The Church of Ambrosia’s Zide Door in SF has been providing magic mushrooms and other legally questionable delights for over a year now at Howard and Seventh streets, but says they’re shutting down the SF location because of “harassment” from the SF Planning Department.
For about the last five years, a purported “magic mushroom church” called the Church of Ambrosia has been operating out of Oakland, providing what they call “safe access of all Entheogenic Plants, with a focus on Cannabis and Magic Mushrooms.”
The church popped onto our radar back in 2020, when Oakland police raided their East Oakland location and accused them of selling illegal drugs — even though Oakland had decriminalized the possession of psilocybin. Then during 4/20 this year, the Church of Ambrosia made news as they provided porta-potties and crowd control on Hippie Hill after that event was officially canceled, though you knew thousands of stoners would just show up anyway.
According to KRON4, the Church of Ambrosia opened an SF location called Zide Door in April 2023, where a $5 membership fee gets you access to, you know, the stuff.
But now SFGate reports that the mushroom church is closing the SF Zide Door location at the end of the month. The church is citing $200,000 in repairs they say is being required by the SF Planning Department to their 1121 Howard Street location, and claims the Planning Department is subjecting them to “religious discrimination.”
“It’s obviously hostility from people in the Planning Department,” the church’s founder Pastor Dave Hodges said in a press release. That release claims that the church is “the victim of a city planning department bent on expelling the institution.”
The release cites a quote from an Examiner article from this past August where Planning Department chief of staff Dan Sider described the church by saying, “It seemed to me like we were dealing with a bunch of people on mushrooms that were trying to convince us that they weren’t hosting bunches of people on mushrooms.”
That Examiner report also alleges some unsafe working conditions, workplace harassment, and employees being paid in cash with no benefits, after speaking with some ten current and former Church of Ambrosia employees.
Yet there are a series of Department of Building Inspection (DBI) violations that have been given to the site. A June violation cites “Circuit wiring installed without permit or inspection Clearance violations around electrical distribution equipment Non-compliant exit/emergency lighting installed without permit or inspection,” while a late August citation describes “incomplete and improperly installed bathroom fixtures.” The DBI has sent the venue several warning letters since.
“The building code represents the minimum legal safety standards for a structure,” DBI spokesperson Patrick Hannan. “When a building isn’t meeting the minimum code standards, we require the property owner fix it so it’s safe for people to occupy. That’s what we’re doing here.”
Yet the building’s landlord Tatiana Takaeva Shiff said in a statement to the Chronicle that “I never had any problems with the planning department until Dave opened the church.”
Yes, the church’s sale of magic mushrooms and what appears to be unlicensed cannabis is completely illegal. But SF has decriminalized magic mushrooms, while state Senator Scott Wiener’s many attempts to decriminalize magic mushrooms at the state level have all failed.
So if you’re in the market for some, err, “religion,” Church of Ambrosia is still maintaining its Oakland location at 1216 10th Avenue, and there are a couple other mushroom churches operating here in San Francisco.
Image via Zide Door
