Founded by Gabriel Maldonado in 1951, back when the Mission District was primarily an Irish and Italian working-class neighborhood, La Victoria Bakery was the first Latino-owned business on the 24th Street corridor.

The panaderia moved across the street to its current location at 2937 24th Street, a corner building with three storefronts and three apartments which is still owned by the Maldonado family, in 1955.

And having quietly tested the waters without a set price, the corner building, which sits on a parcel which is zoned for development up to 45 feet in height, is now on the market with a $3.4 million price tag and touting “an ideal mixed-use rental or condominium redevelopment” opportunity.

While the sale doesn’t include the bakery business, the panaderia’s 3,400-square-foot space will be delivered without a long-term lease. In addition, the 600-square-foot Texi’s Jewelry shop space is on a month-to-month lease, the 700-square-foot Geminis Barber Shop lease expires in 2020 and two of the three apartments above the storefronts are currently vacant.

45 thoughts on “Mission District Institution on the Market”
  1. cue Calle 24 histrionics in 3-2-1…….

    When I lived in the hood, I enjoyed La Victoria. It was an interesting business that tried to ride the Mission wave, staying true to its panaderia roots but opening up its kitchen to frequent pop ups and also experimenting with a wider variety of baked goods. Kinda sad to see it (likely) go. Note that this corner had, at one time, THREE panaderias, although the one directly across Alabama from this (Dominguez) has been closed for years with no sign of re-tenanting. And on lower 24th generally there are several panaderias (La Reyna, Sweetheart, La Victoria, La Mexicana) still active, although only La Mexicana seems to have significant business.

    Unlike taquerias, its been harder for Mexican panaderias to appeal to a broad demographic. And the simple fact is the neighborhood has been changing for a long time, and Calle 24 can’t really do very much about it.

    1. Yes, Hispancis mostly live in the outer Mission and into Daly City now. Not a lot of Mexicans in the Mission for a long time actually.

      1. I live a couple blocks from La Victoria and spend most of my time on 24th. That said, I can tell you that there are quite a few ‘Hispanics’ living in here, patronizing these businesses, and adding to the neighborhood. It still feels like a healthy mix if not a larger number of Latinos over hipster, tech, millennials or whatever nonsense everyone is suggesting is taking over the area.

        The number of Latinos in the neighborhood has anything to do with a longtime property owner selling their building. And yea, can’t wait to hear what kind of ass backwards obstructionist rhetoric Calle 24 comes up with to stop this sale from happening.

      2. Fun fact: for about 100 years, the mission was predominantly an irish and eastern european neighborhood. This was from the gold rush era. The fact that San Francisco has Spanish catholic roots made it more tolerant of Irish Catholics moving in. Even then it was a tough neighborhood. In the 1940s-1960s, large groups of Mexicans began to move in after they were pushed out of a barrio on Rincon Hill and it turned into a Latin district. Now it’s become more tech workers. These neighborhoods are always changing.

        Hayes Valley, originally a whitebred neighborhood, after WW2, was home to a large number of jewish immigrants and displaced persons from the war. Then african americans flooded in after their homes were destroyed on Fillmore, and it became one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in SF. Then the yuppie designers moved in.

        1. Irish Catholics were like 50% of SF at some point in the 19th century I believe so it was not like they needed a tolerant area. They were dominate in every neighborhood south of Market all the way to Bayview (Butchertown). The whole of SF was more tolerant to “white ethnics” as Italians and jews also had it much easier than the East Coast

        2. Missing from this mostly accurate history are racist regulations on homeownership. Banks would not lend to black families to live anywhere else but Bayview for decades.

          Painting migratory patterns as natural occurrences while ignoring laws, loans and other structural constraints on these changes is either ignorant or deliberately racist in attempting to justify gentrification as universal choice.

    2. “cue Calle 24 histrionics in 3-2-1…….”

      I know. How dare an increasingly marginalized group of people have a negative reaction to the loss of one of their institutions? Especially when the reason is for higher profits, that ultimate social good?

      1. Yes, it’s a shame that the Latino family that has owned it for decades is making a profit on the sale. I think they should donate it to Calle 24, to help the Latino people. Only white people are permitted to make profitable investments. If you’re a Latino property owner, you have the moral burden of transferring the property to some kind of non profit. Sorry hombres 🙁

        1. Calle 24 is such a farce. I was a neighborhood resident for years (non-Hispanic white guy here). Loved the neighborhood for all of its diversity and very much in favor of rational measures to enhance the district as a historically Hispanic area, with restaurants and bakeries, and other small businesses, while recognizing that the district needs to serve the diverse folks who call the Mission home. Yes, including hipsters.

          But Calle 24 wants to be the gatekeepers and overlords, and they will only accept the views of folks who share their groupthink.

          One of the several requirements to be a voting member of the group is to “BE RECOGNIZED by the Calle 24 Council as having made an important historical contribution to the Latino Cultural District’s mission and vision”. It neatly allows them to exclude anyone from membership, including merchants along the corridor, who don’t share their very singular vision of preserving 24th street in amber even if no is patronizing the panaderias anymore. rant over.

  2. I don’t doubt the history here but surprised to hear there was not a Latino business on 24th until 1951. My grandfather grew up on Harrison/24th and told me he used to eat tamales but perhaps the store owners were Irish and not Mexican. My mother was born before 1951 in the Mission and had a Mexican mother. 100% there were Mexicans in the Mission before this date but perhaps they had no businesses

  3. In the past, I would’ve said build it up. I now realize it’s deeply unfair that equally transit-adjacent lots in Noe Valley, Glen Park and the Westside aren’t getting built up because they aren’t zoned for multifamily, while the Mission, with its many precarious renters and local businesses (see Sun Rise Restaurant’s recent rent hike and risk of closure) is being asked to carry all the weight of new housing.

    Let’s make it legal to build 45 to 85 foot apartments across Noe, Glen Park and the Westside and then once a few of those projects are wrapping up, we can come back and talk about building here too.

  4. Present day problem is people in the 94131 believe Glen Park is not San Francisco rather a “village”. Exclusionary tactics are tightly organized by retired, culturally homogenous, land owning “villagers”.

    Scott is right that Rezoning will share the burden. Why should the Mission carry all the weight?

    1. The Mission carries all the weight because wealthy white people want to live in the Mission, which means they’ll get it. And wealthy white people don’t want anyone else moving in to Glen Park, which means it won’t happen.

      1. The Mission carries all the weight? Hmmm. Count how many residential units have been added in the Mission over, say, the past 10 years. Contrast that to SOMA, or Mission Bay, or the base of Potrero Hill/Showplace Square. Hell, even compare it to Upper Market, no one’s idea of development central.

        The Mission has accepted very very little and for a neighborhood that is literally on top of BART that is a crime.

        1. Except for Upper Market, those areas all started from a baseline of being either industrial, resided in by working-class people of color, or both. Just like the Mission.

          There are thousands of units in the pipeline in the Mission now versus maybe ten or twenty near Glen Park BART. Why does the lack of development in Glen Park not bother you?

          1. It does, actually. But it is indeed a different geography and harder to put together developable sites. Upper Market and the Mission are very comparable. Upper Market embraced the Market Octavia plan that made all those corner sites along market street much more developable. There hasn’t been a ton of fuss. Meanwhile every single development in the Mission is a “monster” and is fought tooth and nail by misguided neighborhood orgs.

          2. “There are thousands of units in the pipeline in the Mission now”

            Dondé?

            Maybe a couple hundie, not thousands…and most of those are getting protested…unless they’re nonprofit low income projects.

      2. I don’t disagree that the area around Glen Park BART is underdeveloped, but can you cite a proposed project that was jettisoned because the “wealthy white people” don’t want anyone else to live there?

        1. Yeh the fact that there is a BART station in Glen Park is relevant but otherwise spatially the two neighborhoods are very different

        2. Look at the zoning for the neighborhood. It’s nearly all RH-1 and RH-2. So no one can propose apartments to begin with. The wealthy white people already killed all the apartment projects in advance by downzoning in the 1970s.

        3. Densifying glen park is a ridiculous idea, for all the reasons mentioned above. Except for a few 5-8 story building you could theoretically add near the Whole Foods, in the little 1/2 block commercial strip, there is no where else to even consider that. Glen park is a village. Let it be.

          1. Glen Park is a neighborhood with a mix of white and Asian.owners. It is not all wealthy by any means or all white. Some of the older owners (70s, 80s) bought in the 70s and 80s and were simple middle class folks. It was a middle class neighborhood relatively recently. I live above Glen Park in the pneumonia gulch area and have retired neighbors who were retail clerks and schoolteachers when they bought here as young adults. The recent surge in prices has made the neighborhood unaffordable to young middle class workers It is not wealthy in the sense that folks buy here because they can’t afford Portrero Hill or Noe Valley or Forest Hill.

          2. You could say the same about Calle 24. It’s a small village, let it be. For the record I don’t think either neighborhood should be off limits to growth but it is worth noting the disparity in treatment under our zoning code, which cannot be explained away by transit, geography or the character of the existing housing stock.

        4. No proposed project *could* get jettisoned, because the zoning prohibits it.
          Now, you want to predict what would happen if someone proposed upzoning it?

          1. Huh? How are the residents responsible for the existing zoning? And why the race baiting – I don’t recall seeing many neo-nazi’s hanging around Canyon Market.

      3. Glen Park is already a bottleneck at its current density. The roads are narrow and curving. There are hills, a canyon, and a creek. The zoning is not favorable. The lot sizes are not favorable. You came on here with an agenda and not much else to offer, Cynthia.

        1. “There are hills, a canyon, and a creek.”
          Then don’t build apartments in the canyon or on the creek.

          “The zoning is not favorable.”
          Then change the zoning.

          “The lot sizes are not favorable.”
          Then allow lot mergers.

          1. Glen Park is fine the way it is. Do you really want every inch of San Francisco covered in skyscrapers?

          2. You skipped past the bottleneck aspect, the way the roads are. Your lot mergers and zoning takes amount to eminent domain. Practically speaking, you are really only talking about building a high density construction around the BART. See point one, bottleneck, point two, roads.

        2. You know what’s a bottleneck? The Bay Bridge. Also: the Transbay Tube. A good way to get around that is to build housing where people can walk to BART on the San Francisco side.

          Roads? Why would people drive when cafes, shopping, Canyon Market and BART are all right there? Ensure most of them don’t by limiting parking in new developments if you’re concerned.

          I agree with Cynthia. Change the zoning, allow lot mergers, and give Glen Park homeowners the option to rebuild adding more housing. The BART can handle it: it has the least boardings of any station in the city, and is the only station in the city to see a decline in usage during the boom over the last 5 years.

          1. Yes the Bay Bridge is frequently a bottleneck. So is 280/San Jose @ Monterey twice a day. So is Bosworth at Diamond. Why would people drive … that is a thing that people like to say, yes. Why would people drive anywhere from Glen Park when they have 9 or so amenities right there in Glen Park? heh.

            How would allowing lot mergers work for Glen Park?

  5. Its not just Calle 24 that is upset about what’s happening to the Mission. A lot of longtime residents are. Neighbors being replaced with short term rentals housing darty-eyed stone-faced automatons afraid to even say hello; ugly Houston-style condos sprouting everywhere; Endless streams of “venues” on the main streets crammed with the bridge and tunnel crowd nights and weekends and vacant during the day… Its like a backlot for a bad theme park. All that’s left in some areas are a very tough crowd of embedded hoodlums and alarmingly perky and self-absorbed Google millionaires. And traffic from hell on what used to be quiet side streets. It was perfectly summed up for me when I had to work my way past a real estate agent at Vanguard exiting his Maserati with custom plates reading “ROARK.” Yes, as in Ayn Rand. Its gross. All of it.

    1. Exactly why are the Interlopers (TM) so afraid? I am a decidedly non-threatening, early middle-aged white guy who lives up the hill from Glen Park in Pneumonia Gulch. I often walk down the hill to BART in the morning. On quiet streets, I will often nod or say a quiet ‘Good Morning’ to anyone coming the opposite direction. I am not trying to become anyone’s friend; I just think it’s more awkward to conspicuously ignore another human. Anyway, most normal people respond appropriately, or initiate the greeting before I do, but these 20-something bearded wonders practically start to pee their pants if I so much as nod in their general direction. How do they handle small talk with their non-white Über driver? I guess it’s generational?

  6. “The wealthy white people already killed all the apartment projects in advance by downzoning in the 1970s.”

    Do you have a source for this assertion? Was Glen Park filled with wealthy people in the 1970s?

    1. I think it was actually middle class white people who killed apartment projects in the 70’s and 80’s – the “wealthy white people” were pretty much contained to the north side of town at the time.

      During the “manhattanization” debates there were two linked effort – pass Prop M to keep office development downtown in check, and downzone all of the neighborhoods. The folks who collaborated on this – fairly conservative neighborhood groups throughout SF along with Bay Guardian “Progressives”, were united in their desires to limit change, and that put off neighborhood change for a generation. That’s how we got to the point of channeling all growth to formerly industrial areas (SOMA, Mission Bay). Only with the advent of better neighborhood plans in the 2000’s (notably the Market Octavia Plan) did SF start to turn the corner to envision ways to do thoughtful neighborhood infill.

      Note: Glen Park WAS one of the neighborhoods targeted in the Better Neighborhoods plan cycle, but the resulting plan was very focused on the few blocks around BART and didn’t result in much more development potential. Neighborhood resistance to change was overwhelming.

      1. Thanks for that history. It checks out with what I’ve heard. A Glen Park-dwelling friend told me there was massive resistance to the condo project that the Canyon Market and library are part of (despite it being super small!) and the histrionics over how this could never be allowed to happen again guided the Glen Park Community Plan, with said plan’s emphasis on preserving the “character of a small town” as Calle 24 was being upzoned.

        1. Yes, David Prowler was the public face of the Canyon Market ( forget his exact role). He was an old hand at public sector development in the City, having been lead planner on the Mission Bay project for a bunch of years in Redevelopment. When he represented the Canyon Market/library project on the private side I think he thought that he had an easy win/win project that made complete sense urbanistically, but he ran into a huge buzzsaw of opposition from neighborhood residents with the usual Parking!!!! Traffic!!! Neighborhood Character!!!! NIMBY issues nearly derailing the project and significantly shrinking it.

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