Balboa Street Is Having Two Vintage Revivals, and They Don't Share a Block

Outer Richmond residents who've noticed more secondhand racks and mid-century furniture appearing on Balboa Street this year are seeing something real, but they're likely only seeing half of it. The vintage wave collecting on Balboa didn't start in one place and spread. It started twice, in two spots more than a dozen numbered avenues apart, for two different reasons, and neither cluster seems to be paying much attention to the other.

One version formed in the past five years around 19th and 20th Avenue, seeded by a single relocated shop and grown by word of mouth. The other reasserted itself this spring near 32nd through 36th Avenue, in a stretch that's carried a secondhand identity since long before this year's headlines, anchored by an owner who's been selling on that block, on and off, for more than a decade. Anyone picturing "Balboa Street vintage shopping" as one continuous stroll will find the street has other plans. These are two separate trips, each with its own neighbors worth a stop.

The Newer Row, Nineteenth to Twentieth

The younger cluster traces back to December 2020, when Graciela Ronconi moved her Haight Street shop, Love Street Vintage, into 1801 Balboa Street. Ronconi is a longtime Richmond District resident, and she's said she felt the neighborhood was starving for a fun business. For a while the block stayed quiet. Then Uncommon SF opened nearby at 1815 Balboa in the summer of 2024, and Tight Knit Vintage & Modern followed at 1850 Balboa, opened by Ashley Von Edge, a Richmond resident who noticed a for-rent sign across the street while shopping at Love Street and decided to try running her own store seven blocks from where she lives.

That's the pattern worth naming. Three shops on one short stretch, each one arriving because someone saw the last one work. Von Edge has said having a business close to home was an easy decision. All three keep similar weekend hours, open Friday through Monday, which makes the block function less like scattered storefronts and more like a small, deliberate shopping district that assembled itself one lease at a time.

The Older Row, Thirty-Second to Thirty-Sixth

Walk more than a dozen avenues west and the vintage identity isn't new. It's returning. The stretch of Balboa near the historic Balboa Theatre has carried a secondhand and salvage reputation for years, and this spring it filled back in. Local Strange, at 3227 Balboa near 33rd Avenue, reopened in March after owner Anthony Williamson spent years selling vintage furniture and design objects on that same corridor under a different name, Mixed Nuts, before the pandemic pushed him into a storage unit in 2020. He's said sorting through everything took a while, but he's back, open Friday through Sunday and by appointment during the week. Williamson has said it feels like the corridor has become a hub for vintage again, comparing it to the early 2010s.

A few doors down, Eye & Hand Society at 3425 Balboa, already a boutique and art gallery, added a store-within-a-store called Second Hand, carrying vintage clothing alongside its regular inventory. Rampant Wine Bar, at 3516 Balboa, has hosted pop-up events on the same block. None of this is arriving cold. This stretch already had Marla Bakery at 3619 Balboa, started by two former Nopa chefs and now one of the city's better-known brunch spots, Simple Pleasures Cafe at 3434 Balboa, and Shanghai Dumpling King at 3319 Balboa, known for its xiao long bao. The Balboa Theatre itself, at 3630 Balboa, opened in 1926, designed by architect brothers James and Merritt Reid, the same firm behind the Fairmont Hotel, and still runs its Balboa Classic Movie Series alongside first-run films. The city gave this stretch a formal identity years ago too, installing twelve-foot tile gateway markers spelling out BALBOA at 34th and 39th Avenue as part of an older streetscape project. The vintage shops filling back in aren't creating a character. They're returning to one that was already built.

A Dozen Avenues Apart

The distance matters more than it sounds like it should. The newer cluster sits at 1801 to 1850 Balboa, between 19th and 20th Avenue. The older one runs from roughly 3227 to 3630 Balboa, between 32nd and 36th Avenue. That's more than a dozen numbered avenues of straight, mostly residential blocks between them, past the produce market, the fish tackle shop, and a long run of houses before you hit the second row of storefronts.

Nobody browsing Love Street Vintage on a Saturday morning is likely to end up at Local Strange by accident an hour later. The two rows aren't competing and they aren't collaborating. They're independent answers to the same underlying appetite, generated a mile-plus apart on the same street, which is a stranger and more specific fact than "Balboa Street likes vintage right now."

For anyone planning a weekend around this, the practical version is simple. Pick a row and build the rest of your day around it rather than trying to cover both in one outing. The 19th to 20th Avenue block pairs naturally with the newer wave of Clement Street cafés a few blocks north. The 32nd to 36th Avenue block pairs with an actual movie at the Balboa Theatre, dinner at Shanghai Dumpling King, and a coffee at Simple Pleasures, all steps from each other.

The Same Weekend, From Opposite Ends

The two rows even had their own separate reasons to draw a crowd this spring, on the same day. George Washington High School, a few blocks from the Local Strange end of Balboa, held its fifth annual car show on April 11 at its campus on 32nd Avenue, organized by the school's auto-body club. The club calls itself the only high-school auto shop in San Francisco and bills the show as the only car show with a Golden Gate view. It's free to attend and draws waxed cars and bikes spanning decades of design, which sits naturally alongside a block already leaning into mid-century furniture and salvage.

That same evening, Bazaar Cafe on California Street hosted a live music night called Songs for Celestial Bodies. Neither event mentions the other, and neither was built around the vintage shops nearby, but both landed on the same day at the far end of the neighborhood from the newer Balboa cluster, adding to a stretch of Outer Richmond that was already, for entirely separate reasons, having a specific kind of weekend.

None of this needs a unifying explanation. Two shopping rows a dozen avenues apart, each built by a different owner solving a different problem at a different time, happened to land in the same calendar year. That's the whole shape of it, and it's more interesting split apart than smoothed into one trend.

If you're weighing a move to a block like this, one where the character is built shop by shop rather than handed down by a developer, The Golden Gate Group knows the Outer Richmond well enough to tell you which row you'd actually want to live near.