South of Market: then & now

A neighborhood vanished, and transformed

3 min readMar 31, 2014

Last month, I saw an intriguing Tweet from @robinsloan, pointing out a photo survey of San Francisco’s South of Market district in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

That Tweet led to a post —I think from the New Yorker— about the photos & their photographer, Janet Delaney, who moved to the South of Market neighborhood in 1978 and stayed through the mid-eighties, documenting the neighborhood, its residents, and its rapid transformation. Delaney’s photos were recently published in a gorgeous book, “South of Market”.

I’m fascinated with San Francisco’s history, and grew up in that era, so Delaney’s photos caught my attention. I found the images completely arresting; the buildings look familiar, but the landscape is alien.

Then, as now, San Francisco and its landscape were undergoing a significant shift, as the city claimed 87 acres of prime downtown land —covering six entire city blocks to the south of Market Street— in the name of urban renewal. This process displaced 4,000 residents, mainly elderly and low-income, the majority of whom lived in the area’s 46 residential hotels. In a matter of just a few years, an entire neighborhood was wiped away. Delaney’s photos capture this vanished San Francisco.

I thought it would be interesting to recreate some of Delaney’s pictures, to better understand how much has changed South of Market in the 36 years since construction commenced on the Moscone Center. So yesterday, armed with the captions for Delaney’s photos and a printed-out Google Map of the neighborhood, I spent a few hours doing just that. These are the results.