A plan to commemorate 50 locations tied to San Francisco's leather and LGBTQ culture with sidewalk markers is expected to win approval from the Board of Supervisors this week.
It is timed to coincide with an underway streetscape improvement project along Folsom Street that at one point was known as the city's "Miracle Mile." It earned that nickname due to the many gay bars and bathhouses that operated on or near the main artery through the South of Market district in the 1960s and 1970s.
But the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s soon would diminish SOMA's leather scene. The health crisis resulted in most gay bathhouses and sex clubs in the area closing their doors.