SF International Arts Festival presents Chris Carlsson in "What’s That Smell? A Walking Tour of the Northeast Mission Industrial Zone"

Chris Carlsson, long-time grassroots historian and guide to San Francisco's lost, forgotten and overlooked histories, takes participants on a walk around the old industrial sites of the North Mission. Pungent odors such as ammonia, baking bread, and roasting hops, once common, are now only memories. We'll visit breweries, bakeries, and an old baseball field site, uncovering stories of how the underlying ecology shaped the kinds of work that came to be done in this once-thriving neighborhood crisscrossed by railroads and streetcars. Ultimately the dialectic interplay of nature, immigration, capitalism, and unplanned development brought a certain neighborhood into being, that is now only visible in the ghosts and remnants of the built past.