SAN FRANCISCAN SALOONS OF THE PAST – Looks like we’re in the right neighborhood.

by James Jarvis, ECV

Today at the busy intersection at 16th Street & Mission of San Francisco’s Mission District you may find the Drink Me Offices, but you will not find a saloon on any corner.  But this belies it’s drinking past.  In the 1850s and 1860s this part of the city was pastureland with grazing cows and rolling hills.  The city of San Francisco was where today’s Financial District now exists;  16th & Mission was considered the boondocks.  San Franciscans liked to get away from the busy city life, and spend the day picnicking in the country, by the abandoned Mission Dolores.  To get here, you began on horse or carriage from around 4th Street & Mission, and rode along a toll road made of wood.  This plank road was private, and followed today’s Mission Street, over sand dunes and marshes.
16th Street’s original name was Centre Street, an ungraded dirt road.  From here at Mission you might disembark from your horse-drawn carriage, and have a refreshment or bathroom break.

Today on the south-west corner of 16th & Mission you’ll find one of the two entrances to BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit).  Notice how this is a big empty space.  Eminent Domain forced landowners to sell their properties to BART in the 1960s, then the buildings were demolished.  “Mission Village” was a local bar here which existed in the 1940s to the 1950s.  To call them on the phone you dialed MA1-8138.  Before Prohibition (1920-1933) this was a saloon known as “Schubert Brothers”, which operated for twenty years from 1899-1919.  The 1906 Earthquake and Fire burned this area to the ground, but the hardy Schubert Brothers had their lost saloon rebuilt here by 1907.  Various other owners came and went, but the earliest record of a bar here is from 1865, when bartender John H. Sayward poured drinks for the thirsty.

One the north-west corner of 16th & Mission was John Wiese’s saloon, which he operated from 1895 up until the 1906 disaster.  To call him up you dialed White-1321.  Curiously, John ran the saloon here in 1883-1884 before moving to tend bar on Potrero Hill for several years.  Then he moved back here by 1895.

Little is known about the north-east corner of 16th & Mission, where the other entrance to BART now sits in all it’s ugly glory.  One D. H. Roberts ran his bar here in 1875-1877

And finally on the south-east corner of 16th & Mission, P. J. Roddy’s saloon operated from 1917-1919, before Prohibition killed the fun the following year. Before 1906 the Bruns Brothers ran their saloon here and dispensed drinks from 1864-1879.  They must have been successful, for they ran another saloon on Folsom Street in SOMA around the same time.

Heading towards Mission Dolores along Centre Street (16th Street), were more saloons to choose from.  But that’s another story.