At Eighth and Folsom in SoMa, the Prelinger Library is marking twenty-two years with an estimated 50,000 items — including, as of 2025, a World War I prosthetic leg.

On the corner of Eighth and Folsom in SoMa, behind 10-foot steel shelves navigated by 12-step rolling ladders, sits a World War I prosthetic leg. It arrived in 2025, donated by Tina Hittenberger, heir to a prosthetics company her family once ran on Market Street. The leg — handcrafted oak and hammered silver, well-worn — found its new home at the Prelinger Library, which has spent more than two decades collecting what other institutions may have discarded or failed to understand.

The library opened to the public in June 2004, after Megan Prelinger and her husband Rick leased the Eighth and Folsom warehouse space in late 2003. The timing was not accidental: the dot-com bust had softened warehouse rents across SoMa, and the Prelingers moved fast. A weeklong volunteer "barn raising" filled the shelves. Twenty-two years later, the collection has grown to an estimated 50,000 items — books, art, historical BART materials the library calls "BARTifacts," and thick gray boxes of newspaper clippings sorted by San Francisco neighborhood, organized by local archivist Norm Therkelson.

In the SoMa box, from the 1990s: a headline that reads "SOMA WARS," from the years when the neighborhood was grinding between its residential building boom and its nightclub scene. The clipping is still there. So is the library.

Mission Local profiled Megan Prelinger this week, in a piece by reporter Sarah Hopkins. Prelinger, now 58, was careful to push back on the nostalgia reading of her own project. "It's a museum of possibility that exists really to support the future," she said. "This is not a nostalgia project." That framing — the past as usable rather than preserved for its own sake — runs through the collection, from the BARTifacts to the prosthetic leg to Stacks Explorer, a remote-browsing tool built by programmer and librarian Devin Smith in 2017 and rebuilt after a 2020 reorganization, which lets disabled and remote researchers move visually through the shelves online. The Prelingers have also built a following through "Lost Landscapes of San Francisco," a film project assembling historic Bay Area footage from their archives.

SoMa has logged 25 eviction notices in the past 90 days, and 970 311 service requests in the past week alone. The block turns over. The Prelingers stay. The "SOMA WARS" box waits for the next researcher.