By the 1870s business had come to the Valley – Ralston’s silk ribbon factory; several breweries, including Mission Brewery, noted for its steam beer; two quarries; a gas plant; a fertilizer company; and the Southern Pacific Railroad, which filled in the bay for its tracks and tunnels. Schlage Lock was a major employer between 1925 and 1999, and Silvestri’s statuary has been a business neighbor since the 1960s. The Five, Six and Seven Mile houses offered lodging and recreation. With business came transportation, evolving from the original one-track streetcars that cost 5 cents each way, to the Muni buses that replaced them, to the light rail system’s T-line that has its southern terminus at Bayshore and Sunnydale.
In 1905 the Reis-Paul Tract sold $125 lots throughout the Valley for $1 down and $1 a week. Sunnydale was erected for World War II defense workers, and Joseph Eichler’s 1960s plan for luxury housing in two high-rises evolved into Section 8 housing at Geneva Towers, imploded in 1998. Churches include the Catholic Church of the Visitacion, replacing the six-acre estate of Peter Burnett, California’s first governor, and subsequently the San Francisco Auto Camp; St. James Presbyterian, remodeled by Julia Morgan, the Hearst Castle architect, in 1923; and Valley Baptist on Raymond, erected in 1919. Both the Visitacion Valley Community Center, spearheaded by Florence Friedman, and the John King Senior Center continue to meet a variety of neighborhood needs.
Today’s residents are proud of our new branch library, once consisting of only a few shelves in the drugstore on Leland, and the six greenways that spill down the hillsides on former water department lots. The revitalization of the neighborhood, named in 2000 by the Fannie Mae Foundation as one of the ten “Just Right” urban markets in the entire U.S., continues.