SoMa: San Francisco's Arts and Tech Warehouse District

South of Market — SoMa — has transformed from San Francisco's industrial warehouse district through leather bar and artist live-work loft territory to its current identity as the headquarters district of the global technology industry and an arts and culture corridor of unexpected density. The Moscone Convention Center anchors the district's convention economy, while the campus-style headquarters of Twitter (now X), Salesforce Tower — the city's tallest building at 326 metres — and dozens of smaller technology companies have made SoMa the centre of gravity for the industry that has most profoundly shaped contemporary San Francisco. The tension between this corporate presence and the neighbourhood's surviving artistic, LGBTQ+, and working-class communities produces a friction that is simultaneously productive and difficult.

The cultural institutions of SoMa are world-class by any standard. SFMOMA, expanded in 2016 to become the largest modern and contemporary art museum in the United States, houses a collection of exceptional depth including the finest holdings of California art, photography, and design in any public collection. The Museum of the African Diaspora, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Children's Creativity Museum, and the California Historical Society are clustered in the Yerba Buena district around the Yerba Buena Gardens — an unexpected and beautiful park carved out of the SoMa grid as part of the Moscone Convention Center development, its performing arts centre, carousel, and ice skating rink providing public amenity in a district otherwise defined by private development.

The nightlife and social culture of SoMa has evolved through several iterations since the 1970s when it was the centre of San Francisco's leather and LGBTQ+ bar culture. The Folsom Street Fair, held annually since 1984 and the world's largest leather event, maintains this heritage in a street festival that attracts hundreds of thousands of participants each September. The cocktail bars, music venues, and restaurants that populate the streets around 11th and Folsom represent the current iteration of a nightlife district that serves both the neighbourhood's surviving alternative culture and the technology workers whose weekday presence in the district has generated a more mainstream evening economy in the blocks around Salesforce Tower.