The Neighborhood Through Time
Building a Working Class Community
Industry
was quick to move into the South of Market area, including George Gordon’s
San Francisco and Pacific Sugar Refinery on Eighth and Harrison streets
and William Ralston's Kimball Carriage and Car Manufacturing Company.
By the 1880s, men in the South of Market could find work at furniture
factories, blacksmiths, and supply yards selling coal, wood, feed, and
lumber. Small manufacturing included a cooperage, pickle factory, matzo
factory, chemical laboratory, photo plate factory, cream of tartar works,
mattress factory, flourmills, pasta makers, and 
winery.
The majority of people who lived and worked in the South of Market
were Irish immigrants or their American-born children. The South of
Market landscape was shaped by its industrial and working class character.
While smoke stacks and factories punctuated the sky line, nearly every
street intersection had its corner grocery store, liquor store, or saloon.
Saloons, whose proprietors were almost always German, gave 
workingmen
a temporary escape from crowded houses and tenements.
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