SoMa, Explained: San Francisco’s Neighborhood South of Market Street

South of Market, commonly shortened to SoMa, is one of San Francisco’s largest and most varied neighborhoods. Its name is straightforward: the area lies south of Market Street. But the label covers a collection of smaller districts and places whose identities do not always line up neatly.

The neighborhood’s generally recognized limits extend from Market Street on the northwest to San Francisco Bay on the northeast. Mission Creek forms the southeastern edge, while the southwestern boundary follows Division Street, 13th Street and U.S. Route 101, including the Central Freeway. SoMa is also notable for its street pattern. In this part of the city, streets are arranged at right angles to, or in parallel with, Market Street rather than following the orientation found in other sections of San Francisco.

SoMa includes several sub-neighborhoods. South Beach, Yerba Buena, South Park and Rincon Hill are among the areas associated with it. The neighborhood also overlaps with nearby or adjoining areas, including Mission Bay and the Mission District. Financial District South is another section sometimes included in the broader SoMa area.

Those overlapping designations help explain why people may use “SoMa” in different ways. Neighborhood boundaries are not fixed in the same way as official political borders, and the area’s precise extent can vary depending on the source. The Central Freeway is now part of the commonly cited southwestern boundary, but the neighborhood’s earlier geography was different: before the freeway was built in the 1950s, 9th Street—formerly known by another name—served as a historical dividing line in some descriptions.

Today, SoMa is associated with several major civic, cultural and commercial destinations. The neighborhood contains many of San Francisco’s museums, the Moscone Conference Center and the headquarters of several prominent software and internet companies. That mix gives SoMa a distinctive place in the city: it is at once a museum district, a convention destination, a technology center and a patchwork of smaller neighborhoods.

For anyone trying to locate an event, institution or address in central San Francisco, understanding SoMa’s broad geography is useful. A place described as being in Yerba Buena, South Beach or South Park may also be described as being in SoMa, depending on the context. The names are not necessarily competing labels; they can describe different levels of the same urban area.

Source and reuse information This backgrounder adapts factual material from “South of Market, San Francisco” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_of_Market,_San_Francisco The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.

Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://www.cloudflare.com/terms - https://archive.org/stream/merysblockbookof1909bloc#page/162/mode/1up - https://www.sfmoma.org/visit/ - https://www.wired.com/2013/04/dreams/ - https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/10/foursquare-finally-checks-in-to-its-very-own-soma-office-pics/ - https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/05/tc-cribs-yelp/ Image rights Photograph description: 6th Street, before the gentrification of South of Market, was considered a very run-down place full of drug addicts. Today it still keeps much of that run-down feel, except that it feels authentic due to being less subject to the forces of gentrification. Love the graffiti/art on the barricade. Beyond it can be seen Tu Lan, a well-known hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese noodle eatery. Creator: InSapphoWeTrust from Los Angeles, California, USA. License: CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A6th_and_Market%2C_San_Francisco_(6001096396).jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.