One of SF’s most photogenic areas.

During the dot-com boom, the area South of Market Street (SOMA) in San Francisco saw rents skyrocket as legions of code monkeys sought to become the next Google. Most crashed and burned spectacularly in April, 2000 and the tech stock market has not remotely recovered in the decade since. Such are speculative bubbles.

Not that this was bad. The San Mateo bridge to Oakland is once more drivable thanks to the lane added too late for the boom and rents in SOMA have come back down from the nosebleed levels seen during the bubble, allowing artists and sculptors and generally creative people to once more return and make the place what it is. There are lots of great print and machine shops here, serving all needs from large posters, custom furniture, metalworking and photographic printing.

And what most typifies SOMA is a vital mix of old buildings made to look new again, vibrant colors, murals, local eateries and all of those great things that constitute a neighborhood.

You can get some sense of what I’m going on about by clicking the picture below, which will download a 3.2mB PDF to your computer. Suffice it to say that all the 22 snaps included were made on one dreary morning between rain showers earlier this week.

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