The brick building two doors west is Amoeba Music’s San Francisco store, opened on November 15, 1997. The space is 24,000 square feet of records, CDs, DVDs, books, and posters, one of the largest independent record stores in operation anywhere.
The building started life around 1907 as a streetcar barn, used by the Market Street Railway Company to store and repair the electric streetcars that ran on Haight Street. The cable car line had been the original 1883 link that built the neighborhood. By the 1920s electric streetcars had taken over. The barn at 1855 Haight serviced them.
After streetcar service ended, the building became Park Bowl, a bowling alley that ran through most of the second half of the twentieth century and was home to several long-running gay and lesbian bowling leagues at a time when most San Francisco social venues were not welcoming. It closed in August 1996.
Amoeba’s founders had already opened a successful store in Berkeley in 1990. The San Francisco store filled the empty bowling alley with custom-built record bins, and the space has barely changed since. Check current hours in the app before planning a long browse.
Haight Street ends two blocks west at Stanyan. The Beaux-Arts building on the right at 750 Stanyan, the Stanyan Park Hotel, opened in 1904 and is the last of seven hotels that once lined Stanyan Street facing Golden Gate Park.