Sunnyside Avenue, Until It Wasn't
The road running through Sunnyside carried the neighborhood's own name first. Sunnyside Avenue. A designation that said plainly who built the street and who it belonged to.
By 1921, the name was gone. Sunnyside historian Thomas Malim, whose research is preserved on FoundSF's Sunnyside page, traced the renaming to a petition from developers and early residents of St. Francis Wood, Westwood Park, and the Highlands. These were the wealthier subdivisions flanking Sunnyside to the west and south, and they objected to Sunnyside Avenue running through their neighborhoods. They petitioned City Hall. Sunnyside residents, led by one Ernest Van Beck, opposed the change. The petition prevailed. Sunnyside Avenue became Monterey Boulevard, and the neighborhood's main commercial street lost the name that had identified it as theirs.
A sourcing distinction worth noting: this is Malim's narrative, assembled from local history research rather than surviving municipal records. FoundSF presents it within a larger Sunnyside essay by Jacqueline Proctor, who has documented the boulevard's commercial history through that essay and through her own photographic archive. The bare fact of the renaming is verifiable; by 1921 the name had changed. But the motive Malim identifies, pressure from adjacent developments carrying more political weight, belongs to his reconstruction rather than to a document anyone can pull from the city's files. The distinction matters because it raises a question the boulevard's subsequent century has been quietly resolving. If the street's identity could be overwritten by neighboring subdivisions, what kept the boulevard itself from being remade in their image?
Edna to Ridgewood, on Foot
The Sunnyside Neighborhood Association defines the neighborhood's primary shopping street as Monterey Boulevard from Edna Street to Ridgewood Avenue: small businesses, restaurants, cafes, and a Safeway. The description is accurate. More to the point, it has been accurate in its essentials for decades. The individual businesses have turned over. The scale and function have not.
Start at the Edna end, heading west. What registers first is the roofline, or rather its modesty. The buildings along the 500 block are one and two stories, wood-frame and stucco, their facades sitting flush with the sidewalk or stepping back just enough for a doorway recess. Some of the lots are narrow enough that a single storefront fills the entire street frontage. Public property records show at least one building on this stretch, at 574 Monterey, built in 1913. That date places its construction before the renaming, before the First World War, when this was still Sunnyside Avenue and the commercial strip was only beginning to coalesce. A residential-scaled building in what is now commercial zoning; the kind of structure that tells you the neighborhood preceded the commerce, and the commerce grew into what was already there. The 500 block today holds personal services and a neighborhood bar: Monterey Hair Salon at 597, Friends Bar at 558.
The 600 block anchors around the Safeway at 625, which has occupied its site since 1971, constructed adjacent to the old Servell Food Store according to historical images Proctor has preserved. The Safeway is the corridor's one concession to a larger commercial footprint, and even it sits within the NC-1 framework. The 700 block clusters restaurants and cafes: Won Kok Restaurant at 700, Railroad Expresso at 705, Big Joe's at 717. Proctor's photographs show that 719 Monterey was once Ron Davis's barber shop; the address now houses a salon. At 777, Monterey Hardware and Plumbing served the neighborhood until its closure in 1983. Proctor's images also record the former Texaco station at Ridgewood and Monterey, since replaced by apartments.
What holds these blocks together is a shared dimension. The storefronts are narrow, sized for a single operator and a handful of customers at a time. The buildings stay low enough that the sky remains visible above the boulevard. The businesses serve daily needs: haircuts, meals, groceries, a drink after work. Some structures date to the early twentieth century; others arrived in the postwar decades. The architectural variety is real but contained within a narrow band. Nothing announces itself as destination retail. Nothing was built to draw customers from beyond walking distance.
Section 710
Part of this persistence is codified. Much of the Monterey Boulevard commercial frontage carries an NC-1 designation, Neighborhood Commercial Cluster District, under the San Francisco Planning Code. Section 710 defines NC-1 as intended for:
"local neighborhood shopping districts that provide convenience retail goods and services for immediately surrounding neighborhoods primarily during daytime hours."
The code specifies that many NC-1 districts have "some of the lowest commercial intensity in the city" and may consist of "small clusters or short linear commercial strips with low-scale, interspersed mixed-use development."
The planning code is describing, in the compressed vocabulary of municipal regulation, exactly the boulevard a person encounters walking from Edna to Ridgewood. Lowest commercial intensity. Small clusters. Low-scale. The SF Planning zoning map confirms NC-1 designations for parcels including the Safeway site at 625 and smaller frontage parcels along the corridor. Not every parcel carries the same classification; the corner at Edna, for instance, is zoned RH-2, a residential designation that has nonetheless housed ground-floor commercial use for decades. But the dominant zoning signal along the boulevard's commercial stretch is NC-1. Neighborhood-serving. Low-scale. Daytime-oriented.
Zoning alone does not explain the boulevard, though. The NC-1 designation arrived after the corridor's commercial identity was already established. The businesses that lined Monterey Boulevard in the 1940s and 1950s, the hardware store, the pharmacy at Monterey and Gennessee that Proctor's photographs preserve, the cleaners, the delis, were already operating at neighborhood scale before the planning code formalized what they were doing. The code ratified a pattern that residents and shopkeepers had already created.
What Succession Preserves
The SNA's 2021 corridor inventory reveals something more useful than the zoning map. What emerges from that snapshot is not stasis but a particular kind of turnover. Businesses change; the category of business often does not. A barber shop replaces a barber shop. A restaurant replaces a restaurant. A salon occupies the address where a salon operated before. The storefronts are sized for small operators, too narrow for chains, too modest for destination concepts, and so they select for the same kind of tenant generation after generation: someone with limited capital, a specific skill, and a need for neighborhood foot traffic.
The boulevard has lost businesses that residents depended on for decades. The 1983 closure of Monterey Hardware at 777 removed a neighborhood institution. The Monterey Pharmacy at Gennessee is a historical photograph now, not a functioning store. Each closure represents a specific person's livelihood and a neighborhood's diminished self-sufficiency. But the pattern of succession, the corridor's tendency to refill its storefronts with businesses of similar scale and function, has proved remarkably durable. The SNA's 2021 inventory counted personal services, restaurants, cafes, bars, and convenience retail clustered mainly between the 500 and 700 blocks. Proctor's mid-century photographs show essentially the same mix.
Commercial corridors across San Francisco's west side have thinned, consolidated, or shifted character in the years since the pandemic. Monterey Boulevard's advantages are structural: the NC-1 zoning, the narrow storefronts, the residential density within walking distance. They are not invulnerable. What the corridor has is the accumulated result of a century of small decisions, each one individually unremarkable. A permit filed, a business registered, a lease signed by someone who looked at a narrow storefront on a modest boulevard and decided it was enough. The person walking the boulevard now, passing those storefronts, stepping around the same sidewalk dimensions that a 1913 building established, is walking through the sum of those decisions.
The street lost its original name in 1921. It kept nearly everything else.