Think of all the great movies that have been made in San Francisco: there was that wonderful 1950 Film Noir Dead on Arrival made before Alfred Hitchcock dicovered SF, declared it 'the Paris of America' and made his most San Franciscan movie,Vertigo, in 1958.. In the 70's we got Dirty Harry (1971) celebrating the city's underworld... and where else could they have filmed the famous car chase in Bullitt (1968) but up and down the hilly streets of the City by the Bay?

I could go on at length, but what is it in these movies that in each case most alerts the devout Friscophile to where it is set? Is it the Bridge? the wonderfully Freudian Coit Tower? the cable cars? the Palace of Fine Arts (all of which appear in Vertigo)? that strange elongated pyramid, the Transam Building that keeps appearing in the background of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)... or is it the wonderful old houses?

One of the special joys of San Francisco is the ornate wooden Victorian buildings with the bay windows. San Franciscans love them too - they are as much a part of the city's image as the Golden Gate Bridge. Their survival in such abundance is a miracle: apart from earthquakes they are virtually all wood and because the land they were built on was sold by land sharks you can barely see daylight between them.

Fires are serious business in San Francisco. Next to car horns (known locally as 'Mexican doorbells') fire engine sirens are the most pervasive sound in the city at night.

I am indebted to Rand Richards book Historic San Francisco: A Concise History and Guide (Heritage House 1999) for the following information. Richards points out that as with the Queen that gave the period her name;
The heyday of the Victorians ended as the nineteenth century came to a close. The twentieth century has not been kind to these noble structures. The 1906 disaster razed San Francisco's downtown, leveled the grand Victorian mansions of Nob Hill and Van Ness Avenue, and destroyed virtually all of the abundant commercial Victorian office buildings that once lined the streets of The City's financial district.

Arguably the best was lost and much of what remains were the mass-produced single-family homes of the middle class. Richards estimates that only about one-half of The City's approximately fifteen thousand remaining Victorians are still unaltered. As soon as the Victorian era ended it fell from grace and out of fashion. Many houses were "modernised" beyond recognition or suffered asbestos shingles, roll-a-brick, stucco, or other fireproof materials to reduce fire insurance.
It was only in the 1960s that this modernizing trend came to an end, and property owners and the public experienced a newfound appreciation for these overdressed "painted ladies." During the past twenty years, some of the previously modernized Victorians have been painstakingly restored to their former appearance.

And it was the narrow building lots that gave San Francisco's historic buildings their distinctive appearance;
Such a small, narrow lot size forced architects and carpenters to be creative in their designs and ornamentation. One early distinctive feature that emerged was the bay window, which gave a building not only more floor space but also increased the available light and ventilation - important considerations in houses occupying the width of their lots and standing shoulder-to-shoulder. The bay window also provided additional room for exterior decoration. The builders fully utilized this space as well as that on the rest of the facade, adding embellishments as their imaginations dictated. One could also speculate that the profusion of decoration resulted from a desire to compensate for the small lot size.

Cottage/Carpenter Gothic	Italianate	Stick Style

Queen Anne

The Four Periods

The surviving houses, according to Richards, can basically be placed into one of four periods, each with its own prevailing style, which he illustrates with these four examples. Although some houses are difficult to categorize since builders frequently mixed elements of different periods depending on what materials and designs they had available. Houses sporting decorations from more than one style also prevailed during times of transition from one period to the next. Notwithstanding, basically Richards' four periods are: Cottage Style/Carpenter Gothic - - - - 1850's to 1860's Italianate - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1870's Stick - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -1880's Queen Anne - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 1890's

As he says many of the buildings contain combinations of these styles and others exemplify them to a greater or lesser extent. See if you can classify my examples, drawn exclusively from the Mission District, and spot the cunningly concealed example that isn't one at all (but which I still like).

Continue on the unauthorised San Francisco tour:

(1) Home - (2)Sanfrancisco.com - (3) Luver and Me - (4)Visit the Tenderloin
(5) Peoples' Park - (6) Land's End Beach - (7) People's Park Today - (8) The Innocent Arrives
(9) The Mural Culture - (10) My exhibitions in SF - (11) The Battle for San Francisco
(12) Victorian Architecture - (13) Return to Travel Page