| Hayes Valley | |
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| — Neighborhood of San Francisco — | |
| Looking west along Hayes Street from Octavia Boulevard. | |
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Hayes Valley
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| Coordinates: | |
| Government | |
| • Board of Supervisors | Jane Kim and Ross Mirkarimi |
| • State Assembly | Tom Ammiano (D) |
| • State Senate | Mark Leno (D) |
| • U.S. House | Nancy Pelosi (D) |
| Area[1] | |
| • Total | 0.5 km2 (0.180 sq mi) |
| • Land | 0.5 km2 (0.180 sq mi) |
| Population (2008)[2] | |
| • Total | 5,672 |
| • Density | 12,153/km2 (31,476/sq mi) |
| ZIP Code | 94102, 94117 |
| Area code(s) | 415 |
| [3] | |
Hayes Valley is a fashionable neighborhood in San Francisco, California, between the historical districts of Alamo Square and Civic Center. Victorian, Queen Anne, and Edwardian townhouses rub shoulders with boutiques, restaurants, and public housing complexes.
Although its boundaries are ill defined, Hayes Valley is generally considered to be the area north and south of Hayes Street between Webster (near Alamo Square) and Franklin (near Civic Center) streets.
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Hayes Valley's commercial center is made up of the section of Hayes Street running from approximately Laguna Street in the west to Franklin Street in the east,[4] with extensions on perpendicular Gough and Laguna Streets.
The Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association considers the neighborhood as a whole to be bound by Webster Street in the west, Franklin Street in the east, Fulton Street in the north, and Hermann Street and Market Street in the south, with an extension as far west as Fillmore, between Haight Street and Hermann Street. (The latter definition overlaps considerably with the Lower Haight.)[5]
The San Francisco Association of Realtors considers the Hayes Valley to be synonymous with "District 6B", and extending from McAllister Street in the north, to Market Street and Duboce Avenue in the south, Gough Street in the east, and Webster Street (north of Fell Street) and Divisadero Street (south of Fell Street) forming the western boundaries.[6] (This definition includes the entire Lower Haight within Hayes Valley.)
Adjacent neighborhoods include the Lower Haight and small parts of the Duboce Triangle and SoMa in the south, Alamo Square in the west, and the Fillmore District/Western Addition to the north.
Native people in many small bands, now referred to collectively as the Ohlone tribe, lived in San Francisco part of the year, gathering food in the Mission Creek area, which included seasonal Hayes Creek, and other parts of today's city. Hayes Valley would have been thickly covered with wildflowers every spring.[7] When it was running in the winter, Hayes Creek cut diagonally through the current Hayes Valley.[8] It is now underground year-round.
In 1776, local people came under the control of the Spanish empire with the de Anza expedition, which established Mission Dolores just south of Hayes Valley.[9] After the 1849 gold rush, Italian immigrants from around Genoa developed produce farms on the sandy soil of the Hayes Valley neighborhood.[10]
The Western Addition was developed in the 1850s to expand the city to the west of Van Ness Avenue. Michael Hayes, who, in 1856, was on the committee which named the streets of this development, may have been instrumental in naming Hayes Street after his brother, Thomas, a large landholder in the neighborhood, who was then serving as country clerk.[11] Hayes Valley was built out with many grand Victorian residences, as well as the smaller residences built to house the craftspeople at work on the mansions. Primary streets with big houses were named after influential local citizens (Hayes and Gough) and families (McAllister),[12] while streets with the smaller houses carry botanical names such as Ivy, Linden, and Hickory.
Hayes Valley south of McAllister Street was spared the fires that followed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.[13] It was a multi-ethnic neighborhood, becoming, with the blossoming of the Fillmore district after World War II, an African American neighborhood. The elevated Central Freeway was built in the neighborhood during the 1950s and brought with it urban blight and decay. Damaged during the Loma Prieta earthquake, it was closed afterward and eventually demolished. In 2005, a section of the freeway was rebuilt to end at Market Street, with the new, tree-lined Octavia Boulevard running north through the Hayes Valley along the previous path of Octavia Street, to Fell Street. Between Fell and Hayes streets, at , a neighborhood green terminates the boulevard, providing seating, green space, a play structure for children, and a changing exhibition of public art. The green is named for the late Patricia Walkup, a local activist who volunteered her time for many years to fight neighborhood crime, and co-led a campaign to tear down the part of the Central Freeway that ran through Hayes Valley. The destruction of the freeway has spurred gentrification which has revitalized the neighborhood, and has made one of the trendier sections of town with eclectic mix of boutiques, high-end restaurants, and hip stores on Hayes Street.
The city-owned lots between Fell and Oak, Laguna and Octavia, where the previous on- and off-ramps for Highway 101 were situated, are being transformed into an urban farm by Hayes Valley Farm — an education and research project with a focus on urban agriculture. The project is founded on an interim use agreement between Hayes Valley Farm and the City’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development until the City moves forward with other development plans for the site.[14]
Hayes Valley is served by several San Francisco Municipal Railway (MUNI) buses, including the #21, which runs through Hayes Valley on its east-west route between Golden Gate Park and the Ferry Building, the #5 (also east-west), the #22 (runs north-south along Fillmore Street) and the #6 and #71, which both run east-west along Haight.
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