SoMa

This guide to SoMa in San Francisco starts with the Slot, the iron cable-car groove that once split Market Street and the city along with it, factories and boarding rooms to the south, banks and theaters to the north. It traces how Jack London turned that divide into fiction in 1909, following a mild sociology professor who invents a rough dockworker alter ego to study laborers south of the line, and falls for a union organizer while crossing back and forth. From there it follows the neighborhood itself through the 1906 earthquake, waves of displaced workers who rebuilt it, and the leather bar that opened here in 1962 and drew a defiant culture of its own.