The Tenderloin

About The Tenderloin

The Tenderloin is one of the densest neighborhoods in San Francisco. Depending on how the boundaries are drawn, 28,000 to 35,000 people live in roughly 50 square blocks, the majority in single-room-occupancy hotels built after the 1906 fire.

The neighborhood remains working-class largely because of zoning protections won by community organizing in 1981. Developers proposed converting the SRO hotels to tourist hotels or replacing them with office buildings; residents organized and sued, and the city created a zoning overlay that capped building heights at the residential-hotel scale and required most SROs to remain residential. Nonprofits including the Tenderloin Housing Clinic and TNDC own roughly a third of the housing stock and operate it as permanently affordable.

Most buildings in the neighborhood date between 1907 and 1930. More than 400 of them are on the National Register of Historic Places as the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District. The Tenderloin Museum sits on the ground floor of the Cadillac Hotel at Eddy and Leavenworth, the first structure rebuilt in the Uptown Tenderloin after the fire.

Vietnamese refugees settled in the area in significant numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. Larkin Street between Ellis and O’Farrell was formally designated Little Saigon in 2004. Yemeni, Pakistani, Cambodian, and Filipino families also live in the neighborhood.

How to Walk the Tenderloin

The neighborhood has three north-south spines.

Larkin Street is the food spine. From the Tenderloin Museum at Eddy and Leavenworth, walk three blocks up Eddy to Larkin and turn north. Larkin between Ellis and O’Farrell is Little Saigon. Saigon Sandwich at 560 Larkin has been making banh mi since 1979; it’s cash only and takeout focused, and sandwiches currently run roughly $5 to $7. Pho 2000, Turtle Tower, and Lers Ros are on the same stretch.

Polk Street, two blocks west of Larkin, has a broader mix. Brenda’s French Soul Food at 652 Polk serves Cajun and Creole food including beignets and shrimp and grits; weekend lines are long. North of the Tenderloin, Polk continues into Nob Hill with bars, Thai restaurants, and cocktail rooms.

Jones and Leavenworth Streets hold the bar and theater corridor. Bourbon & Branch at 501 Jones is a Prohibition-era speakeasy behind an unmarked door (the address actually operated as an illegal speakeasy from 1921 to 1933, under the front of a cigar shop). Reservations are required for the main rooms. A connected walk-in room called The Library is accessible without a password from 6 PM to 2 AM seven days a week; you enter through a bookcase. Great American Music Hall is on O’Farrell.

What to Know Before You Go

The city concentrates social services for the unhoused in the Tenderloin, which is part of why open drug use and homelessness are more visible here than in other parts of the city.

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