After 39 Years, Sherman Market Closed. Union Street's New Arrivals Want a Reservation First.
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Two things happened on the same stretch of Cow Hollow this year, a block apart from each other, and neither one is being talked about in relation to the other.
On April 13, Sherman Market closed its doors on Franklin Street after 39 years in business, a corner store that had outlasted two recessions, a pandemic, and the dot-com bust. Around the same stretch of Union Street, an AI system named Luna started running a corner store from behind a phone line, a fast-growing Bay Area fitness studio signed a lease for a space you book by the hour, and two restaurants with built-in followings elsewhere planted their first Cow Hollow flags. None of these businesses replace what Sherman Market offered. That's the part worth sitting with if you live here.
Sherman Market sat at 2606 Franklin Street, one block off Union, since a business registration dated back to May 1987. That's not a rounding error kind of tenure. It's a shop that opened under one set of owners, Batshon Hanady Mazen and Elias according to city registration records, and stayed open long enough to become a fixture of the kind you don't think about until it's gone: the place you grabbed milk at 9 p.m., where the person behind the counter recognized your face before you said anything.
It closed this spring. No announcement has surfaced yet about what takes its place, and in a corridor where storefronts in Cow Hollow rarely stay dark for long, that vacancy is itself a small data point. What replaces a 39-year-old walk-in market says something about what this stretch of the neighborhood wants to be next. So far, nothing on Franklin has answered that question. But a few blocks over, on Union Street itself, three very different answers have already shown up.
At the corner of Union and Webster, a storefront that would have been unremarkable five years ago has become one of the more unusual retail experiments in the city. Andon Market is stocked and managed largely by an AI system named Luna, which selected the merchandise and posted the job listing that eventually brought a human employee, Felix Johnson, into the mix. Customers who want to buy something pick up a phone inside the store and place an order with Luna directly, who processes the charge.
It's still, technically, a corner store. You can walk in. But the model has flipped. The old version of a corner store ran on a person who knew you. This one runs on software that hired the person who's there now. As of this spring, neither city regulators nor neighboring business owners had issued any public comment on the setup, and the operators behind Luna have described it as an early-stage trial rather than a broader rollout. Whether it expands or stays a one-off, it's a preview of a version of walk-in retail that doesn't require anyone behind the counter to know your name.
A few doors down, the newest tenant on Union Street isn't retail at all. The Yard Strength Training signed a lease for 1906 Union Street this June, a roughly 4,300-square-foot buildout that the studio's own site now describes as nine private training pods plus four reservable pilates reformers, all booked by the hour. It marks the company's third Bay Area location after studios in Lower Pacific Heights and Tam Junction. An opening was originally penciled in for September, though the studio's most recent update pushed that to a broader "fall 2026" window without a firm date yet.
The site wasn't chosen at random. The company describes a multi-year search for a location that sits between its two existing markets, close enough to serve both.
"Cow Hollow sits squarely between the two communities we already serve heavily."
That's Joseph Cicero, the company's founder, explaining the pick. Founding memberships for the Cow Hollow studio are being sold at $218 a month, locked in for the first year, a price built around getting in early rather than walking in on a whim.
What's notable isn't the gym itself. It's the model. You don't wander into The Yard the way you'd wander into a corner store or a boutique on a Saturday afternoon. You book a pod in advance. The entire pitch is a private, reservation-only hour that never depends on who else happens to be on the block that day.
The restaurant side of this year's turnover tells a different but related story. Breakfast Little, the Mission District breakfast burrito specialist known for its "OG" order of eggs, bacon, cheese and tater tots, confirmed this spring it's taking over 2223 Union Street, the space last occupied by the French bistro Gamine before it closed in 2020. The realtor who brokered the lease told the San Francisco Chronicle he expects the addition to bring genuine neighborhood warmth back to that stretch of the street.
Breakfast Little won't be the only new kitchen in the area. Two blocks away, Turtle Tower opened its second San Francisco location at Fillmore and Greenwich in January, bringing its late-night Hanoi-style pho into Cow Hollow, according to the Chronicle's April reporting. The opening had been previewed the prior fall by Mayor Daniel Lurie on social media. The original Financial District location stays open until 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, a detail that has locals wondering whether the Cow Hollow outpost will keep similar hours.
Here's the pattern underneath both moves. Neither restaurant is a new concept betting on Union Street the way a first-time operator might. Both already built their reputations somewhere else, in the Mission and in the Financial District and Tenderloin, and are now importing that following into Cow Hollow rather than trying to create it from scratch here. It's a vote of confidence in the street's foot traffic, but it's a specific kind: the confidence of operators who don't need discovery, only distribution.
Line up the year's arrivals and a shape appears:
None of these five data points is a headline on its own. Together, they describe a corridor swapping one kind of commerce for another. The businesses moving in either ask you to book ahead or arrive with a reputation you already trust from somewhere else. The business that just left ran on neither. It ran on proximity and familiarity, on being the place you happened to walk past.
Not everything on Union Street is being reshuffled. The Bus Stop Saloon marked its 126th anniversary this May, an occasion big enough that the city closed a block of Union between Laguna and Buchanan and rerouted the 45 bus line for the day. A bar that's been serving the neighborhood since before the 1906 earthquake isn't going anywhere, and the street closure for its anniversary is the kind of thing longtime residents plan their Saturday around.
The Union Street Festival ran its 48th consecutive year this June, closing the street between Gough and Fillmore for two days of vendors, live music and the annual Waiter Relay Race, where restaurant and bar teams race uphill balancing full trays of drinks. Sunset Mercantile and the Union Street Association put it on jointly, the way they have for decades. Worth marking on next year's calendar if you missed it this time around.
Those two institutions are the counterweight to everything above. Union Street isn't trading its identity wholesale. It's absorbing new tenants who operate on a different logic than the ones they're replacing, while the anchors that have survived generations of turnover keep doing what they've always done.
If you're used to treating Union Street as a place you can walk into unannounced, that's changing in specific, traceable ways this year. A gym that requires booking. A market run partly by software. Two restaurants that built their names somewhere else first. And a 39-year corner store with no announced successor yet, which means the next few months are worth watching if you want to see what fills that gap on Franklin.
None of this required a real estate transaction to notice. It just required paying attention to a few blocks you already walk through. If you're weighing what a home near this stretch is actually worth given how the street is changing, or thinking ahead to a move within Cow Hollow, that's a different conversation, and it's one Colleen Cotter has been having with clients in this neighborhood for years. Reach out for a complimentary market consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
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