Longtime Mission bakery La Victoria to close its doors.
La Victoria Bakery, one of the first Mexican-owned businesses in the Mission, is closing Tuesday after 67 years in business.
A landmark to many longtime Mission residents, La Victoria had endured in a rapidly changing neighborhood that has pushed out many other Latino residents and businesses. Yet gentrification itself is not directly to blame: The closure caps a complicated and bitter family battle over the business and its building, which are both owned by the same family.
Gabriel Maldonado founded La Victoria in 1951 across the street from its current location, at a time when the 24th Street shopping corridor was largely occupied by Irish and Italian businesses; that made it
one of the first Mexican businesses in the neighborhood, according to Maldonado’s son, Jaime, who ran the operation for the past 20 years.
Gabriel moved the business into its current location on the corner of 24th and Alabama in the early 1960s, converting a former pharmacy with an Italian bakery in the back into a Mexican panaderia whose windows looked into a case of pan dulces, cookies and breads. He also bought up the surrounding businesses and residences, patching some together into the existing storefront, renting others out.
Maldonado’s timing was impeccable: As immigrants from Mexico and Central America settled in the Mission through the 1960s and 1970s, the bakery’s location down the street from St. Peter’s Catholic Church made it a popular Sunday stop for families. La Victoria’s restaurant, which operated from 1963 to 1998, became a community gathering point in itself.
Maldonado, now in his late 90s, handed over the running of the bakery to Jaime in 1997 and the ownership of the building to a family trust overseen by his wife (and Jaime’s stepmother), Susana Maldonado, in the mid 2000s. Jaime is also a member of the trust.
Even though the Maldonado family has not been forced to navigate rising rents or eviction attempts as the Mission has changed, La Victoria has struggled to keep up. Jaime Maldonado tried numerous strategies to revitalize the business and draw in new customers: hosting popups, hiring trained pastry chefs to update decades-old recipes, subleasing the kitchen to small food businesses and renovating the dining room in order to reopen the restaurant as a small-plates bistro, a plan that never came to fruition.
As Mission Local reported in March, the relationship between family members has deteriorated into legal and financial chaos over the past two years. Jaime Maldonado dates the troubles back to a small fire that displaced the tenants in a residential unit above the bakery storeroom, which required extensive repairs and set off a cascade of debts, insurance claims and lawsuits.
Eventually the trust put the building on the market for a reported $3.4 million, and as part of the settlement between the parties, Jaime Maldonado subleased the bakery business to a third party.
Laura Hernandez, a former employee, took over the bakery and management of its 15 employees in January 2018. Daughter Jacqueline Hernandez says her mother has made money and taken care of the property since then, but in August the trust served her with an evacuation notice. She and other subtenants have fought the eviction but received final notice last week that they needed to vacate by Oct. 10, pending the sale of the building.
“She’s feeling pretty sad,” Jacqueline Hernandez says of her mother, “because she’ll have to leave a lot of people without work.”
While they look for a permanent space, they are moving into a commercial baking space in Dogpatch to bake bread for wholesale clients and take orders for Day of the Dead and Three King’s Day specialties.
“I’m saddened about the situation that La Victoria has gone through after supporting the neighborhood and being an anti-gentrifier,” Jaime Maldonado said. “I feel sad that the neighborhood is going in such an ... interesting direction.”