Murals cover Balmy Alley's fences off 24th Street, and HBO's Looking shot at a restaurant on the same block.
What Mission District looks like
Mission Street, , 24th Street and 16th Street are the neighborhood's commercial fronts. Quieter residential blocks run between them along Guerrero and South Van Ness. Two and three storey mixed use buildings line the boulevards, painted wood and stucco fronts over ground floor storefronts, roll down gates and hand lettered signs among them. A four storey stucco building near Mission and 15th Street is painted coral with turquoise trim.
, a single block off Garfield Square between 24th and 25th Streets, has murals across nearly every fence and garage door in the alley. , off Valencia between 17th and 18th Streets, is painted along both sides of its own narrower passage. The murals continue past the two alleys onto storefront walls and roll gates on 24th Street itself.
Away from the boulevards, the side streets have flat roofed Victorian rows and stick style houses, some built speculatively in matching cookie-cutter rows with ornately gabled Queen Annes among them. Many were later raised on a new ground floor to add a storefront, so a plain shopfront now sits beneath a decorated Victorian face upstairs.
, whitewashed adobe and stucco, stands on Dolores Street beside the basilica built next to it in 1918. Grander houses with deeper front yards line Dolores and Fair Oaks Streets a few blocks over, a change of scale from the storefronts on Mission and Valencia.
Shot in Mission District
The Pursuit of Happyness used the apartment building at , at 24th Street, for the Gardner family's first home. A few blocks away on the same street, HBO's Looking filmed inside for its first season.
The Pursuit of Happyness, 2006
1161 York Street
The Pursuit of Happyness places the Gardner family's apartment at 1161 York Street, at 24th Street, for the opening stretch of the film. It is an ordinary residential corner rather than a dressed set, one block over from the murals on 24th Street.
Pilsen's 18th Street runs the same two and three storey mixed use storefronts covered edge to edge in murals, a Mexican American shopping corridor at the same scale as 24th Street. Both grew their murals through resident run projects rather than a single commissioned wall. Pilsen's storefronts are brick rather than the painted wood and stucco common in the Mission. Its street trees are also sparser, so a closer frame reads better than a wide one. Try searching mural covered storefront corridor now.
Cesar Chavez Avenue in Boyle Heights runs the same kind of two storey Latino commercial strip as 24th Street, storefronts painted with pictograms of what they sell and murals covering the walls between them. Boyle Heights sits flatter and drier, with palm trees and low pitched roofs that would give it away in a wide shot, so a tight storefront frame holds the match better. Try searching Latino commercial storefront strip now.
Wynwood in Miami, Florida
Wynwood's mural covered warehouse walls play the same idea as Balmy Alley's fences and garage doors. Blank fronts here turn into one long painted surface instead of dozens of small ones. The warehouses are single storey cinderblock rather than wood fences and stucco houses, so anything wider than a close mural frame breaks the match. Try searching mural covered warehouse wall now.
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