital, increasingly important American city. Mid-Market was the heart of the entire Bay Area's arts community through the '60s; even Lawrence of Arabia debuted at a theatre on mid-Market. The thoroughfare was regularly compared to New York's Fifth Avenue and Paris' Champs-Elyseés. It was nicknamed the Great White Way for the theatre's illuminated marquees.

 

Then San Francisco's -- and the country's -- priorities changed. In the 1960s, city planners started following the East Coast trend of tearing down the signage that had proliferated along the country's major highways, making driving a more relaxing and clutter-free experience for the new American suburban middle class. As San Francisco's biggest thoroughfare, Market Street was set in the cross hairs of beautification, and in the mid '60s, the city banned major signs of any kind all along the street. 

 

Then came BART. The street became a gaping maw from 1967 to 1972 as the vast underground train network was installed beneath it, along with much of the existing Muni streetcar service, diverting pedestrian traffic away from the street. When construction was finally finished, so was Market. Over the next decade, the restaurants folded or moved to more desirable areas; storefronts were boarded up as retail closed; formerly grand cinemas devolved into adult movie parlors, then strip joints — if they were lucky enough to avoid police raids. And even a $50 million development plan, which installed redbrick walkways and rows of spindly trees, couldn't save mid-Market from itself, or the city's planning policies.