Saturdays on Mission Street

"I was there..."

by Carol Birnbaum Gilbert

Mission Street between 20th and 21st Streets, ca. 1930s. The red arrow shows the building Bloom's Clothes for Men and Boys operated out of.

Photo courtesy Carol Birnbaum Gilbert

My grandfather founded Bloom's Clothes for Men and Boys on Mission Street between 20th and 21st Streets maybe in the 1920s or 1930s. The building itself was very interesting. It had been a house. They lifted it up and built the store underneath it to rent. We had the ground floor store with a half space loft that held our tailor shop and the boy's department. From the tailor shop you could still enter some stairs to the old house that sat on top of us. It was dark and creepy.

Bloom’s Interior in the 1950s

Photo courtesy Carol Birnbaum Gilbert

When my grandfather retired, my father, Charles Birnbaum, managed it thereafter. My sister and I worked in the store on Saturdays and holidays during the 1950s and some of the 1960s, from the time we were 12 years old. Note: it had no heat except for an old gas stove at the very back. We froze there! It was next door to The Majestic department store and when it went under renovation, it caught fire and burned us out as well. We never returned.

Eventually there was the Mission Merchants Association. They marketed our area as the Mission Miracle Mile and they brought in a lot of customers for special sales called "Dollar Days".

On the other side of us was a small jewelry store owned by Jack Dougal. The Tower Theater was across the street and on the corner of 21st there was a large hat store because men wore hats once upon a time. On our side there was also a mostly lingerie store, but that also carried some clothes. I think there had been a small fruit market on our side once upon a time. We went to the dentist who had an office upstairs on our side of the street.

Siegel's Fashions for Men and Boys

Siegel's Fashions for Men and Boys on the block below us was our main competition. On the street above our store on the same side was Byron's Shoes and KnitCraft where I was a frequent customer. There was also a Hale Brothers store that was pretty large.

Granat Brothers on Mission and 20th Streets, 1964.

Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library AAC-6823

Granat Brothers Jewelers had a store further up until they got fancier. Greyhound Bus ran along Mission and I could ride it home to San Mateo as needed. There was also a jitney service that drove cars up and down Mission Street and I think you could hop on and off for a small fee.

You'd think all I did was eat because I remember good food at Manning's in the Mission Market, especially hotcakes and cinnamon rolls. Down a block from us was great Italian food at Bruno's. I think I recall a karmelkorn shop where I bought candy like molasses chews. There was a doughnut shop whose maple bars and cinnamon twists I loved. I remember good sandwiches at The Rialto on the other side of the street on the block above. I lunched at the counter there. We were there for the immigration of Italians and Irish through Latin Americans and then Blacks.

We commuted from the foggy Richmond District to the warm and sunny Mission until my parents moved to San Mateo where, "The children could play in the sun."