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We love how warm and unpretentious the 24th and Bryant area is. We especially love the harmonious balance between the hipster and Latino cultures which is threatening to become less and less harmonious due to the construction of various sets of condominiums in the area. Each business has its own distinct personality that enhances the overall vibe of the neighborhood, and that's the way we like it.
So, we were surprised a couple of Monday mornings ago to see what seemed to be a hipster oasis that sprouted up over night on 24th St near Bryant. It's a spacious venue with very cool vintage, modern furniture accessorized by perfectly complementary, abstract art. It’s so in-your-face cool that we wondered whether it was a furniture store or a café. Then we vaguely thought, "Well, that would be silly if it’s a café because it’s directly across the street from another new café."
Upon further investigation, it was discovered that the place does indeed serve coffee and that it’s a coffee lounge. And its name is Sugarlump. It's puzzling as to why they set up shop in this particular neighborhood. For one, the sterile, modern/kitsch style of the place seems more appropriate for Hayes Valley or SoMa, and two, Bryant isn't exactly the most central part of the Mission, like Valencia or Mission Streets are. Most people who frequent the area live right around there, which would make it a challenge to fill that large of a space on a regular basis, especially when there's a more established joint right across the street.
SFist Leanne, contributing
On the other hand, it has also been lamented that 24th St needs another coffee shop. L’s Café, the café across the street from Sugarlump, packs the house with art and music events several times a month, but their coffee is kind of watery. Philz coffee, which is very popular in these parts, is way too strong for some people, and those same people can't seem to stomach the odor it emits. St. Francis Fountain has good coffee, but we always forget we could just get coffee-to-go from them.
When we checked out Sugarlump last weekend, we found it had lots of good qualities but lacked personality. The people are nice, the décor is impeccable, the coffee is pretty good, and the menu is interesting but limited: along with pastries and bagels, they have various pies, such as meat pie, chicken curry pie and vegetarian pie. It was observed that the style of the lounge is similar to the cafés in Vancouver and Singapore, and the word "contrived" also came up, which is an accurate description for how the place fits on the block.
Contrary to our humble opinions though, some people don’t find Sugarlump at all creepy, and it's been well occupied most evenings and weekends the times we’ve walked by.
We will probably stop in at Sugarlump here and there, but it would be nice if they tried to take on some of the flavor of the neighborhood. L’s Café had a Latino heavy-metal cover band playing out front a couple of Saturday afternoons ago. Sugarlump, may we suggest you get a Latino heavy-metal cover band of your own. Battle of the Bands, perhaps?
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I'm glad you investigated that place. I was also wondering what exactly it was, but hadn't taken the time to check it out. If they really want to have some local Latino flavor on the weekend, they should get a taco stand or truck out front. The meat and food smells alone will draw crowds, and who can argue with a taco that tastes great and is under $2?
Great, just what this City needs, another nondescript, sterile, hipster coffee house. In another 20 years, people will think this town sprouted up as a result of the great chai tea latte/leather jacket/Armani reading glasses/iPod rush instead of the gold rush.
Fruffy-up SoMA and Noe Valley and even the Richmond all you want, but leave the Tenderloin, the Mission, and Portrero Hill to the regular folk.
BRING BACK THE HARDSCRABBLE DAYS OF YORE!
That would be great, especially since the taco stand down the street got its license revoked this summer!
The Richmond is getting fruffy - where? Two blocks out of 40 on Clement doesn't count. Love my hood but I'm not feelin' hippified just yet.
What is this, the Guardian? If you don't like it, don't go there. This complaining about gentrification is just stupid.
Exactly my point Andrew, soon there will be no place left for the great unhip, unplugged, and unmonied to go.
And you're right, nothing ever got acknowledged, changed, or helped by people expressing their displeasure with it. Just ask Bush. Maybe he could help you erect a virtual bubble around yourself so that you wouldn't ever have to hear a disparaging word about anything, ever. What a great City and country that would be, eh?
Glass houses Andrew -- wasn't your comment itself a complaint about something you didn't like? Are you calling yourself stupid. Such self-loathing. Embrace dissent, it's our only chance.
WTF is wrong with one (or a couple for that matter) of places that "don't fit". Isn't that the whole point of a vibrant neighborhood; a bit of this and a bit of that? I bet anything that you people complaining the loudest about "gentrification" are white neo-hipsters that can't stop yapping about the good 'ol days.
Evolve or die.
What's a "neo-hipster"? I just figured out hipsters; now I have to learn about neo-hipsters?
Hipsters or not, neo or old school... whatever you call them, all they really are is the modern version of the grumpy old man that yells at kids, "get off my lawn!!"
Do we really need another hipster den in the Mission?
TheRobin and Andrew are both right. Everybody should just roll over and accept the fact that our great City is fast becoming Anytown USA. Fuck it, we should just raze the entire Mission and build one huge Ikea-Starbucks-Red Lobster-outlet mall and be done with it.
And I'll stop caring about low-income people that need some place of the City to call their own. Hell, Daly City is big enough to take anybody that doesn't own a laptop or drive an Audi, right?
This isn't about revitalizing a burnt-out ghetto and making it vibrant, this is about real estate owners, developers, and others making money by snatching up prime real estate being "wasted" by vacumn cleaner repair shops, used furniture stores, and mom-and-pop eateries -- you know, the kind of shops that used to be on Valencia before the Dot.com era. The Mission is a vibrant neighborhood because it is so uniquely provincial. I don't care what kind of modern art or brutally uncomfortable modular furniture the new coffee house sports, it doesn't belong in the Mission. Now if it had sawdust floors and served "Joe" out of a metal urn, well, now we're talking.
The key to the success of any good neighborhood is density and diversity. 24th at Bryant is on oasis of blight in an otherwise vibrant corridor. The Punjab restaurant has been historically empty and the other options bring nobody out in the evening (the La Raza gallery excepted). I think that having a place no the corner for people to hang out in the evening is a great tool to keep people on the streets. Gentrification sucks ass but it is an inevitable truth. You can't ignore it, but you can educate folks and work to proactively shape development.
The community currently has a hipster / latino vibe, it wasn't always the case (See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_District,_San_Francisco,_California#History)
The deep Mission is not as froufy as Valencia, that is why I chose to live there. However, I don't want its character hermetically sealed. If it is going to thrive, it can't be stuck in flanel shirts and converse... sawdust floors? WTF.
If the new coffee place sucks, it will perish. If the neo-hipster haircut trash punks don't like it, they will hopefully go to the underappreciated L('s). From what I see, Philz could use some competition and yuppie-hipster magnets will help thin out the lines on Sunday.
i kind of hate to say it, but the mission started getting gentrified when rich white kids (hipster or not) started moving in, which was sort of a while ago.
I kind of hate to say it, but leave the Mission to the Irish. I remember the days when you could actually get a decent pot roast in this town. Now if this "Sugarlump" had a boxing gym and a dog track, now we're talking.
I live on 23rd and Shotwell, and I have to say, how coffee shops do we need? If you start at the double play and move up, Bryant has at least four between 17 and 23rd street. Christ.
At least its not another hipster bar, that'd be worse.
Oh well, at least the taco window's still around. When that thing goes, I'm moving to Oakland or the liberal part of texas, or something.
Yeah, I knew when the Double Play showed up that the neighborhood was in trouble. That place is the locus of Mission gentrification, bar none.
I have lived in this neighborhood (Florida Street) for over eight years. Call it whatever you want, but an occupied storefront is always better than an empty storefront. Places like La Palma, Roosevelt Tamale Parlor and all the various Tacquerias and other businesses at this end of 24th street have soldiered on through good times and bad and no amount of coffee shops will change that.
I welcome the fact that younger people (they're not all under-30 art students, but so what if they are) are discovering our little corner of the mission and places like the St. Francis Fountain and Pop's have crowds of people again.
A vibrant, thriving commercial strip on 24th street can only help the neighborhood which still has a disproportionate share of violence and gang activity. Rest easy, fellow citizens, no amount of coffee shops will change that overnight.
Gad! You can't please some people. Sugerlump may be “gentrification” in that it's not a 99 cent store, an abandoned storefront or another taqueria, but it is a locally owned business, operated by people who've likely lived in the neighborhood for far longer (at since the 80's) than most of those bad mouthing it.
The place is decorated with rather attractive finds from estate sales and frankly I can think of a lot better targets for your “the Mission isn't an Ohlone village/Spanish Mission slave pen/Polish ghetto anymore angst”. Perhaps you should complain about the new galleries in the area next,? You're all a little late getting agitated about the the architecture studio that moved in three years ago? Where were you people when the Tamale Parlor and St. Francis got bought by "gentrifiers"? What about the very expensive used furniture store by the school?
Seriously It's nice to see the neighborhood evolve, and lower 24th street has been changing a lot in the past few years.
In this context, I don't understand the anger at Sugerlump, the location may be chancey, but it seems to me that if one if afraid of the Mission becoming a rich kids playground 1) one has missed the boat by about ten years 2) the local small business owners of Sugerlump are precisely the sort of people you should support, because when they're gone it's either brown-field or mini-mall.
Additionally I suspect the place has been planned for a while, and likely didn't want to open up across from competition...
Some of you complainers crack me up. I know, I know, if the neighborhood becomes a little more trendy you might lose your hard earned "cred." How tragic! Everyone knows it's way cooler to live in a seething pit of poverty and violence--even poor people of color know that!
God forbid someone open a local coffee shop for people who don't want to drink swill. Tearing down a locally-owned business is retarded, especially when the reason is "OMG IT'S FOR RICH PEOPLE AND BEING 'POOR' IS SO AWESOME!"
You're not poor anyway. You can afford rent in San Francisco, so suck it up and realise you're the rich asshole you always hated. And then get over the guilt and start drinking good coffee instead of that crap at Muddy's that makes you feel like a "regular person".
I pretty much agree with Olivia's sentiment, but you could have had the answer to this whole "where did this "hipster" cafe come from?" by keeping up with the local blogs that you (sfist) promote, ie. the tablehopper: http://tablehopper.com/newsletter/061114/index.html
sugarlump was opened by the owner of the MakeOut room, which I'm sure everyone will just attribute as another harbinger of mission gentrification (or maybe hipster before the hipsters came??). I've met Martin a couple of times through a mutual friend, and he seems like a nice person who's not out to ruin people's lives or anything.
A note from the contributor here. I guess I should've avoided using the word gentrification... It was kind of meant as a joke, but it seems like everyone jumped in with their usual rants again simply because that word was in the title.
The post reflects my personal, mixed feelings about the place. I said everything was decent about the coffee and service, and that I would even go there once in a while (when I feel like spending money on coffee instead of just making it at home). My preference would be that it has more local flavor, is all.
This conversation on gentrfication is too funny. My guess is that somewhere between 80-99% of the comments on this article are written by "rich white kids" at least when compared to working-class mexicans who predominantly live in this part of the mission...
Personally, I went to sugar-cube or whatever the fuck its called last weekend and it was fine. Coffee was good. It was definitely over-priced and totally lacks the charm and warmth of L's (both the actuall environment and the people working there). However, its a huge space and that is nice to have since there really aren't any other large-space cafes around except maybe Phil's.
Its nice to have a place that you can large around and read the paper for an hour.
Good luck to the owners to make enough money to pay off the neo-hip furniture though....
I was puzzled about Sugarlump when it opened, but now go there to work twice a week.
Having sat there for 4-5 hours at a time on several occasions over the past few weeks, I've seen all kinds of people roll through there. Sure, the occasional Latino workingman has walked through the door only to turn tail seconds later. But I've also seen a pair of Latino lawyers cousel a Latino woman about a rent problem. I've seen old-school Mission Cell Space types hold meetings about upcoming art events. I watched what looked like a recent college grad submit herself to an interview for entry-level clerical work.
So while we iPod wearing, "neo-hipster" tech workers are represented, the total clientle is not as homogenous as many of you think.
And the Make-Out Room crowd has done OK as far as I'm concerned. Similar to the guy who founded The Slanted Door, do you want to run a Mission success story out of the neighborhood just for being successful?