 Already, good evening. What we want to do is take you on a trip through time without having to use a time machine. So we won't be having to charge you $10,000 a piece. Now, 100 years ago, when you went to a Nickelodeon on Market Street, very often you would see this very slide shown. Because women, at this time, were wearing huge hats. And they put all kinds of things on them, such as birds and feathers, et cetera. And many times, you could not see around a woman's hat. So obviously, she had to remove it. What I want to do is take you architecturally through some of San Francisco's history so that you can walk out and look at the front of your house from the sidewalk and pretty well put it in a decade. And that'll be the beginning. Then as we get near the middle and the end of the lecture, we'll get into the real nitty-gritty how-to. But I want to give you, it's basically architectural history 101 in an hour period. And here's the lady who basically started it all for us all in our love of Victorians. This is herself in her castle in Balmoral, Scotland. And I always like to show a photo of her because she had nine children and I had nine children. But that's where the semblance ends. She had lots of money and I don't have lots of money. But here she is, graining from 1837 to 1901. So if your house is built in that time, it doesn't matter what style it is. What matters is that it was built between 1837 and 1901. Then you've got yourself a Victorian. If it was built from the time after she died in January of 1901 up to about 1910, then you've got yourself an Edwardian when King Edward came. So that's the most, if you don't take anything else out of this lecture, take that out. Because many people say, oh, well, it's a Victorian because it has so-and-so style, but it's built in 1971. It's a Neo-Victorian. This is San Francisco in 1856. And I am not showing this slide because these people are being hanged. I'm showing this slide to show you what downtown San Francisco looked like. It's a far cry from what she looks like now. And the skyscrapers of this time were maybe four stories high. If you have a chance someday when you go up to the San Francisco history room, just before you walk into the room on your right is a huge map of San Francisco in 1854 with many buildings etched around the edge of it. And you can look at those and say, that's what San Francisco, in my mind anyway, should look like, not the way it looks right now. What's happening here is San Francisco was a rough and ready town. And there was a murder every eight minutes in San Francisco in the 1850s. So things have not changed a heck of a lot. And so two committees were formed in 1851, 1856, the vigilance committees. And the way they were different from something that you might read about in a Wild Western novel is the fact that when both of them had accomplished what they wanted to accomplish, which was to chase off the nasties, they were businessmen, so they disbanded. And they just started keeping going the town again, especially in 1856. They hanged four guys and deported 200 to New York City, which may be what's wrong with New York City now, but we don't know. One of the first, shall we say, real estate developers in San Francisco was a man who built very small houses up in Pacific Heights with little fences like this. And this is the only one left. This is the one on Jackson Street. What he did is he was a jeweler, and we think that that's why he built such little tiny houses. And basically they were starter houses for people. So if you're up on Jackson Street near Webster and Buchanan, you might see this little house with the wonderful little fence. But it also gives you an idea of what San Francisco looked like with fences like this, iron fences, even up until World War II, a lot of people had iron fences around their property. But what happened to most of those was 1898, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II. The army basically came through San Francisco and other cities in the nation, and just said, give me your fence or your firstborn kid. And it was much easier to give them the fence, and it was taken away and turned into marvelous things like bullets and bombs. But this is why you do not see a lot of iron fencing left in San Francisco as you might when you go to New Orleans. Now, this is the first real architecture that starts in San Francisco, and this basically starts in the late 1850s and runs about till 1875. It's the flat-fronted Italianate. And you can say, okay, flat-fronted, right, no base. What's this Italianate stuff? Well, back in the Renaissance in Italy, they loved building huge buildings that were two or three stories high with great windows so that the light would come in and little decorations over the windows. These little guys up here call pediments. And that was a style that was very, very popular at that time, and there would be rows and rows of these buildings, and usually you would look down a long vista or view and at the end would be a fountain, or maybe you'd see a mountain or a tree would end the view. So when San Franciscan started building these flat-fronted ones, they were called Italianate, referring back to the Italian Renaissance. Now, lots of times when they built these, the architect or the contractor builder, or the owner builder, wanted to keep up a facade that was elegant. So he might have a window, as he does here, but the one on the left might have fronted on a restroom where you would not want a window, so they would just fill it in with boards but keep the idea of carrying the little pediments, a little bracket salon. And this was a nice way of when you look at the building, it gives you a sense of rhythm and it also gives you a sense of balance. So this is up till about 1875. Then in 1875, basically, people realized, wait a minute, San Francisco has two seasons, fog and not so much fog. So what you wanna do, you wanna scoop light in your house, especially since the Spaniards had laid out the basic lot in San Francisco, 25 feet wide, 100 feet deep. So they started to build bay windows. This is a house built in 1876. It's on our city guides tour of San Francisco Victorians. And it's a wonderful house in the front door, there's a big bee etched into the door and when you go in, there are glass doors that have the bee and there have only been three owners since 1876 and fortunately all their surnames have begun with bee so they have not had to change anything. The big building material in San Francisco, of course, is redwood. There were trees everywhere. We could cut them down. We can make houses. It was very difficult to get stone into San Francisco, it was very expensive. Even if you went up to Lake Tahoe and found yourself a nice piece of granite, by the time you had rolled it down, it probably would have gotten stuck in Sacramento. Then you would have had to barge it down. It was too expensive. So people wanted to make their houses look like stone. Now, immediately the first thing that gives you that clue is, these little guys here, these little white guys coming down, these are called coins, Q-U-O-I-N-S. If you play Scrabble, I hardly recommend this word, especially on the triple word score. But what these were, again, we're looking back to the Italian Renaissance. And a man at that time realized that many times buildings because of rain and because of pollution at that time, sides of buildings where the two corners came together would fall apart. So he invented these coins, which are blocks of stone. And then the water comes and erodes the little blocks. Everything's fine. So when they made a building look like stone, they put the coins in. Then they had a man come along who would paint the building stone color and he would put sand in it. And lola, if you look at it from the street, it looks like stone. The people that have painted it now, of course, have not followed that. They haven't even followed the proper paint style of the times, but basically in the 1870s, people in the beginning of the 1870s and pretty much up to the end of that decade were painting their houses in earth tones because that's the only kind of paint there was. Was done from coal bolt, which came from the earth and all kinds of dyes, such as Phoenician dyes which come from seashells and that type of thing. This is an 1878 house and somebody's had a little bit more money here to play with and so you can see the bays, but you can also see the wonderful roof line. They've done a man-sard roof, the little scooped up roof here, which was invented in France and the reason it was invented is because one of the Louis had decided that he needed more money because he needed to buy more wigs and jewelry and he started taxing windows. And what you could do with this kind of a scooped roof is you could put in very small porthole windows and still get light into the building and then you wouldn't have to pay the tax on it. So San Franciscans who started building Victorians in the 1870s liked this idea and started using it. This house is also up in Pacific Heights. Now one thing you might look for in your driveway is this kind of marking here. And that tells you that there used to be a stable somewhere on your property. This is the protective device for a horse who's coming down out of the stable to the street so that he will not slip or she will not slip. So if you see this, you know that at one time there was a stable, you may now, your garage may have been the stable or they may have torn it down and built a garage. The car craze hit San Francisco approximately 1910 and everybody went totally berserk and everybody had to have a car. So this is what you did. You ousted your horse and you bought a car. If you had a lot of money, you built a stable like this for your horses. And many times, especially up on Knob Hill, especially the Stanford's, the stable was almost as good looking as the ballroom. And it proved that you had the money to spend. This is a mahogany stable. And I don't know if the horses care, but at least they have good bedding and that's all horses care about. But they're well kept. There were a couple of houses in San Francisco and a couple of houses that were in the East Bay where the stable was larger than the house. And here's a couple of horses. Mostly there would have been these type of horses, what we call draft horses, to pull the wagons, to pull the cargo freight wagons to get freight from wherever into parts of San Francisco. Now, when you look at your house, your house may be one year and your neighbors may be another like this. This is a mixed group here. Here we have an 1880s house and you can always tell an 1880s house by the square bay. And here's another 1880s house next door. But what happened to this guy? What happened to this guy was Johns Moundsville asbestos tile salesman hit San Francisco approximately April 22nd of 1906 and sat in people's parlors and said, our tile is virtually fireproof. And people said, well, we wanna avoid whatever happened downtown. Let's slap it on the houses. Of course, now they found out that asbestos is not good for you. And Johns Moundsville has gone into what, chapter 11, which is fine with me. On the right, you have an 1880s, but you'll notice the roof line. Somebody's taken some, had some extra money and took a little care and built something extra. So many times you'll find houses of this different period or the same period together or what they have been called what our illustrious city guide founder, Judith Lynch, calls misguided improvements, what the old house journal calls remudelments. And that's what happens over there. Many times as you look at your house, you'll see little details. This is a house on Central Street, such as this Palladian window. Palladio was a very famous Italian architect in the middle 1500s. And he invented this style of a wonderful arched window flanked by two rectangular windows. And as you go through San Francisco, you will see different kinds of these windows. You'll see it's basically a Palladian window, but somebody's played a little bit with it. And this is a particularly nice one because they've put the little guys in here, these little leaded, what we call mullioned windows, in to give it a little extra treat. And it's a very nice painting job that they've done on this house too. Now you may find in the 1880s also that people started to experiment even more with housing. This is a house on Sutter Street. It's now been painted yellow. It's by the old Cala up from Venice. And of course the old Cala's been torn down and they're building something huge up there. But it has what is called a Belvedere, which is an Italian word meaning a good view. So somebody on a day like today when it's hot and muggy, could walk out into the Belvedere and have a breeze blow on them and feel cool. It was a nice thing. There's only two houses left in the city with these. This one in one out near Petrero. And it's basically a very large loss. I think that most of those have been torn down. This is that same house looking at it from another angle. It was built by a real estate agent, Theodore Payne, in 1882. And he was very, very blessed. He was getting ready to put out his Christmas cards and he wanted the photographer to photograph the house. Well, the day that the photographer came to photograph the house, which was in late November to make the Christmas cards, we had the largest snowstorm ever known to San Francisco, four inches of snow. So sometime if you have a chance, if you happen to be at the California Historical Society Library, which is open on Wednesdays to the public, you can see his invitation with the photograph and the snow is falling. It's very effective. He had a little house next door for the servants. He didn't even have to worry about them being in the same house. So there's a little connector guy here for them to run back and forth and up and down. Servants were considered to be expendable, shall we say. And anybody could afford a servant. It didn't matter how poor you were, you always had at least one servant. And if a servant got very ill and died, well, you just went out to the labor market and got yourself another one. But many times you may find in your house a very small room down in what is now your garage or your basement and it will just be a room with no window or anything. And that's probably your servant's quarters. And here's a little cast iron fence that belongs to this house. You can see the wonderful design that the work people, well, they would have been work men then, in the casting and the wonderful patterns looking like spirals and waves and that type of thing. This is a house you probably are familiar with. It's on Devisadero in the 500 block up from Fell. It's a famous house because it has a very famous architect, Samuel Newsom. And you say, who the heck is Samuel Newsom? Well, he is the architect of the wonderful house up in Eureka, which I hope is still up there, the Carson Mansion. And that was like his Magnus Opus. Well, this was a house that he began to build in 1889 and was finished in late 1889. And you can see that it's all covered in shingles. The shingle style starts to become very popular in the 1890s in San Francisco, especially these kind with a little, what we call fish scales. They look like fish scales. And what the Victorians were trying to pick up is the fact that light will play across anything. And if you can break the light up with this type of a shingle, you've got a wonderful thing going. And here's kind of a pseudo-Belvedere. It's not really big enough for anybody probably to walk out. But the Newsoms were very much known for exuberant architecture. And if you've seen the Carson Mansion, you know that. They did a lot of building in San Francisco and a lot of building in LA. And of course, most of the ones in LA are now gone and they're been turned into high-rises. This now in the bottom has a little Arab deli in it. So you just never know what's gonna show up in a Victorian. And as the 1880s waned and the 1890s started, there became almost an anticipation about the turn of the century coming. Very much like we are beginning to feel here in 92 about what's going to happen in 2000. What's going to happen? And men were beginning to get together and plan all kinds of real estate schemes. They're beginning to plan what we would do with the city of San Francisco to make her even better and bigger. This gives you an idea of what a man who was going to a meeting at night would dress up, what he would wear. And this would be a kind of a meeting house for him. This would have been downtown. It was called the Merchants Exchange Building. Later on, it was to become a very famous spot where they raised a lot of the money for the 1915 World's Fair. So at the very end of that 1880s period and just looking into 1890, a group of men got together called the Real Estate Associates. And they might have built your house. They built over a thousand houses in San Francisco. All of them have the same floor plans. All of them have the same nule posts. But what they did do is they gave them different what we call cornice lines, the roof line here. This one has what's called a French cap and this one is looking back to almost a Dutch colonial look to it. These houses are these particular set. This particular set is on Octavia, just up from Bush Street. So you might live in tract housing, even though many of us think the tract housing is 1940s or 50s, it's back then too. And this is a close up of the corner house of that tract housing, which is a little larger, a little roomier, just very much like they do tract housing now. This house is always a wonderment to me because it's on the corner of Bush and, pardon me, Laguna. And the cars go by there 80 miles an hour. They rent the upstairs flat for $1,500 a month and the downstairs flat for $1,200 a month. And I don't know how the people survive in it. Another set of housing built in the beginning of that change of between 1889 and 1890 was a set out on Broderick by two fellows, Mr. Kiernan and Mr. Cranston. And they got together and built all kinds of houses, especially near Golden Gate Park. And you can see that they're trying to give people a little different look to their houses so they're a little more individual, not like the New Yorker cartoon of, I think, 1955 where all the houses look like little boxes and the men are trying to figure out whose house is whose to go into. This is an 1890s house on Baker Street. The, you can see the shingle work, this fish scales, and then it's been kind of abstracted. And up here we have plaster work. In the early 1890s, plasterers found out how to make plaster that would last, plaster that would not fall off. Before this time in the 1880s, a man named John Anderson had started to build houses. And you can always tell a John Anderson house because it has two little wreaths up above the front door. And those little wreaths are made out of sawdust. So many times you will see one wreath intact that hasn't been exposed too badly to the weather. And the other one is just a circle. It's a different color on the paint. The biggest example of that is if you ever come down from 30th and church on the J church line and you cut, go into the cut there. And just as you're starting to come around the corner to see the view of the city, on your right is a John Anderson house that has one wreath intact and the other one not. This gives you an idea of what was going on in the 1890s and how people wanted their houses laid out where they wanted to put people, how they wanted to lay out bedrooms, libraries. This is a wonderful book called American Shelter. And what the fellow did that wrote it is he's done this with every kind of style that you can think of, going back to Adobe's and very early housing and then going clear up till I think 1962 of how a house is put together. And it's a very helpful book if you say to yourself, okay, this is how my house is laid out. And then you can flip through the book and look at the floor plans and you can pretty well get yourself an idea again of time. In the 1890s, besides the real estate associates and Mr. Cranston, there was a group of fellows called the Hinkel brothers. There was Charles, there were five of them, Charles and Henry and all these guys. And if you have a Hinkel house, you can pretty well tell it by these little buttons that are on here, what we call buttons and they called them buttons. So if you go out on your sidewalk, look up at your house and see buttons, you've got a Hinkel house. They ran in price, they were rather pricey for the time, ran in price from $7,000 to $10,000 apiece, which sounds wonderful to us. But to a person of this time period, it was very difficult. The average man was making approximately $0.75 a day. The average woman was making $0.35 a day. And when you built a house, you had to pay for the first half while it was being constructed and the last half you had to pay as soon as the last nail was nailed into the house. You may have heard your mothers or your grandmothers or your fathers or whomever discuss a slogan called cash on the barrel head. That's where this comes from. The owner would come in just as the last nail was being driven into the house. There would be a barrel of nails out in the front and he would lay his last cash payment down. And that's how it was until a man named Fernando Nelson came along who built 4,000 houses in San Francisco from approximately 1885 to World War II. He began to what they call carry papers. He would build a $7,000 house. He would have somebody make a down payment with him. He would then carry half the papers himself and put the other half with the Germanic Bank. And if you are researching, the archives room has one of his cash books that he used to carry in his hip pocket. They've got a duplicate up there. And it's wonderful because you see him, it'll have the address and you'll see him $25 a week, $25 a month, whatever. Some people he carries for years in that book. And some of them you can tell they've gone through hard times because they're down to making $5 installment payments. And he never foreclosed on anyone. So you might have a Fernando Nelson house and if you do, when I tell you how to find out if you do, then you can go up to the archives room and say, hey, I wanna look at Fernando's notebook and you might be in there. Now one of the things about 1890, they get even more exuberant here. We have a balcony. If you wanted to go out and practice arias from Tosca, this would be the place to do it. And again, you can see that they're using the plaster work and it's great little balcony that you can go out and do whatever, throw water balloons if you were a kid or whatever. And this house again is near Baker Street. And then one of the things you could do is be really playful with plaster. Can you see a face? See his mustache? There's his nose. We think it's Neptune. And this house is up on, it's near Clay. It's on, oh, Drat. Just down from Lafayette Park. Can't think of the street, but you'll see it there. And if you're sometime wandering through things in the archives in the San Francisco history room, if you see any photographs of the fire and earthquake and people hanging out in Lafayette Park, you'll see this house since it was built in 1889. You'll see it in the photographs. One of the things to do is look at doors, look at the little detail work. This is a door from approximately 1892 when they were beginning to use a lot of what they called wood graining. Then you may look at your house or look at your door and you think, okay, this is mahogany. But then if you look at it, you will notice that it's probably redwood or oak and then a man who was called a grainer would come in and he would stain the door, the proper color. Then he would take feathers and combs and make all kinds of wonderful flares and radials which look like the regular wood, but are not. This door itself is oak, but it was stained to look mahogany. Another great invention that came at this time was plate glass. San Francisco was not making plate glass until the late teens, but the plate glass that came into San Francisco, especially this rounded plate glass, came from Belgium. And then there were men who were working in Belgium in glass and then there began to be problems in Europe in the 1890s and they started coming to America and they eventually came to San Francisco and we learned how to make sheet glass and plate glass. But up till about 1910 or so, if you wanted to get any sort of plate glass, it had to come from Belgium. If you wanted really good art glass or stained glass, you had to go to France. And again, real estate developers. This is out in the Crocker Amazon if you live out there. This was a school that was to be built and what they started to do was make what we call planned communities. A lot of them even have had covenants in them. In fact, St. Francis Wood has a covenant in it that you cannot build a saloon in the middle of St. Francis Wood, which is a pretty good idea. But there were also covenants that were not good that were against Native Americans, against Black people and those were not good. But I like the idea of not a saloon in the middle of St. Francis Wood. Wooden quite fit. Inside your house, especially if it was built in the 1890s, you might have a fire back in your fireplace, which would be with a pattern of like this, which is kind of a Greek urn or an Aladdin's lamp. You can look at that and you can say 90s. Many fireplaces that you have in your houses have been really done a number on. They started out burning wood and then a lot of them switched to coal and then they were switched to gas. So sometimes you may have pipes coming out over here and a little place for coal over here and you may say, what's going on? Well, that's what's happened. People tried to modernize. You might also find in your bathrooms a very nice French tile. This is very much in the 1890s too. Bringing in tiles that say somebody wants to spend a certain amount of money on a house and they wanna have something a little extra. So you bring something from France or you bring something from Germany and that makes your house, oh, shall we say a little more, whatever, more kosher shall we say? It makes it a little more European. Let's people know that you know your history, that you know your art. Now a big effector of architecture is world's fairs. We are very much influenced by television. If we see something on television, new clothes or whatever, we may wanna try it out or if we see it in the newspaper. People at this time didn't have radio yet and so you would go to world's fairs. That's where you found out everything. Well in San Francisco we've had three world's fairs and the first one was in 1894 in Golden Gate Park. And this is where if you were a little girl, this is what you would wear to go to the fair and this vase may look familiar to you. It's out in the Legion of Honor, which is of course closed now for a couple years. It's the Gustav Doré vase which he had made for the 1876 World's Fair, which celebrated 200 years of America and he called it something like the grape industry or something but if you've ever gotten a chance to look at it, it's entirely covered in bugs and drunken people. It's a very interesting concept. Now you might have gone down to the fair and been one of those people that wanted one of the 700,000 tamales that were sold during the run of the fair and you might have liked this little house with the little shingles and you might have taken this idea away and if you were an owner builder or you might have talked to your architect and you might have come up with something that looked a little like this because this is where you saw everything new. Here's the site of the fair. If you have trouble placing it, it was in something called Concert Valley, which is basically now where the de Young and the Academy and the band shell are. A lot of people think the band shell's from 1894. It's not, it was built in 1898 by the Spreckles. But the man that of course was in charge of this fair was John McLaren who was a tiny, tiny Scotsman and gardener for 45 years and he basically was very upset about the fair and when it was over, he went through and dynamited anything he could dynamite and basically literally put the sand dunes back where they were, didn't want his park upset. This is a view looking down. That's the administration building over here by A. Page Brown who becomes a very famous architect in San Francisco. This fair is basically an outcropping of the Chicago 1893 fair. Michael Harry de Young who was the editor of the Chronicle had gone to the fair and said, all right, Chicago has a fair, we can have a fair and we will have it in midwinter and we will open it on January 1st. Well, it didn't quite happen because half of the exhibits came from the East Coast and there was a snowstorm in Denver so the fair did not open until January 20th but you can imagine walking down this, picking up new ideas, going into the mechanics building, the arts building and learning about all this new technology that was coming and one of the big things was electricity. Electricity had come to San Francisco in 1874 but it had only been put in businesses and nobody had thought about, hey, we could put this in our house and we could do all kinds of things with it. So the tower here, you could go up to this level here and there was a cafe up there, a restaurant called the Buena Vista and you could eat your lunch up there and look out over the whole city through the Golden Gate Straits, must have been quite the thing and mull over what you were going to do with your house when you got home, how you were going to build it and here's electricity. You can imagine people who have not been exposed to electricity walking on the fairgrounds at night and seeing these wonderful, wonderful buildings just totally illuminated. It must have been amazing for people coming from basically a candle or gas light culture to see this. So people went away from that fair thinking about what they would do with the houses, how they would build their houses and how they would protect their houses. You may have one of these out in the front of your house, if you do, you're lucky. This is the old fire hydrants. You notice the knob on top. That's for when the horses come up with the fire engine, horses hate fire so you tie them down. You throw an asbestos blanket over their backs and you work on the fire. After the small problem of 1906 of April, they built what they called an auxiliary water system. So you may have one of these guys out. If that system fails of the first fire hydrant, this will come along. There are two reservoirs. You will see these all over town and you can remember where the reservoirs are. This has a blue top, what they call a bonnet and you can remember that the reservoir is on Knob Hill. You can remember the blue bloods and if it's got a red top, you can remember that the reservoir is up in the Haight Ashbury and you can remember that from the quote radicals of the 60s. So when you went away from the fair and you built your house, maybe you wanted to have something a little different which these people definitely did. They wanted to have what we call a bracket or a console which is basically something that looks like it's holding something up but it isn't. It's decorative and we have gone to the full decoration here. We have a mermaid holding up or looking like she's holding up the house. This kind of thing again is approximately 1890s and this is San Francisco. This is when you went downtown to buy new things for your house to go to the city of Paris, to go to the White House and walk by Lottice Fountain and check out what was going on. You can see that traffic was not controlled very, very well. Traffic control really didn't come in till about 1909. In fact, people were not even issued licenses, traffic licenses, car licenses until about 1910 and that was all over the nation. In fact, Sears Roebuck put a book out in 1908 called How to Drive an Automobile. And in the back area of your house, you might have a staircase like this. If you have one of these staircases in the back of your house, you can be pretty sure it's a servant's staircase. It's not finished off or if you have an outbuilding, which some people do, where there was a factory going on in the outbuilding, this would have been the worker's staircase. Heaven forbid that we should coddle a worker or a servant. You just, they were basically not even taken as good care of as a horse would have been. But there were people that were exceptions that took good care of their servants. But basically, if you were a worker or a servant at the time, this is what you dealt with. You might find flooring like this in one of your, in the outbuildings of your house or in the back of your house. Again, this would be either a servant's area or a factory type setting. And this came from this factory, the California NetMeat Factory. If you know where 101 California is, this is what was here before that. This is Glen Park in 1910 in the rain, giving you an idea of that San Francisco is always moving out. People are always moving west. Basically, San Francisco started in Rincon Hill, which is downtown where you see the big union oil clock and just started spreading, spreading, spreading. And it's out to Glen Park by 1910. And you can see that there's, somebody is very fortunate has an automobile. There's another one. And you can see that the automobile craze is really taking hold. But it also gives you a feeling of the cityscape or the streetscape of that time of walking down. And if we read about people being more relaxed, and I think one of the reasons they were more relaxed is you, if you wanna look at a building, you don't have to crane your neck and fall over backwards to see the top of it. You can actually find it. And this is what was being built in San Francisco from approximately 1901 to about 1907. It's looking like a Victorian, but it's simpler and it's the Edwardian. This huge triangular shape called a pediment, a little baby one there, and then a couple of windows. And if you've got a house that looks like this, when you look up over your door, you're relatively sure that it's between 1901 and 1907. And then in 1910, the Mission Revival craze hit. What had happened is San Francisco and LA and the whole state of California in 1893 had sent this wonderful California building to the Chicago World's Fair. And it looked like a mission. And it really grabbed people's imagination. And they started building banks and all kinds of things looking like the missions. And they called it the Mission Revival style. Well, it starts coming back and it finally comes back into San Francisco about 1910. And the big thing is you're supposed to have big windows and tiles and a little place for your mission bell up there, of course. But theirs is either fallen off or they never got one. But what's funny is that this building from here up is very Mission Revival, but from here down, it's very 1890s. So it looks like someone decided, hey, let's get modern and let's go with the Mission Revival style. And one of the things you might find inside your house is a staircase like this with the Spanish or Mexican tiles. And that'll give you a clue too that's probably between 1910 and 1930 because that was a big craze then to get these tiles from wherever you might do them or have a San Francisco artist make them. Now, what's happened to this house? This house started out probably about 1902, happy, wood. And then someone in 1911 or so decided, hey, we're gonna Mission Revive this house or as I call it, Mission Revival because they put the little tiles on and then they decided to be fancy and do the stucco work here. They've kind of left the window and down here, well, I'm talking about down there, but to me, if I were a house and somebody did this to me, I'd be rather embarrassed. This is another house. This is what period is this house originally? 80s, yeah, Square Bay. But someone didn't like the Square Bay. They left the Square Bay, they stuccoed it, they ripped out the cornice line here and added, ta-da, tiles. Hey, we are up to date. This is out in Glen Perk. Then if you had a house that was built in the 1880s and you liked the new shingle style that really hit with Julia Morgan and the people working in Berkeley, Bernard Maybeck, then you threw a few shingles up on top there and made a penthouse. And again, another as the Old House Journal calls them remodelments. But you might find this in your house. In fact, as you look at your house, you may have to visually strip away the stucco, strip away whatever and say, okay, what's the basic shape and how long has it been here? Another craze that hit approximately 1916 was this Tudor style or Elizabethan style. And there are not too many of these in the city. This one's out on Golden Gate, I think it is. But you might find one of these is quote half timbered guys, which really isn't. This house was built in 1915 by Willis Polk, extremely famous architect in San Francisco, one of the very few with chimney pots. You might have chimney pots, which looks back to England if you've been to England and Europe and seen these chimney pots, especially with storks nesting on. This house has a wonderful history to it. It's up on California Street. It was to be built for two different sisters and it was to be two mirror images. And the one sister married and said she was gonna go to Berlin game. So the other sister said, well, Willis just finished the house off. If you get a chance, drive by it. It's on California near Laguna. And there's an arch that goes halfway up and ends, which would have normally hit the other side. So somebody, the woman that did build, had a sense of humor. Now the next world's fair was 1915. Everybody flocked to it. Again, electricity was here. This was where to come and see all the new architecture, see what was going on. It was basically color controlled. Everything on the fair was in, basically the color orange taken to its heaviest degree, which becomes brown and to its lightest degree, which becomes beige. So the whole fair was color coordinated and that made people start to think about color coordinating interiors of houses and exteriors of houses. Of course, you can see the Golden Gate Straits, Sands the Bridge, and here it was at night. And again, the electricity is here, but it's now indirect. It's hidden. And that started to give people ideas about, well, we've got these little coves at the top of our, our walls, these little like little things that hang out. We could put some electric lights in there and hide them because the big thing in the 1890s, if you had electricity was you showed off your bare bulbs. I mean, people went in and said, wow, we've got bare bulbs. If you had a chance before the Whittier Mansion was sold, the California Historical Society, that's the main thing you saw when you walked in there is those bare bulbs hanging out. And Mr. Whittier was proud of them. Here again is the Tower of Jewels, which was designed by the architectural firm of Coray and Hastings, who did the Waldorf Historia and all kinds of hotels in New York. It was 435 feet tall, and you can imagine this thing at night all lit. Four times during the fair, they did what they called burning the tower. They walked the entire grounds, told everybody between seven and 715, we're gonna shut the lights off in the fair. You must stand still. And we're talking like 750,000 people on the grounds. And then what they did for 15 minutes is they, no lights were on except the tower and they only shone red lights on the tower and then they read poetry about San Francisco coming back from the fire. It was very moving. People who went to this fair remember that. Now, horses suddenly have become passe. You will obviously have to have a garage so you're gonna convert your stable. You're going to build all kinds of places to put cars. This is on Fell Street near Devisadero. It was built in 1906 as a stable for 70 horses. But by 1908, he had seen the light and he had converted to cars. So garages become something that might be in your backyard or might be next door to you where you would just leave your car very much as you would leave your horse in a livery stable. And this is just a detail of that particular building. But see now instead of using plaster, they're beginning to use concrete. And then if you have, if you're in a building built, though just past the World's Fair up to about the 30s, you might be in a big apartment building such as these out near the beach. And this was the style that became popular. Again, kind of a mission revival up here. And then this very Italianate looking apartment. Okay, now we'll get down to the nitty gritty. Now you know the architecture. First thing you do is you go between 830 and 430 to 420 Mason Street to the water company. This is the water company. Now this is not what they look like. It's a very bland building. It's between Geary and Post. And you walk in the front door and you walk straight to the back where it says closed accounts and you say to the person, I want to see the original turn on papers for 100 McAllister or whatever. And they will say, okay. And then they will go back in the vault and they will bring you out a piece of paper from the Spring Valley Water Company, which will be folded in threes. And you will open it up and down at the bottom will be a date. August the 28th, 1892 and a signature. So you write the date down. That's when the water was turned on. That's when the lifeblood of the house begins. That's basically the birthday of your house. And then the signature is either your owner, your builder, your architect, or in a couple I found it was the cook. But usually 85% of the time it's your owner, your builder or your architect or maybe your contractor. Okay, that's important. Then if you're really interested then read the rest of it because it tells you how many families were there. It tells you if there was a horse or a cow in the back because horses and cows use water. It tells you if there was irrigation. So you know you had a lawn in the back or the front. It tells you how many square feet per floor. And then it also tells you how many feet you are from your cross street, 30 feet from baker or whatever. Then you fold it back up. And as you fold it back up the first fold there'll be a little drawing if you're in luck and usually they're there in pencil showing you the perimeter of the house. Copy that down. I always do. I draw terribly but they look all right. Especially you'll see in the front little lines that represent staircases. So this is really important because then when you come back and look at your house you say, hey the staircase has been moved from here over to here. And that'll give you an idea of somebody probably was fiddling around in 1922. Didn't have anything else to do so they changed the staircase. Then you very carefully fold it back up and return it to them and thank them profusely and go on to your next step. Which is to come into the periodicals room up on the third floor. And just as you walk in the room make a hard right and you'll see all these city directory guys in Maroon. This is a city directory from 1881 and 82. And if our light were better you would see Adolf Sutro listed here. Give yourself plenty of time, at least a half an hour to look this up because you will become enthralled with the city directories. And what you do is you take that name you got and you check it out. And you hope that it says Horace T. Hofernickel and you hope it says 100 Macallister because then you got him. He's in the house, he's your owner, he's there. And then what you can do is you just keep checking it like every year and you can follow him up. Then when you're through with that and you've followed that name as far as you can follow it you come out of the library and rest a little bit and walk across the street to City Hall and go up the back, poke steps there and turn to your left into the assessors, recorders and whatever. It's the one on the left. I always get mixed up which one it is. And you go in and you tell him you want to look at the 1914 records. Otherwise they'll give you a box of microfilm and it won't go back beyond 1980. And they'll give you a box and you pull it open and you stick it in the microfilm machine and you look for your address. Say it's 100 Macallister. And you look at the address and it'll say owned by Mr. Smith and there's so much taxes on it and year built and usually the year built is wrong. The Realty Index is not real good. I think it's because they didn't have time to really study the things. And you check that out. Then at the top you'll see the assessor's number. It's block number and lot. It's like a seven digit number. So it might be 006, that's the block and then there'll be a hyphen 14 or 0014 and that's lot 14. Now you're cooking. Now you go back in the back of the box to 1914 to 1918 and you look up that number and you shove it in there and you start, you'll see the block number at the top. It will give you the old survey number. Now you might live in what they might call something else but it was the Western, what they called the Western Edition. It'll say old WA survey number. Take that down. It's important. You may want it later. Okay. Then you start following that through and you go down and you keep looking for lot 14. It's like in the middle of each page. And as soon as you get to 14 then you look over and you'll see Mr. Brown sold it to Mr. Smith and usually it says on the right for $10 in gold. That seems to be the thing when they didn't know how much something sold for at that time. You just follow that up till 1938 which is the next section. So you put that guy back and you get off the 1938. You just keep following your people up to the present time. If you get lost or if you forget what to do, the man and the lady that work in there are very, very nice and they'll help you along. If you have trouble and you don't like microfilm and you like computers, you could start, they have a little computer there that'll take you back to 1980 and that'll give you your lot in block number two. But I don't like computers but if you like computers you can start that way. Then after you've done that you've now got who owns your house from whenever it was built basically up till present time which should be you or if you're renting your landlord. The things that you will look at start at 1914 because of the small problem in 1906. They do have the records from pre-1906. They are caught up in something which I guess we should call a catch 22 where they're in beacons, they're in storage. You should be able to request them but if you request them they tell you you can't request them. So maybe if you're an attorney or something you might be able to get into those records. But say you've got on your water company, Claribel Horse Feathers and you find your first person listed as Sarah Delajante. You know, okay, there's been a sale in there and you wanna check that out. You wanna see was there somebody else in there? So you go back to the San Francisco history room and tell them you wanna look at the block books. The block books are, they have about five sets of them. They have 1894, they have 1901, 1906, 1907, 1909 and 1910. That's where you take that survey number. So say your old survey number is Western Edition 467. You go in there, there's an index in the front of these books and you find Western Edition. You look down 467, it's on page 212. You open page 212 and there are little drawings of all these 25 by 100 lots with names on them. And of course you start with 1894 because you're hoping that that's gonna connect with Miss Horse Feathers. And you check down because you've written down how far the block, the lot is from the corner because you wrote that down at the water company and then you just count it off. Say if it's 100 feet, you just count four blocks or four lots, four 25 foot lots and there you are. And that'll give you another, the next name and you can follow those block books. Then if you're really into it and this to me, this is the most fun, then you go and ask your friendly librarian in the San Francisco history room or if you're researching at the California Historical Society for the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. And this is gonna be fun because what happens is you tell them where your house is and they have a wonderful little chart, they check it out and they give you a real microfilm and then you go zipping over to the periodicals room and you put it on and you find, you go wandering through, give yourself plenty of time because you're gonna fall across stuff like horse stables, tanning factories, you wanna read about it and you say, oh, that's what was at the corner of market and whatever. But anyway, you'll come down to your house and there will be a drawing and outline of the house. There will be a number on it, two or three, two or three stories. There'll be a D for dwelling. There will be, if you follow the up to like 1914, a lot of it will say AB, automobile in the basement. This does not mean you brought the car through the kitchen and dropped it down. What it means is that the basement was torn out and a garage was put in. So you know that this owner was very avant-garde, had a car. And then you can start checking out within three or four blocks and find out what was in the neighborhood. You'll find out that there might have been a Nickelodeon down the road or a dry cleaners. What is on those maps is anything to do with fire. So basically you go to the water company, then you come and check the city directories and then you go from there. And you start looking at details. You look at the whole overall house before you start any of this, getting your period together, your decade. Look for other details such as roommates. Watch for the signs that are gonna tell you what's going on as you take this big ride, shall we say, to find out when and what was going on in your house. Shedding light on it as you go back in history and climb up the stairs of knowledge and find out who built my house and when. Thank you.