The Outer Mission

Platted in 1863 as part of attorney Harvey S. Brown's West End subdivision, the area remained rural until the 1906 Earthquake, when the northernmost part of the subdivision near Mission and Geneva began to fill up with humble workers' cottages. The area was serviced by the Southern Pacific Railroad and, like the Mission, many of its original residents were of Irish and Italian descent.

It was around this time that the West End subdivision began to be called the "Outer Mission." Despite creeping urbanization, cut flower nurseries and small truck farms providing the city with Swiss chard and potatoes remained the predominant land use in the neighborhood until the 1930s.

The Outer Mission district's boundaries are Ocean Avenue to the north, Mission Street to the east, the San Mateo County line to the south, and San Jose Avenue to the west.

With the exception of Mission Street and several small sections of Alemany Boulevard and Geneva Avenue, the Outer Mission is predominantly residential, consisting for the most part of single-family rowhouses and flats constructed immediately before World War II. Pockets of older housing remain near Mission Street, around Balboa High School, and near the Daly City line.

The Outer Mission has remained a hidden San Francisco Neighborhood. It is a tight knit community of home owners and renters that is the gateway to the district from the south. It boasts several small local businesses, including international restaurants, coffee shops and an iconic pool hall.

The first block of Niagara Avenue between Mission Street and Alemany Boulevard is one of the oldest residential blocks in the Outer Mission, containing examples of post-quake vernacular cottages and more elaborate late Queen Anne cottages, several Craftsman bungalows from the 1910s and 1920s, as well as a handful of older pre-quake dwellings that were likely built as farmhouses before the neighborhood urbanized.