A walk from the train station located near San Francisco's Third and Townsend Streets to one of the city's main thoroughfares, Market Street, is an unremarkable event for most people, including tourists. However, to a former resident who hasn't seen the area since the late 1960s, a walk down Third Street might seem like a trip back to the future. Urban renewal, gentrification, and many other factors have changed this area from being tagged in the 1950s as "skid row," to the much tonier name of SOMA (South of Market Area) today. Before and after maps of renewed parts of a city show the physical changes to an area, but they typically give no information about the people who used to live and work there. This memoir tells the saga of a family that left Harlem, New York in 1949 and travelled to San Francisco, California eventually ending up in SOMA at the alliterative address of 333 Third Street where they resided from 1952 to 1957. A series of coming-of-age and slice-of-life stories chronicle what it was like to experience the chaos of urban renewal, the challenges of living in SOMA in the 1950s, and most important how a mother's love and determination smoothed out the highs and lows of an economically difficult household.