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Seven Houses, Six Sisters
The Alamo Square Painted Ladies are usually called the Six Sisters, and the photograph almost everybody takes contains seven houses. Six of them are the sisters: 710 to 720 Steiner Street, matched Queen Anne row houses put up by a speculative builder named Matthew Kavanaugh between 1892 and 1896. The seventh, the tall one anchoring the left edge of every frame, is 722 Steiner. That was Kavanaugh's own mansion, finished in 1892, wider and grander than anything he sold. He developed the row, kept the best corner for himself, and had six near-identical neighbors built to frame his view. It is why the group reads slightly off-balance in pictures and why nobody can say quite why. Count the houses from the left and stop at the first one whose bay window does not match its neighbor.
Battleship Gray
Nothing about the color scheme is Victorian. During the First and Second World Wars a great many San Francisco Victorians were painted battleship gray with war-surplus Navy paint, because it was cheap and there was a lot of it going spare. Color came back in 1963, when an artist named Butch Kardum began putting intense blues and greens on the outside of his own Italianate house and the neighbors copied him. The idea spread through the 1970s into a movement, and it acquired its name in 1978, from a book by Morley Baer, Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen. So the paint job that stands in for the whole city is younger than the moon landing. Compare the trim colors where two of these houses meet, because each owner chooses alone and the seams show.
Why They Are Still Standing
This block survives because of a 125-foot-wide street a mile east of it. When the fire of 1906 ran west across San Francisco, soldiers dynamited every building on the east side of Van Ness Avenue south of Filbert Street, and the sheer width of the avenue did the rest. That firebreak is the reason the Western Addition still has wooden houses from the 1890s while the districts east of it do not. Alamo Square then took in the people the fire had burned out. Tents went up across this hill, and because the ground falls away hard in every direction, the camp builders framed a wooden undercarriage beneath each tent to hold the floor level. Walk to the crest of the lawn and feel how steep it is, then picture a flat canvas street laid across it.
The Sixteen Thousand That Went
San Francisco built roughly 48,000 Victorian and Edwardian houses between 1849 and 1915, and about 16,000 of them were demolished. The heaviest losses were not the earthquake's. In the Western Addition redevelopment that followed the blight declaration of 1948 and accelerated under Justin Herman from 1959, some 2,500 Victorians came down, 883 businesses closed, and somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 residents were pushed out. The bulldozers stopped short of this block. Public anger at the second phase produced a program to preserve the Victorians west of Fillmore Street, and in July 1984 the city drew a historic district around these blocks, covering buildings from 1870 to 1929. Look east along Hayes Street to where wooden bay windows give way to concrete apartment slabs, because that line is the map of what went.
The Full House House Is Not Here
The opening credits of Full House show the cast picnicking on this lawn, which sends thousands of people a year to Steiner Street hunting for the Tanner house. It is not on this block. The exterior belonged to a Victorian at 1709 Broderick Street in Lower Pacific Heights, about a mile from here, and the show's creator, Jeff Franklin, bought it for roughly $4 million in 2016 and repainted the front door red to match the credits. Every scene shot inside that family's home was filmed on a Los Angeles soundstage. The row behind you has still done well out of the camera: an estimated 70 movies, television programs and advertisements. Stand where the lawn flattens below the crest and find the angle the title sequence used, because it sits lower than most people try.
The Square Came First
The park is older than every house facing it. The city set this hill aside in 1856, under Mayor James Van Ness, as a square of 12.7 acres, and the name predates the street grid: alamo is Spanish for cottonwood, and a lone cottonwood here marked a watering hole on the horseback trail between Mission Dolores and the Presidio. The water never left. Springs and seeps belonging to the Hayes Creek watershed still move under this slope, which is part of why the lawn misbehaved for a century. The rebuild that reopened in spring 2017 folded a 2008 bond restroom project into a 2012 bond water-conservation project, tore out the old irrigation lines and swapped the thirsty turf for native grasses that are never mown. Notice the patches nobody cuts, because that is the design and not neglect.
The Mansion Behind You
The strangest building on Alamo Square stands behind the crowd rather than in front of it. The William Westerfeld House at 1198 Fulton Street has 28 rooms, was drawn by the architect Henry Geilfuss in 1889 for a German-born confectioner, and cost $9,985 to build. After that it went sideways. Czarist Russian emigres turned the ground-floor ballroom into a nightclub called Dark Eyes in 1928. In 1948 the house was carved into 14 apartments, rented largely to Black jazz musicians. The filmmaker Kenneth Anger lived there in 1967 and shot Invocation of My Demon Brother inside it. It sold for $750,000 in 1986 and was restored. Turn your back on the Painted Ladies, look uphill toward Fulton and Scott, and find the tower with the witch's-hat roof.