Grand Tour of Old Homes Around San Francisco

When we turned the corner onto Sacramento Street, our guide Vickie pointed out five magnificent Victorian houses across the street and commented matter-of-factly, “These were the cheap homes in the area because they were on a side street.”

Cheap? These beauties--Italianates with graceful Gothic-inspired touches and Colonial Revivals with gable roofs and delicately crafted windows? One had been the Yugoslav Consulate.

“The one on the left,” Vickie said, “was sold last year.” She wasn’t sure, she said, but she thought it was for $750,000.

Any way you figure it, that’s a pretty good return on your money. Vickie said that these 1865 to 1895 “row houses on a grander scale” usually cost about $2,000 to $3,000 to build, although these may have run as much as $5,000 because their lots were a little wider than usual.

The middle class lived here in these “cheap” houses when Sacramento Street was a side street carrying the public transportation--the cable cars and livery stables with the congestion and noise.

The Upper Crust

We had turned off Franklin Street, leaving behind a legacy of magnificent Classical Revival, Georgian and Queen Anne mansions--the homes of the upper-middle class during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Where, I wondered, had the rich lived?

Most of them, I found out, only one block east of Franklin on Van Ness Avenue, now San Francisco’s auto row and U.S. 101, the principal route through the city.

In the late 1800s the city laid out Van Ness as a 125-foot-wide grand avenue for the most prosperous citizens. Ironically, the fashionable width of the street turned out to be the early death sentence for its enormous and imposing mansions.

After the 1906 earthquake, when devastating fires threatened to consume everything left standing, Van Ness Avenue was chosen as a fire break. All the buildings on the posh avenue were dynamited.

Heritage Walk

If you have a penchant for San Francisco’s Victorian and Edwardian architecture--and for a glimpse of some of the fascinating history that comes with it--this Heritage Walk through the eastern Pacific Heights neighborhood to ogle surviving pre-World War I mansions, family homes and smaller row houses (and a couple of noteworthy postwar samples) should satisfy the most voracious appetite.

The Foundation for San Francisco’s Architectural Heritage offers 2 1/2- to 3-hour guided walking tours every Sunday. For those who admire the period but don’t know the difference between a Mission Revival and a Tuscan Revival (but would like to know), it’s an educational jaunt.

For everyone, it provides a lively look at family life here during that opulent era. The pace is leisurely and not strenuous (the terrain is mostly flat, not up and down the famous San Francisco steep hills).

National Landmark

It begins at the museum owned by Heritage (and used by the organization as its office), the stately gray Haas-Lilienthal House at 2007 Franklin St. The 24-room 1886 Queen Anne/Stick-style house, with its gables, stylish round tower and intricate carvings is a landmark on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1906, after their home had survived the earthquake, the Haas family climbed to the roof of their three-story house and nervously watched the ravaging fire approaching from the east. It stopped one block west at the fire break on Van Ness Avenue, now the eastern border of Pacific Heights.

Only two generations of the family have lived in the house. In 1972 the heirs donated the house to Heritage.

The Haas-Lilienthal House is one of the two mansions in the area open to the public for guided tours. The other, three blocks away at 2090 Jackson St., is the red Arizona sandstone-faced mansion of William F. Whittier (he was the partner in a paint and lead company that was to become the W. P. Fuller Co.). It cost $150,000 to build in 1896.

So when compared to those “cheap” houses built for $5,000 on Sacramento Street, it’s obvious that some of the rich did live off Van Ness Avenue. The half-Queen Anne, half-Neo-Classical style house, unusual for San Francisco because it was built of stone, withstood the earthquake with little damage, probably because its brick walls were steel-reinforced.

The German government bought the mansion for a consulate in 1941, but the property was seized by the U.S. government when World War II was declared. It has been the property of the California Historical Society since 1956 and is used as its Northern California headquarters.

Exuberant Examples

Another two dozen exuberant examples of San Francisco’s rich turn-of-the-century heritage are scattered along the walk that meanders down a path covering no more than two miles. Although Pacific Heights covers about 130 blocks, from Van Ness to Presidio Avenue and from California to Union Street, the houses along the walk are considered some of the city’s finest Victorian survivors.

Two of the most palatial, built after the earthquake, are within a block of each other on Washington Street. The white concrete French baroque mansion at 2080, built in 1913 for Adolph Spreckels (the sugar baron’s son), takes up an area that once accommodated seven or eight homes. The architect was George Applegarth, who also designed another San Francisco classic treasure, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Personal Showplace

Sen. James Phelan built his great tile-roofed Italian Renaissance Revival house at 2150 Washington St. in 1915 as his personal showplace to entertain dignitaries visiting the Pan-Pacific Exposition. It’s for sale now; you can pick up the buff-colored brick beauty for a mere $4.2 million.

The mansions of Pacific Heights withstood the earthquake and fire but they did not survive a second misfortune. Land was at a premium so they were torn down in the name of progress and replaced with apartment buildings (some incredibly posh, like the 1925 Beaux Arts 10-story next-door neighbor of Spreckels, which has only one house-size apartment per floor).

Most of the survivors have been turned into rental units. One, the Atherton House at 1990 California St., holds about 15 apartments of varying sizes.

Variety of Uses

Or churches: The Golden Gate Church occupies the Classical Revival mansion at 1901 Franklin St., built in 1895 for a member of the Crocker (banking) family.

Or consulates: Back in the neighborhood is the German Consulate, which just bought the adjoining Georgian Revival Matson houses (shipping, cruise lines) at 1950-60 Jackson St. from the Swedish Consulate.

Or law offices: The beautiful, intricately decorated Queen Anne mansion at 1701 Franklin St., built in 1895 for Edward Coleman who owned the Idaho Mine in Grass Valley, had deteriorated into a card club before it was painstakingly restored and turned into law offices in 1975. So was its Georgian-style, red-brick next-door neighbor at 1735 Franklin St., built in 1904 for coffee merchant Edward Bransten (the “B” in MJB).

One of the most bizarre stops is to view a house in Lafayette Square that is no longer there (but a breathtaking view of San Francisco Bay is), once known as Holladay Heights. Samuel Holladay built an enormous Italianate house on the crest of this choice hill site in 1866, even though the city-owned four-block park wasn’t completed until the following year.

Thirteen years later he built the first astronomical observatory in the West on the hill. He has to be San Francisco’s most famous, richest and most successful squatter--the city didn’t raze the mansion and reclaim its land until 1936.

Place to Park

If you’re driving to the Pacific Heights Walking Tour, where street parking is at a premium, the best places are on the streets bounding Lafayette Square--Laguna, Gough, Washington and Sacramento. Public transportation along Van Ness Avenue is provided on Muni Bus Lines 42, 47 and 49 from the BART Civic Center Metro station.

The tour starts at 12:30 p.m. every Sunday (except Christmas and New Year’s Day) in the basement ballroom of the Haas-Lilienthal House at 2007 Franklin St., telephone (415) 441-3000. Reservations are not necessary. The cost is $3 for adults; $1 for children and senior citizens.

The separate guided tour inside the Haas-Lilienthal House costs an additional $3. These are usually every half hour on Sundays from 11 a.m to 4 p.m. and Wednesdays from noon to 4 p.m., and last about an hour.

The California Historical Society’s Whittier Mansion, 2090 Jackson St., telephone (415) 567-1848, is open from 1 to 5 p.m. on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, with guided tours on the hour from 1 to 4 p.m. Admission is $2 for adults, $1 for children, students and senior citizens.