South Park

South Park ‘Dot-com’ was the word on the street here in the mid-’90s, when venture capitalists plotted website launches in parkside cafes with tattooed 20-something techies. But speculation is nothing new to South Park, which was planned by a real-estate speculator in the 1850s as a bucolic gated community. Though the South Park development itself never quite took off, a plaque on an office building around the corner at 601 3rd St marks the birthplace of Jack London, esteemed author of The Call of the Wild,White Fang and many other popular adventure stories. Otherwise the neighborhood retreated into obscurity, and Filipino American war veterans formed a quiet community here until the dot-com boom. Nowadays it seems even the birds in the trees are twittering about another South Park venture, founded here after the dot-com bust: Twitter.