Artwork quilt unveiled at San Francisco dirt alley that was mistakenly bought at auction

In the fall of 2025, CBS News Bay Area first brought you the story of a Sunset couple that had the winning bid for a piece of property next to their home. They thought they were getting the duplex next door. Instead, they got a small patch of land known as Dirt Alley.

This story has many chapters, but it ended with a community celebration.

The final chapter in the story of Dirt Alley was written Wednesday night as they unveiled the tiles of artwork on the pavement.

“I’m very happy today,” JJ Hollingsworth said. “It’s just amazing that these artists that I’ve been working with and sold the alley to have come through with this incredible art.”

JJ Hollingsworth was the original property owner. She took out $25,000 from her retirement to pay for this parcel in a city auction. She thought she got a bargain for the duplex next door. When she found out it was actually the alley, the stress led to health problems and a lot of anxiety.

“I’m trying to forget, but I caused all this,” she said. “That’s what happened. I caused all this.”

Then came an email that would help her get out of the Dirt Alley nightmare. A group of friends from San Francisco was interested in buying this 82-foot-long alley.

“I know she was really stressed out when she first bought this and kind of didn’t know what she was going to do with it,” Theo Bleier said. “It’s really lucky. We were going to buy a different parcel, and we lost the auction. It was more than we wanted to spend. We felt really lucky the coincidence worked out, and we were able to help out JJ.”

The new owners then had the idea of laying an artwork quilt on the pavement and took submissions online.

“I think we had about one million people visit the website at least,” owner Patrick Hultquist said. “1.2 million, I think is the number of people that visited the website.”

The tiles with the most votes made it onto what is now called Notion way.

“Now, it’s not an official name of the street. It’s an unofficial name, but we did get an official-looking sign,” he said.

JJ Hollingsworth, who is a music composer, wrote a ballad called Notion Way for the special occasion. What started as a horrible mistake ended up bringing the community together.

“It’s really beautiful,” neighbors Tom Goslinga & Nesha Niezrecki said. “It’s how culture gets created in a lot of ways. People kind of being creative with an interesting situation. It’s really cool.”

While Hollingsworth is grateful for how this story ended, she says she learned a valuable lesson from this whole experience.

“Read the fine print and ask a lot of questions,” she said.