The Stencil Archive project has been in San Francisco since the beginning. The streets of this city were filled with stencils in the mid-1990s, making fertile ground for collecting photographs, making stencils, and sharing it all through words, walks, and other ways of expression. The main section of the City that holds the most stencil history is the Mission District. Haight Street (the locals break this down to Upper and Lower Haight, while tourists know Upper Haight as the Haight Ashbury) comes in second. Makes sense that Stencil Archive was first thought up and created in the Mission District.
Since around 2012, Stencil Archive HQ has been in the Western Addition, a large swath of San Francisco that has smaller neighborhood names. First we were up in NoPa, a newer name for North of the Panhandle. Then we moved down the hill a bit to Divisadero Street, a main shopping corridor for this part of the City. Now, we are in Japantown, just off Fillmore Street and below Pacific Heights. Haight Street is also part of the Western Addition, but the Stencil Archives have been split up a bit due to the volume of images from Haight and Divis.
Finally(!), we have upgraded one of the geographic stencil archives for San Francisco, beginning with a smaller one for the Western Addition. This archive also includes images from Lone Mountain, USF, the Panhandle, as well as Pacific Heights, Fillmore District (and Street), Japantown, and maybe a few other nooks of this section of San Francisco.
We hope to focus on a few more manageably-sized SF archives this week, so keep an eye out for fresh images and filenames that explain more about what you may be looking at.