Oceanview Broad/Randolph

The best source to find the history of the Oceanview area where the Broad/Randolph commercial district lies, is the Outsidelands website. Oceanview is one of the neighborhoods on the southern border of San Francisco making up San Francisco's OMI Neighborhoods which include Ingleside, Ingleside Terraces, Merced Heights, and Ocean View.

The OMI, east of Lake Merced and west of the San Francisco-San Jose railroad line (today the route of Interstate Highway 280), began as a patchwork of different street grids and speculative real estate ventures.

Ocean View, south of Merced Heights, began as two separate homestead associations. The Railroad Homestead Association filed the street map from San Jose Avenue west to Orizaba Avenue in 1867. In 1870, the City Land Association laid out the grid from Orizaba Avenue west to today's Junipero Serra and the section of 19th Avenue that splits diagonally to the southeast.

The name Ocean View may have come from a renaming of the San Miguel Station of the San Francisco-San Jose steam train line at Plymouth and Sagamore Avenues. The train began service in 1865, and another train, the Ocean Shore Railroad, snaked past the same intersection in the early twentieth century. The story passed down about the Ocean View name is that the station marked the first place riders from downtown could see the Pacific Ocean headed south.

As part of recording its history from 2002-2005 the community conducted a project called "I am OMI".