 Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Fund Events, and we would like to thank you for joining us for our program with Richard Brownlee for his new book, Garden Neighborhoods of San Francisco, the Development of Residence Parks, 1905 to 1924. Before we begin, I'd like to find out how many of you are new to the Mechanics Institute. We have all members here, or friends, wonderful. If you are new or if you would like to bring up friends who's new, please tell them to come Wednesday and do the tour of our library and Mechanics Institute building. The librarians will give you a great history background and also the great tour of the library and the chest room and everything you have under one roof. Also, today's talk will be followed by a Q&A with you, our audience, and then Richard Brownlee's book about sailing and sailing afterwards. So, between 1905 and 1924, in these 36 San Francisco Residence Parks, such as St. Francis, Wood and Seekwood, were planned with a few years of living and a little bit in a park environment. This historic book combines architecture, landscape, urban design, and also the greening of our cities, and so there's no better topic to be speaking about today. Richard Brownlee is a historic preservation consultant, evaluating hundreds of buildings and sites for federal and state agencies and local organizations. He is the author of three books, including San Francisco's Westportal Neighborhoods for the Images of America series, and also St. Francis Wood. He is the current president of the Northern California Chapter of Society of Architectural Historians and also the board member of the Western Neighborhoods Project for 20 years. So, we'd like to welcome Richard Brownlee to tell us all about our neighborhood. Thank you. I'd like to be here. I've never actually been in the Mechanics Institute as a member, but it's a very, very old institution. It's done a lot of good work. I'm very happy to be here, and I know it's a high involvement audience. You guys know a lot of that history, and so you would probably even hope I won't put you to sleep or be something interesting, maybe something that you aren't aware of. So, what is a resident's heart? It's a term that was popular in the early 20th century, but it kind of fell out of favor. It really wasn't used after a while. But the concept was to bring sort of the feeling of living in the country, but we were still in the city, in this case San Francisco. So, there's some characteristics of a resident's heart, at least in San Francisco. This is the goal. This is what people developed. So, they would often have a picture as streets, curving streets, to attach single-family houses. That was really a very important feature of all of these. There was setbacks from the sidewalk and sign setbacks. So, they would be moved for landscaping. There are custom designs by architects, at least at first, the first few years. This is very unusual in San Francisco and even anywhere in the world to have, in this case, there's 7,500 houses where ultimately built. Almost all of those by architects. Not that that means it's necessarily good, but in this period of time, I think when you see these houses, they're all very well designed and well made. As I said, landscaping was very important to all of them. And some of them had their own little parks or playgrounds. So, again, you wouldn't have to go far to get that kind of recreation. They all were very important. They had to have transit downtown. They were not built for super rich that could commute by carriage or private automobile. These were people that worked in downtown. It was no remote work. So, you had to go into the office. So, transit was very important. But there were people who could afford a custom house or at least a single-family house. So, they were professional businessmen in other professions. I'm going to talk a little bit about that later. And then they all had deeded restrictions that when you bought the block, you're not allowed to, well, you could not be, and the terms vary depending on development, but you couldn't be African-American or Asian. Or you couldn't rent theirs as well. And it was written into the deed. So, that's a private enforcement. It wasn't the city that decided this. This wasn't a zoning thing. This was a de-restriction done by the developers. There was this common nationwide for these residence parts, which was a nationwide phenomenon. But also, this kind of discrimination was common at the time in other developments that were now residence parts. So, they were not the only ones doing this unfortunately. So, here's where we have San Francisco before the idea of residence parts. You know, very dense city, an Italian city with no greenery, no street trees. And the impetus for the residence parts was to give people an alternative from this sort of living. And where are you going to do this? You need more land to do these residence parts because you've got detached houses. It takes more land. And so, at the turn of the century, what this map is dated 1900, the western half of San Francisco, as you can see, there's almost no streets. And there was something out there. This was the future Sunset Richmond. And actually, the future Golden Gate Park, which was vacant. And so, you'll see most of the residence parts are built in some part of the western part of San Francisco. This is sure as you, in case you didn't believe me, that there were said, you know, it seems incredible now. But the bunch of this area looked like this. This is Laguna Honda Hospital around 1906. It's had a series of different buildings over this very long history. And I just show this because this shows the Twin Peaks here, which have no trees. And this is Sutra's Forest, which I'm sure you all know about. You know, Sutra is tree planting in the 1880s. And it's quite dramatic here. And I mentioned transit to downtown. So when the Twin Peaks tunnel was built, this was a huge moment in the development of San Francisco. Because you remember after 1906, the city was desperate to see leaders. Desperate to regain the population at most of the East Bay, in many cases in a former residence park, too, because the East Bay was ahead of us in this concept. Anyway, so transit's very important. This is Westportal in 1917. But the very first residence park in San Francisco is Presidio Terrace in 1905. And this, in a way, set the model for the future of residence parks. At least that's what developers hope to achieve. But this is unusual in a couple of ways. It was designed from the beginning for millionaires. Presidio Terrace is going to be a rich man's, rich person's place. And the streets are privately owned. And I know you probably heard about a few years ago. The residents didn't know that they were supposed to pay property taxes on their streets. And it was sold to somebody else to take that through. And there are gates. To Presidio Terrace, which never used to be closed in my lifetime, but they still sort of keep them open. It could be a gated community. And the streets aren't owned by the association. And the fact that it was designed really for the super wealthy is a little bit unusual for residence parks in San Francisco. But the idea of this detached houses in a really lush environment is this was the model. And it's sold slowly until after 1906. And then, of course, everything so much more quickly. The house on the left is the, I think you recognize it is, the then mayor of Einstein's house and the senator. But before that, it was owned by a builder, Fernando Nelson. He actually built it. Well, he had it, but he didn't build it. He hired architects. But in any case. So I mentioned that the residence parks are on the west side of San Francisco. And this is becoming my life's work to talk about residence parks. So I had known about some of them before. And I thought, how many are there? Because I keep running into more and more. So I got a publisher interested in the idea of doing a book about it. So as I mentioned, I found 36 and we mapped them out. And the book is kind of a planning history of where they had ended up, who designed and what happened to them. How did they, just a lot of people know that they don't know they're in a residence park or it doesn't look like it. But it was going to be or should have been or was trying to be anyway. But they were in the west, although they were also even in the marina and in Visitation Valley, which has a site like, I grew up there and I had no idea that there was a site of a residence park in Visitation Valley, which Visitation Valley has been a lot of things, but it's never been a residence park. Anyway, even like you said, so the residence parks were kind of promising things you couldn't get unless you were very well. There's quiet streets, landscaping, detached houses. This is the second matter I was mentioning. Oh, too loud. Okay, forgot your name. Yes. A dramatic views. This is a secret before the trees and before other houses. If you stand there now you can't see the Golden Gate quite like that, but at the time you could. And it's quite dramatic, of course, to be able to look there. And of course, there's no bridge because this is about 1916. Marine views. And when I read the ads, they would often talk about marine views. And I thought, well, I didn't know that. I don't think you can see the ocean from there, but you can. And they interpreted marine view as any look. If you could see the ocean from anywhere in the track. This is Ashbury Terrace, which is a very lovely, small track. And there is a view of the Golden Gate from some of these houses. I'm standing on someone's stairs at this point just to get this photo. But the people in the house across the street in the back must have great, fantastic views. Cine views. This is a very odd Ashbury park. One that also tried to become a resident's park. But sitting views, or selling features, private parks. There's only only a couple of them to be able to do this. Because it takes land that you otherwise could not sell lots on. So for the developer to do this. Entrance portals, you see this a lot. They almost all have some kind of statuary brick. Stuck up some kind of entrance. To let you know that, hey, this is going to be a nice neighborhood right now. It might be sand. It might be nothing here, but streets. But trust us, we're going to be putting some money in to make this a good neighborhood. Even sculptures, even in one case, is sundye. This is an equal sign terraces. And if you're familiar with that part of town, you know, the western half of San Francisco is not exactly known for the sun. But here we have a sundial. And it's clear it was a promotional thing. You can go online to the western neighborhoods project website. And there's a bunch of stories about when this was dedicated. But again, this is something you wouldn't find if you were, you know, going in the western edition trying to find a house. You know, a row of houses. There's any wrong with the western edition row of houses. But this is different. Even Crocker Amazon, which is out way out of mission. And it's really for working class houses. It's not an expensive development. But they had this pergola at the entrance, which lasted about maybe 20 years or so, 15 years. It's not there now, but the street is still wide. And now, recently, TVW put some lines here. Founders. St. Francis Wood has the most found ones per capita, I think. It has three order of function features. Again, an area that you don't really need the cooling function. Wonderful. But, you know, it's a very nice grand thing. I might add, that fountain is a duplicated one in the East Bay of the same developer who used Mason with that. Duncan McDowee. And it got hit by a car on the one in Berkeley. So that's his repair. When I was doing the book on St. Francis Wood, it did get hit while I was doing the book, but we had a photo before. So custom house designs I mentioned. This is a C-clip. You'll see the curved street here. But then, after these were all launched, it was just around before World War I. It was a great anticipation. And during the First World War, the wars really killed the real estate business in actually nationwide. Even before the United States got into the war, it crossed a lot of financial difficulties. So they kind of struggled through World War I. And then in the 20s, the developers realized, listen, we're asking too much of people to not only buy a lot, but then find an architect or find somebody to contract. And then you have to finance it yourself. Some people could do it, but that's asking a lot. So by the 20s, almost all the developers went to a different model where they either had a standardized design for the track and still architect design that you would just change the chronicle to give you some variety. This is St. Mary's Park, which is laid out on Mission Street. On the grounds of the much older St. Mary's College, the original St. Mary's College of 1860s. Anyway, so as I mentioned, 36 projects. There were 14 different developers. Usually, by today's standards, very much one on top. Very small. There's companies, public and traded, limited capital. But they employed a track or supervising architects. So the architect would make sure that whatever was being built was co-design that met the designs of the residence park. As I mentioned, there are dozens of architects involved. Two landscape architects, the Olmstead brothers, the famous sons of the Olmstead of Central Park, and a firm that was very influential for about 100 years or more. And Mark Daniels is a local boy. He was very, very involved in a lot of these things. Quite a character. And I have more to say about him later. I mentioned lots of architects as rare, initially custom houses. And then they realized that wasn't really going too well. So they would give you free plans by the track. If you bought a lot, they would build some houses on speculation so you could just see the house. And I mentioned track designs. And I should back up. Initially, selling you a lot and having you do the rest sounds like you're asking a lot now. But what they were doing was selling you a completely improved lot. All the streets were in, the sidewalks, all the utilities were in. And that was the turn of the century that was unusual for the developer to do that. Many times, the property owner had to pave the street either themselves or slip the cost of the city and utility to do that. So this was all done. So this was an improvement. But then even then, it wasn't quite enough to get people to the totally subscribe to these residence boards. I'm going to just go through a very brief rundown of some of the different architectural styles. And start by saying that the residence parks have, there's no required style that they have at all. You could build in any style as long as you follow the setbacks and landscaping requirements. And usually it couldn't be more than two stories. It had to be single family. And so people asked their architects to build what was popular at the time, which is generally sort of this period revival. Historical styles were very popular now. This is after the Torian. The Spanish colonial is maybe the most popular of all the residence parks. And it was in California to a large extent. But you see US colonial style as well. Some tutor or at least some wood stuck in the stucco to make it look like tutor. Now, I am not being, I shouldn't be a physician because as these architects really did a good job, they were trained in a classical way or a traditional way. And these are all usually very good designs in terms of the plant, the program, circulation and whatnot. And there are no pure styles. These are all influenced by historical styles. And it was up to the customer, you know, to really improve the specific plan. So you see a lot of variety. Some French craftsmen. Of course, that was a very popular at that time period. So you see some craftsmen as well in the residence parks. And then this, what's getting architecturally historical here. This first day tradition, which is not so easy to define. But if you think of Bernard Maybeck and sort of a fusion of different influences of crafts, sort of English cottage, even an Asian Japanese influence in some of these. And so there are, there is a rich mixture of styles. This is just for people to recognize some of the architects that were active in residence parks. It's a who's who of all the notable Bay Area architects at the time. It's important to know, you know, I call it a simpler age. There was, which it was, there was just less of everything. There was really no environmental or planning or land use of really of any kind. There was no affordability requirements. There was no anti-discrimination rules. There was no public involvement. You didn't have the 300 foot fire neighbor. I never found any law students that caught at all. So there was, any delay was just based on economics and, you know, of the developer. But they took all the risk and they were incredibly fast because they usually could build these from buying rural land to, you know, building the first house in maybe three years and put all the streets and everything. You didn't have to submit a plan, a subdivision plan to the city. And the streets had to meet certain requirements. So you couldn't just do any old thing you wanted, but it's a good sense. But the city was very eager and welcomed and loved these developments because the developers were doing what the city considered very high class housing. These were really model communities. The city wanted to recover and get the population back from the East Bay and grow. So they were not, they were sort of acting hand in glove. I didn't find any corruption thing that, at least none of the papers. This is the time of the chief engineer, O'Shaughnessy and Mayor Rolf. And they were a team. They were sort of good government types and sort of a clean after the scandals of the previous administration too. But anyway, and they worked with the developers. These were the bigger ones. Baldwin and Hal did a big old line firm and they started us off here with Procedure Terrace. But they also meant it, which is kind of strange, Mission Terrace, which is all the same as they have now that's sort of like a whole park. They were certainly designed for the working class. These are modest house houses. And then they also did Westwood Park, which is sort of a middle class house. So they did a variety of projects on and around. As well as sell to some of these other developers, and I'm not going to read the list here, but these were what I would call the professional developers. They did what they were doing. Then there were the family-run businesses, which also knew what they were doing, but they weren't quite as sophisticated and they did a lot of work themselves. Fernando Nelson and son, I'm sure you've heard of that name. I don't see along the shaking heads, but a Victorian builder built my homes in the Mission and then he became a successful invulnerator. We also purchased his parks business and launched a couple of them. Joseph Leonard from actually from Almeda, he was an architect and a builder. He was responsible for the sundial and Inglesine terraces. And then the third group of what I'm calling the amateurs, these were new to the real estate game. They generally were rich men, entrepreneurs, they call themselves capitalists. I proud capitalists because they had capital money that they could invest in things and they had usually a lot of business interests and they got into these residence parks. This was the thing to do. So one of them was a millionaire son, Jordan Hart, a cattle rancher in Merritt Terrace, which is now part of Westportal. I have a dasher and Claremont court, which is now Westportal. Even the Archdiocese of San Francisco was a developer of St. Mary's Park. They actually went to their archives and the mortgages are held, the mortgages are held by the Archdiocese. And then sewing machine sales went in several developments here, which is sort of loosely now part of Forest Hill Extension. And I'm going to talk more about him because he's quite a character. Here he is, Charles Hawkins. I'm sure this is a household household thing. I saw his name in ads for years and I didn't really know who he was. He's quite a character. And he was doing things. He started off hustling pool in Texas and he became a Texas ranger that didn't work out. I'm sewing machine salesman. He was quite successful in that. And then he became a truck executive with white trucks. Does anyone know that truck? And he evidently developed himself with a very good axle, was very strong, and it gave white trucks an advantage for many years. But then World War II came and he couldn't sell his lamb so he got into the munitions business and moved to Ohio making guns for the allies. And then I mentioned the truck thing. A banker always had some interest in a small magazine, right? And then real estate developer. And he finally died as a big road president. Wow. And now the reason we know so much about him, thanks for asking, is that there's a moral history of his granddaughter. Even moral history in its innocence is the one. Most of these guys, I don't have a lot of culture because there's nothing, they didn't leave any records, there's no diaries, there's no letters, you know, whatever. So we know a little bit about him. And this is, I'm going to just do a couple of visit elements. This is the one that is now called part of Forest Hill Extension but it actually started out in 1914. It was going to be Belle Portale Park. Now they all have a park or a terrace. And I took me a while to figure out he even, not quite hyphenated, but he has a space between the four and the tall. And it was because he thought and they thought that the tunnel, these tunnels were going to end at Forest Hill Station and not just the station. So it was going to be the first new portal to get in. So again, he kind of copied what they were doing in Forest Hill and across the street to be earned and landscaping as pillars with, you know, planted plants on it. Well, the timing was bad. I hope we mentioned World War I came along and he couldn't get off the ground with this and he became an initiative worker. But he held on to the land. Then after World War I, things were booming in the 20s. You know, the early 20s, it used to be a TV show or something. I was too young, I can't remember that, but they really were the early 20s for real estate. It's not in San Francisco, California, each morning. So we got on, trying to unload this property now, renamed it Laguna Honda Park. Again, Park's in the title, but it's near Laguna Honda Hospital. And there was Laguna Honda Boulevard. So we kind of used that name there, Laguna Honda. But at this point, it's Hawkins Improvement Company. So he is the owner, but he is selling lots to whoever the builders come and get. He wasn't building all the houses. And it's just too much really for a small firm. But it still was going to maintain this detached houses and the look of the residents' park. Now, this is a kind of, it's a little bit of a park in his development. It's really a leftover triangle, triangular piece of land that wasn't built on the residents in the 20s. I got together and built, sort of landscaped it themselves. And they built this monument to one of the residents there. His son died in Gwongwong Mountain World War II. And he built this monument to his son. This is in 2008. And it had fallen into disuse, as you can see. This neighborhood doesn't have do's like some of them. St. Francis Wood has mandatory do's that must pay sort of like mandatory aid. And they use the money to keep up the price. It varies across the residents' parks. This one really doesn't have that. But I'm proud to say that the neighbors got together and worked with the Department of Public Works. And they chipped in some dough. And they fixed it up and restored it. They didn't restore the fountain because it's just plumbing. We have plumbing as well. Water running. So we did get the fountain running. But they did a great job. And that's true of many of these residents' parks today. They have kind of a community spirit, whether or not they have do's. And many of them realized that they lived in a special place. And they wanted to chipped it in and work together to maintain it. So we're almost there again. I want to talk a little bit about one of the landscape architects that was involved in some of the residents' parks. He was, if you believe this resume, and I guess if we do, there's been a lot of work about it. He was very active in the state of California, not just San Francisco. I kind of started on the East Bay. He worked in several of the residents' parks. He did not lay out the streets for C. Cliff, or St. Mary's Park. You see that? On the web, that's not true. He did it garden in C. Cliff, but he didn't lay out the streets. But he didn't sign the streets, the curved streets, since we were still the very curvy streets. They were so curvy, they didn't need the city's requirements, they didn't need to be maintained until the 70s. The residents wanted to unload the streets to anyone here from Florida's County, where I could go on. It's no secret. They wanted the city to take the extensive takings and that over. But anyway, he was a, he does a lot of, what I'm going to call this, those art designs, curved, what's a curved circles, curved streets. In fact, he was asked to do a design for Lake Merced. This is 1916. So he's got a street, a road, a brand. I should use the French word for it. It's very French inspired. A grand boulevard, going all the way across Lake Merced to be a bridge here, you know, and then whoops, whoops, the round point. Can you see the round point in French? Say again? Yeah. And when they used that word, when they were doing these designs, I'm not making this up. But anyway, when they came up this, so many plans for Lake Merced that came to nothing. But he was asked to do that. Then he was asked to take over the former exposition grounds in the opposite of 1915. It was a temporary thing. But it was very popular. And you know, it was man-made, it was popular enthusiasm for keeping some of the buildings or monuments from the fair of the house of fine artists. But they're also going to keep two other things. This call of progress tower thing. Sorry for the bad photo. I think I have a better one coming up. Anyway, he was asked to look at that. What could you do? Listen, I can handle this. This is a great guy. I can handle this. So his first design, this is a marina by Cortez. So is the round point, round point, all points. I can. All those used in French for that thing. But anyway, so you just put it very axially. You know, there's kind of a character. You're going to be axially. Four boards that lead to something and here's a building that's going to be maintained in the street. You have an axial road going to the Palace of Fine Arts. And then you just have this big circular thing for the fun of it, you know, to make it again something different, something grand. Well, the line was owned by many different property owners. And, you know, they didn't have the vision. I should always say, this is too ambitious. Too much. Can we, just look at the top view for a minute. It was revised and kind of made less grandiose. We still have a curved street or semi-circular. And we have all these arrows pointing to things so that we would have the, something to look at. But even that could be too much for at least half the property owners. Because as you look at the one on the bottom, you have a remnant of Daniel's design of this curved street. And I was always curious what he's this curved this way. So it's half of his design. At least the streets part were maintained. It's not a residence park. It didn't have any of the restrictions. You see apartments and flats and houses and everything else. So there's no landscaping. There's no setbacks like a residence park. But it's part of the street design that survived, but only part. Unfortunately, the part that needs to cost fine arts, you know, this was the main thing that the city saved in 1915 because everyone loved it so much. And then it was falling down and in the early 60s, again, the city actually devoted money as well as, I can't remember his name, who loved it too and gave a lot of his money. It was rebuilt. And it's been rebuilt again. So this is a big deal. Now it's the size of a lot of cars raking. But we love it. And this was a big deal. This is a very unusual thing to have in San Francisco. It's such a grand thing that is just for looks. There's no function. We sort of had to explore time in the back for a few years. Okay, so we want to really capitalize on this. We want to have a grand street that leads up to it. So you know you're arriving at something that's a destination. All we have is, we don't have that because this part of the marina, they just extended the grid, the western addition grid on the same scale, the same plan, and they ignored it and said it wasn't there. So you can't even, walk and a half away. The trees don't help. Even if the trees weren't there, they would never do this in France. Or anywhere. Or maybe even Washington DC. But anyway, so it doesn't always work out the way you know, in my planet. So we're moving to residence parks. This is always a hot issue. And at the time I mentioned you know, presidents of local businesses, vice presidents, a lot of doctors and lawyers, not the super rich. There were many first-time homeowners who were living in a rental, some place. It's hard to find data like this, but I looked through a lot of newspaper listings on what they were going to ask, you know. You can sometimes find where they lived before and where the West British and what was in the flat, you didn't see that. So you can see it was achieving this goal of having a home ownership. Clearly very design for families, all the guys talking about a good place to raise kids and you know, the good marine air for the kids, or you know, the quiet streets. And again, only whites, no African-Americans or Asians until really the 60s. I'm sure you can have questions about that later, so maybe I'll talk about that then. But, and I always get this question, Jews were okay. There was no prohibition in the deans. Prohibiting Jews as opposed to other parts of the country that did. Now there could have been informal steering away, but you know, there wasn't any deans. And so what do we get from all of this effort? It's I'm saying a gift to the city. There's about, my rough count, maybe 7,500 houses that were built in this time period. And they are, you know, they're very nice areas that are landscaping their own. They are exclusive but not the super rich. Because I give an example of their secret, which is it is the super rich. And now thanks to everybody, everybody seems to have more money than they used to. But these neighborhoods have long-term stability. You'd be surprised you really don't see any that are really run down. Even if they don't have the homeowners association to kind of help things along. And there was a period in the 60s and 70s when they did get run down, particularly St. Francis Wood. And the residents got together and said, we've got to keep this place up a good. It's the plumbing and the landscaping unit raised the dues. And they didn't. It's kind of a ramp sense. So the reason why this is sort of important historically is that after this we kind of went back to the grid. This is a post-war Sunset District. With a lot of rows of houses, more or less I don't want to be too much kind to the same design. When you actually get and walk down the streets you do see a little more variety than this photo suggests. But these were done. This is affordable housing. This is post-war affordable housing. Low-down payments. A lot of small houses, thousands square foot, two bedroom, which now we could think, oh, I want that. But it was definitely affordable and it definitely helped with the housing needs. And then I should add many of the features of residence parts that's attached to housing setbacks gradually in the 20s and just part of FHA requirements. So there wasn't a need for the developer to write a D in the sale of the property to do this. It became more of a city function to plan communities. So that concludes my talk on the residence parts. Now I do have people I'm sure the most important part of the show is just about to start. Well, my book is available in the back. But my next book is going to be about the 15-year-old Portrero Drive which was a Spanish trail linking Michigan divorce to Daly City. Trust me on this, I've done a lot of work on this. I can prove it. It was like a secondary road because everyone knows about you know, San Jose Avenue of Peace. The main road. But here it is. It's coming, we're looking at sort of the streets and the roads coming over to Michigan Delores is right here. So it came over here connection to about 1930. I don't take too much time. It was a total of the 1860s leading to the resorts. There were two resorts by Lake Merced and the old race track. Not the side race track. This was the one before that. Upper market was extended in the 20s kind of in Cortola. This is 1946. I can't believe there's not that much houses up there. There was a narrow road. This is upper market going into Cortola. And then of course the white end of the 50s. This was an alternative to build a freeway over 20s. But this was quite controversial and I looked up I couldn't believe it but the department building section if you ask them a way with the right references they found in many cases the apartments to move these houses and where they ended up and they ended up all over San Francisco where there was a vacant lot. So I was fascinated by that. So that's going to be in the book. This is just the beginning of Cortola Drive in 20s in 1969. So anyway, now that concludes my talk. One more thing, one last thing I'm getting the word here. If you're interested in the Cortola Drive book, I'm asking if you would want to leave your name and email and I can let you know when the book is out or any information. So thank you. Thank you to open this up to your questions. You can find and ask a question. Please raise your hand if I'll come and come to you with a microphone. Here you go. Hi. I was wondering how they coordinate the public transit with the building. Which was the chicken and which was the egg? Because I know a lot in 1905 all the cable car companies were private. They had been the municipal transit. So each company would talk to the developer and say we're going to put a cable car line out here when you develop, before you develop or after. Well, the best I'll talk about what I know when we do know you know the Twin Peaks was talked about for many years like it was early in 1909, 1910 and there was a lot of posterism that you know the neighborhood associations and the mission were easier to get a road and get a transit over to open up the West Twin Peaks. At the same time this land came available, Sutro died as well as probated enough that they could sell the land. So the developers knew that the tunnels were heard that the tunnels were going to be built and they sort of took I guess a bit of a risk in thinking that the tunnel would be built to open up the area around West Portal for development. In fact the ad said you know by now because once the tunnel is open these prices are going to not come alas they're going to triple the price once the tunnel opens. So it was kind of an informal thing it wasn't it wasn't deliberately planned but there was clearly the tunnels going to be built. Some of the other ones if it's just really up to the developer to say it's near enough to an existing line that they could take a chance like the C-Cliff which was held pretty far out there but there was already transit on California on the Geary that wasn't there from the private companies. Question in the front. So he said there were 36 I think 36 were actually built. So there were 36 that were planned about half of them were built that resemble the residence art. So there were many that never remember the program. There's houses covering this area where it would have been on residence art but it wasn't developed as it was. So 36 were planned and about half of them were built. So those that were built were more or less exact or similar than the other interesting culture. No, it's kind of amazing but there's a tremendous amount of integrity that can change all these houses are pretty much as old as it's built. Having said that if there was a vacant lot you might see a new 50's house or a 60's house or in some cases in St. Francis would there were lots that were split and you'll see a new house built. But generally there's a tremendously high degree of integrity and most of these parts were 59 as it started just before the war on slow period, rapid period in the 20's and there was still that to the 30's. So by war or two most of these were built now. Questions here? Sort of back to the first question related to transit on a different topic that is automobile ownership became common and certainly for this I guess class of economic class of people what were the provisions for parking specifically garages and how did they accommodate the garages were they attached to the units or were they detached and did they place them into like alleys what was the configuration? That's a great question and I'll answer it so the residence parts were very dependent on public transit to get going but it also coincided with automobile abuse and then cars getting cheaper and more reach of more people. So the streets initially many of the houses didn't have the provision for cars really but it also at the same time there was a knowledge that these cars need to do something with them. They're very important. So some of them have rear alleyways so that the unsightly car garages them back. Then some have a garage that's detached you know you come to the main street outside driveway and there's a garage in the back so you don't see it so well. So you can see a lot of detached houses and garages or garages in the rear and then some garages even that are cut through in the front. It codes right, it's right in that time when the car becomes more popular at the same time these areas are lower density than say the west addition so you could work on the street too and at the same time transit is important but these are areas that are on the edge of San Francisco and even to this day car ownership is higher there because people just drive into downtown because otherwise they'd have to use the beauty. Thanks for laughing So it's an interesting thing to see how they try to accommodate that accommodate the car in a resident's car where you wouldn't want to see the car if you want to. Question In the last few years there have been very successful attempts to both statewide and locally to eliminate zoning regulations to eliminate historic preservation and to eliminate environmental review throughout the whole state and especially sadly in one issue for supervisors in San Francisco What impact do you think this will have on these developments? So you bring up a good point and I always forget someone in San Francisco keeps saying Richard we have no single family zoning anymore in the state of California with the auxiliary dwelling unit So every law can have two units so there is no single family zoning period Now to your question about whether increasing the dense efforts to increase density will threaten me to start in Asia most of these residents parks So I know this is being recorded and strained and everything else I don't think it's going to have a huge impact for many reasons just the cost of acquiring these properties and then somehow putting another big unit on them is that the first one out of the state would try to make it much easier and there's a lot of requirements about minimal outsides so I don't see a huge amount but who knows and there's still if it's a historic district if it's listed on the National Register then so far it's exempt from San Francisco what's Jennifer that of the original 36 residents parks in San Francisco how many still have neighborhood associations and feel themselves as an entity but I don't know that's a good question I don't think there's that many well there's degrees so even if they don't have a neighborhood association that collects news like for example with the fountain that they restored they certainly feel like they're in a neighborhood and they feel that they're in a special community but I don't have a percentage for you but I think many of them do it's just that there are legal structure varies from very very strong to very weak but a lot of them have associations websites it's hard to say but I think there's a lot of feeling that they're in a special neighborhood do you have a favorite residents park oh I love them all I love them all well actually I'm in a residents park I live in one so have you ever heard of Claremont Court no but it's part of it's part of Westport there is racial exclusions for many of these residents parks and in the sixties it's probably to change the life also to live I guess but you tell us more about that and also to move to pull up their map this is great I think you can hear the question this is a very brief overview of a very complicated subject but it was you could legally discriminate up until let's see up until 1917 the municipality could discriminate then that was declared illegal by the Supreme Court so you couldn't have a municipal discrimination which could still have private discrimination until 1940 the Supreme Court said you can't have you cannot enforce these deeds that restrict certain people on the basis of race from buying there because to do so you would have to go to court and have the deed enforced and if you go to court then you're using the state to enforce discrimination then state discrimination is illegal okay so that's I'm honest although not too much where it happened but then in 1964 we're created California passed the Jefcy Honorary Civil Rights Act and that is a hearing for the federal that made it illegal for private discrimination you couldn't you know how much a castle you can sell to everyone that became illegal at that point but again that's just the law you could still inform discriminate which went on for I don't know how many years or so but it's no longer legal you can't oh and then I do have a demographic thing here this is but it's demographic of some of the reasons parks and I'll just let you read that over because it's kind of hard to read all of these things but you know it's still so the San Francisco numbers are left so at this time 40% of San Francisco is white and then you see the percentages across the top so it's still pretty much white and see clip to very low emission tariffs and then we sort of average and you can just see the numbers so it's certainly more next than it was in 1912 it's wherever they answer the question oh it could be you know I don't know Richard I have a couple questions first of all I'm wondering which of these projects was involved with were several architects working together on a design or was it one particular architect that was featured between proposals okay let me take your second question oh well so yes Julie Morgan was involved in several of the residents' parks in St. Francis Wood I don't know how many enjoyed the park I'm not sure but it was still and then another one I don't think there were a lot of designs in several of these parks Westwood Park she did hundreds of designs Lincoln Manor as well the developer liked her and used her a lot and produced the track architect so she's the one and then when it worked for other male architect most famously Henry Gutterson was actually a Berkeley architect who was the tracks architect for St. Francis Wood and his firm hired one and so it kind of slides into your next question so you'll see in Prince St. Francis Wood there's about 83 designs that are credited to Henry Gutterson but it's really the firm so other than this his name was on it the principal's name goes on on the plans and other people are doing a lot of design work but he's looking it over and they know what kind of work he does so we don't know in many cases what you really did and some of these other people work but there's a great book by it's terrible Women Architects of the Bay Area came out a few years ago and Inga Horton wrote it and she did a tremendous job of tracking down all the women architects who worked for other women architects like a lot of women worked for Judy Morgan for her firm as one of them so she traces all that but it's a great if you're interested in the subject it's quite an extensive it's really and also these are historic land are they deemed as historic landmarks and in yes what kind of adaptation or limitations to adaptation are required for these locations so some listed on the National Register of our historic districts and in historic districts you the exterior changes are a tightly limited you do additions in the back that don't show them you can do anything you want inside blow it up do anything you want, tear the walls out someone was mentioning earlier about the public there's a nice woodwork inside a lot of the Westwood part houses there's no protection for those at all even if it wasn't a historic district so people get all excited about I have to control my house well first of all this is me you don't have control over your house anyway whether it's a historic or not city planning has tremendous control over into your house anyway so if it's a historic district it's more tightened and you have to go through permits and windows at the beginning don't show them the place the windows just saying it saves you a lot of money put drapes over them if you're worried about the energy loss don't worry don't do that I will, can I just do one more thing now because this is a lot of people don't know if you go on the planning department's website you can look at the properties and they have maps and quite quickly I want to start the city has designated many many many neighborhoods has eligible historic districts under the California Registry eligible so they have never been designated that by any people or supervisors they've been planning for a historic preservation commission but planning considers them to be historic so if you wanted to replace your windows put an addition in the front or do anything they will subject you to the California Environmental Quality Act CQA even if you are not in an anticipated district so that's just the San Francisco record anyone else have a question in the back? I got very interested in the subject through the idea that an architect is famous as Antonio Gaudi would design houses for a project like this but the idea that was particularly interesting about that to me was that they wanted people to be able to have gardens or even little sort of truck farms and give them enough land so that they could sustain themselves and I wondered to what extent was that a factor in any of these projects here and is it still at all? Is there a farming aspect? There was only a farming aspect during World War I when they couldn't sell lots and they were encouraging people to have victory gardens for Amazon but no, in fact you couldn't do any animal type of peasantry in your area was forbidden to do any agriculture work I mean you could have a garden I can suppose it would improve vegetables but no chickens, nothing like that you definitely not we don't want to see any sheds and hay and stuff we're going to live in a park Richard I have another question related to mechanic sisters wondering if Martin Matthews and his wives who had a store they would build all the the built-ins so I'm wondering about the interior design of these homes and if Matthews was involved of course he was involved during so it's a 1915 family civic festival exposition and also Martin Matthews beautiful mural and painting is down and on locking so anyway was there an involvement of the interior design as far as I can tell it was just up to the architect the design's belly to the interior if they did anything other than you know a fireplace or something there aren't built-ins though it's an area that I really don't know too much about but this Martin Matthews there's a mural in the plane at the library which is to start by the way another question yes I wonder if there are any tours to some of these places that also go inside very very rarely do we get to go inside it's very rare there are tours of the outside and I think even getting rarer I couldn't make a plug though for the Northern California chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians which I am the president which is a very long name but we do do two tours a year and sometimes we don't try but it's and the only limit is very people our members so it's very it's very typical but I know the Victorian Alliance does tours house tours I don't know they do they do so it happens it can occur this will be our last question to the fans because we want to have time for everyone to take a look at the book last question yes when I talked to some people who lived in San Francisco the first part of the 20th century they said that San Francisco one of the veins of living here was sand the sand blew all the time and it was constantly sweeping the houses out and that the houses on the near the parade ground and Presidio actually were all turned away from the ocean because the housewives were complaining that all they ever did was sweet sand so I was wondering when they're building all these residents part there's still a lot of community lots in San Francisco so how do they deal with that plant eucalyptus or what well they never mentioned not the Indiana lots of sun no it was an issue you know in the 18th 19th century downtown San Francisco the sand thing going all over and it's you know I didn't really uh San Francis Wood was overrun by opers and and there was a vegetable farm across the street sort of tuned for Sarah and slowed and at one time they had flies came in the house which is not the book by the way but I did yeah you know you think there would be more income but they didn't do anything obvious to block the sand like they didn't build the plant rows of trees particularly on the edge of it so it's a good question we're back we want to thank Richie Granny for this wonderful talk very informative and expansive in the garden neighborhoods of San Francisco thank you for joining us