The Richmond has a reputation for closing early. Two long commercial streets of excellent, unfashionable restaurants, a great deal of fog, and the widespread belief — held mostly by people who live somewhere else — that nothing happens out here after dinner. What is actually on Clement Street is a two-storey, 6,500-square-foot music venue with two separate stages, and the number of people in the Mission who know that is small.
Every neighbourhood has one venue doing the work for the whole district, and it is usually the one locals have stopped noticing. Ask Karpo what is on tonight in the streets you already walk down.
Two rooms, one door
Neck of the Woods at 406 Clement Street is two venues stacked on top of each other, and the important thing to establish before you go is which one you are going to.
Downstairs is the lower-key room: lounge seating, a full stage and sound system, flat screens, a projector screen, board games, wifi and a bar. It works as a place to sit and listen, and it works as a place to be early on a night that has not decided what it is yet.
Upstairs is the other proposition entirely — a stage with a large dance floor, two fully stocked bars, a lounge with tables, and a VIP section that looks out over Clement Street. The sound system upstairs has a real reputation. Together the two floors hold something in the region of four hundred people.
What it books
The programming leans alternative rock, indie, dance pop and electronic, with local and touring acts across both rooms. The two-stage layout means a busy night can run two different things at once, which is why checking which floor a listing refers to is not pedantry.
It also means the venue can hold a club night upstairs and a seated show downstairs on the same evening, and you can move between them on one door charge. For a group that cannot agree on what kind of night it wants, that is a rarer and more useful feature than it sounds.
The Clement Street part
This is the genuine advantage of the location, and it is what turns a gig into an evening. Clement Street between Arguello and about 12th Avenue is one of the densest and best eating streets in San Francisco — Cantonese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Russian bakeries, dim sum, a deeply unglamorous and excellent Irish pub every few blocks.
None of it is expensive and almost none of it needs a booking. Which means the sequence here is dinner at eight for twenty dollars a head, a hundred metres of walking, and doors. In most of the city that sequence involves a car or a thirty-minute bus ride, and the friction is the reason people end up staying home.
- 406 Clement Street, Inner Richmond
- Two floors, two stages, roughly 6,500 square feet
- Downstairs: lounge seating, full stage, screens, board games
- Upstairs: dance floor, two bars, VIP over the street, the better sound system
- Around 400 capacity across both rooms; alternative, indie, dance pop and electronic
Getting out there, and getting back
The Richmond is the part people talk themselves out of. There is no BART, and that is the whole objection. What there is instead is the 38 Geary two blocks away, which is one of the highest-frequency bus routes in the country and runs all night, plus the 1 California and the 2 Clement.
From downtown the 38 takes about twenty-five minutes. From the Mission it is a longer, less direct journey and is the reason this venue stays a neighbourhood secret. Parking, unusually for San Francisco, is actually findable on the side streets off Clement after nine, which makes this one of the few venues in the city where driving is a reasonable plan.
Who it is for
If you live in the Richmond or the Sunset, this is your venue and you should treat it as such — a place to turn up to on a weeknight without a plan, in the way people in the Mission treat the rooms on their own doorstep.
If you live elsewhere, it is worth the trip for a specific reason: the crowd is a neighbourhood crowd rather than a going-out crowd. People are there because it is near them, which produces a room that behaves quite differently to a venue people have travelled across a city to be seen in.
The Richmond's wider case
It helps to understand why a room this size exists out here at all. The Richmond is one of the most densely populated districts in the city and one of the least served by nightlife, which leaves a large resident audience with nowhere to go after ten without crossing town. A venue that can hold four hundred people across two floors is sized for exactly that gap.
That has consequences for what a weeknight feels like. The audience is older on some nights and much younger on others, depending entirely on which floor is programmed and how, and it is not a single scene the way a Mission room can be. If the last time you came the crowd was not for you, that says very little about next Thursday.
Make a night of the district
Before: dim sum on Clement, or Burmese, or one of the Russian bakeries if it is still early. After: the late Irish pubs on the same street, most of which will still be serving when you come out, and none of which will be full of people who came for a music venue.
And if the fog is in, which it usually is, Golden Gate Park is three blocks south and is genuinely worth ten minutes of walking through at midnight. That is the Richmond's actual case: everything you need inside eight blocks, and nobody else has bothered to come out here.
Practical notes
Neck of the Woods, 406 Clement Street in the Inner Richmond, is a two-storey independent venue with two stages across roughly 6,500 square feet and a combined capacity near 400. Downstairs has lounge seating, a full stage and sound system, screens and board games; upstairs has a large dance floor, two bars, a VIP area overlooking the street and the stronger sound system. Programming runs to alternative and indie rock, dance pop and electronic, local and touring. Check which floor your show is on before you go. The 38 Geary is two blocks away and runs all night, and street parking off Clement is realistically findable after 9pm.
Tags: #SanFrancisco #Richmond #ClementStreet #LiveMusic #NeckOfTheWoods #NeighborhoodGuides #SFNightlife #InnerRichmond #SFThingsToDo #Gigs #DanceFloor #LocalBands #Nightlife #SFMusic
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