Living in Dogpatch, San Francisco

The American Industrial Center's half-million square feet of exposed brick and timber, built in 1912 as a steel plant on Dogpatch's waterfront, now hold artist studios and small businesses behind a facade largely unchanged from the neighborhood's shipbuilding-era days. The Minnesota Street Project has clustered more than a dozen galleries into a former warehouse complex a few blocks away, turning a stretch of light-industrial streets into one of the city's more concentrated contemporary art districts. Third Street carries Dogpatch's restaurant and coffee shop scene through storefronts that mix century-old brick buildings with newer infill, a legacy of its run as one of the few San Francisco neighborhoods to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire largely intact. The T Third line runs the length of the neighborhood with stops at 20th and 23rd Streets, connecting Dogpatch north toward Mission Bay's Chase Center and the Caltrain corridor and south toward the Bayview.

Dogpatch's industrial-to-residential shift is still underway on some blocks, and a mix of active light industry, construction, and new condos can make for a rougher, less finished streetscape than the neighborhood's galleries and restaurants suggest.

Dogpatch is still becoming whatever it's going to be, a waterfront district whose galleries and restaurants outrun its unfinished edges for now, with rents still a notch below Mission Bay's and a safety rating among the better readings on this side of the city.