South of Market

Frank Koci, Beat-era artist born in Czechoslovakia in 1904, arrived in the U.S. in 1921 and came to San Francisco in 1923 where he worked as a day laborer. From his apartment in the South of Market Clementina Towers, he remembered the city then as a place where “you either come to finish off — the end of the route — or to begin.” (Read an excerpt from the Neighborhood Oral History project interview with Frank Koci here, pages 1, 4 and 5.)

Photo by Bill Carlson