RON HENGGELER

February 14, 2025
Early morning views from Alamo Square

San Francisco

I recently took my van into the neighborhood's Precision Auto on Divisadero. I arrived at 7:30am when the shop opens and left the van to have the oil changed and the tires rotated. I walked home which is only several blocks away and went through Alamo Square with the famous Painted Ladies on Steiner Street. The sun was just coming up. Here are some of the photos from my stroll through the park.

"San Francisco is the genius of American cities.  It is the wild-eyed,  all-fired,  hard-boiled,  tender-hearted,  white-haired boy of the American family of cities.  It is the prodigal son.  The city which does everything and is always forgiven,  because of its great heart,  its gentle smile,  its roaring laughter,  its mysterious and magnificent personality.   There are no end of ways of enduring time in San Francisco,  pleasantly,  beautifully,  and with the romance of living in everything.  Eat any kind of dish the races of the world know how to prepare.  Drink any kind of wine you like.  Go to the opera.  The symphony.  The concert.  Go to a movie or a stage play.  Loaf around in the high-toned bars,  or in the honky-tonks.  Sail the bay.  If you are alive you can’t be bored in San Francisco.  If you’re not alive,  San Francisco will bring you to life.  San Francisco is a world to explore.  It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.  It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day. “  

(circa  1891)

First in rapture
And first in beauty
Wayward, passionate, brave
Glad of life God gave.
The sea-winds are her kiss,
And the seagull is her dove.
Cleanly and strongly she is--
My cool, grey city of love.

 George Sterling

"It’s the indescribable conglomeration of beauty and ugliness that makes San Francisco a poem without meter,  a symphony without harmony,  a painting without reason---a city without an equal."  

Herb Caen

San Francisco beats the world for novelties;  but the inventive faculties of her people are exercised as a specialty. . . Controversy is our forte. 

San Francisco Call 1864

"Whoever laid the town out took the conventional checkerboard pattern of streets and without the slightest regard for the laws of gravity planked it down blind on . . .  a confusion of steep slopes and sandhills.  The result is exhilarating."    

John Dos Passos

"I think San Francisco is the best place in the whole world for an easy life." 

Imogen Cunningham

"....this marvelous city.  Bazaar of all the nations of the globe,  (compares) with the fantastic creations of ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ " 

Edmond Auger,  French gold hunter seeing San Francisco in 1849

"To a traveler paying his first visit,  San Francisco has the interest of a new planet.  It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world."  

Friz Hugh Ludlow

"San Francisco is the only city I can think of that can survive all the things you people are doing to it and still look beautiful." 

 Frank Lloyd Wright

"There is no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. Its the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new crayons."

Dave Eggers, A Heartbeaking Work of Staggering Genius

"As the years went by, San Francisco became not only my city but also my way of life. From the time I was a boy, I wanted to live in a place like my father's theater world, a magic box filled with lavishly made-up women, extravagant gay men, and other larger-than-life characters. I wanted a world that could encompass all worlds. I found something close to it in this soft-lit city in the ocean mists." 

David Talbot,   Season of the Witch

PAINTED LADIES
Multicolored paint schemes on San Francisco’s “Painted Ladies” did not become the fashion until the late 1960s. Originally, Victorians were painted in drab white, gray, black, and brown. The bay-windowed, decorated, redwood-framed Victorian houses, built from the 1870s through the turn of the century, are the city’s most treasured architectural feature. Victorian houses fell out of favor for many years, and thousands that survived the 1906 fire were demolished or underwent alteration with new facades of asbestos sheeting, stucco, plaster, or stone. Much of the origional decorative metalwork was stripped off during World War I and World War II scrap drives. Beginning in the 1960s, many Victorians were restored and renovated and were sold at exorbitant prices. About 14,000 of the original 48,000 Victorians are still standing in San Francisco. The highest concentration of Victorians is in an area bounded by Divisadero Street, Golden Gate Avenue, Webster Street, and Fell Street. 

Respectfully taken from SAN FRANCISCO SECRETS by John Snyder 

 Chronicle Books 1999

San Francisco

"That City of Gold to which adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven. I wonder what enchantment of the 'Arabian Nights' can have equaled this evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the marshes and the blowing sand.” 

Robert Louis Stevenson

"It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world." 

Oscar Wilde

The air has an indefinable softness and sweetness—a tonic quality that braces the nerves to a joyous tension, making the very sense of existence a delight.     

Scribner's Monthly

Alamo Square Neighborhood Association

"What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States."

H.L. Mencken

"One day if I do go to heaven, I’m going to do what every San Franciscan does who goes to heaven, I’ll look around and say, “it ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco."  

Herb Caen

"San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal." 

William Saroyan

SAN FRANCISCO in the years before the 1906 fire provided a sort of Big Rock Candy Mountain for the entire American people. . .  Good Americans when they died might, in the terms of the epigram, go to Paris. While they where alive they wanted to go to California. Oceans of champagne, silk hats and frock coats, blooded horses, and houses on Nob Hill, these were the rewards that came to the industrious, the far sighted, or the merely fortunate. What better scheme of things, at least on this side of the river, could any man ask?  

Lucius Beebe

"San Francisco was not just a wide open town.  It is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward–spreading puritan tradition . . . 
It had been settled mostly, in spite of the romances of the overland migration, by gamblers,  prostitutes,  rascals,  immigrants,  and fortune seekers who came across the Isthmus and around the Horn.  They had their faults, but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather. "

Kenneth Rexroth, Beat poet 

Honoring and remembering our dear friend Joe Pecora 

In 2014, Joe published his book entitled The Storied Houses of Alamo Square.

A former Alamo Square Neighborhood Association (ASNA) board member and neighborhood historian, Joe filled the pages of his ode to Alamo Square with the house histories that once graced the pages of  ASNA's newsletter for which he had served as editor.

Brimming with details about who lived where, this book is a must-have for any Alamo Square aficionado.

I was honored to contribute many of the colored photos in his book.

"Once I knew the city very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris, I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts... It had been kind to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency."

John Steinbeck

Alamo Square Neighborhood Association

ALAMO SQUARE
It is believed that some San Franciscans who died in the 1906 earthquake and fire are buried in Alamo Square. A temporary camp was almost set up in the square for those who were left homeless by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The terrace of restored three-story wooden homes on the east side of Steiner Street between Hayes and Fulton Streets across from Alamo Square was built by Irish-born property developer Matthew Kavanaugh in the 1890’s. They were originally sold for $3,500. Kavanaugh, who lived at 722 Steiner from 1892 through 1900, couldn’t have envisioned that a century later his houses would be among the most photographed vantage points in San Francisco, known as “postcard row.” The colorfully painted, elaborate Victorians contrast sharply with the skyscrapers of the Financial District looming in the background. The houses have been the ‘homes’ of characters in the motion pictures Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Woman in Red (1984), and Maxie (1985), and the television programs Too Close for Comfort (1980-1986) and Full House (1987-1995). 

Respectfully taken from SAN FRANCISCO SECRETS

by John Snyder  Chronicle Books 1999

"If you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco. If you're not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life." 

William Saroyan

 “The city is like a snake, shedding its skin, changing constantly, moving about in unexpected directions. However, if it is a great city, which San Francisco forever is, it retains its basic qualities---a sense of adventure, a delight in its own history, an air of freedom and a rare tolerance for divergent views and actions. The city dances on its hills and unashamedly enjoys its own beauty, which has survived many a long night of excesses, both joyous and tragic.
    San Francisco, a great writer’s town---tantalizing, just out of reach in its misty aloofness. A city so small and yet so varied, from block to block. Cross a street and enter a different world. Every writer about San Francisco strives to capture its essence and, on occasion, feels he has succeeded---but the city is always one step ahead, laughing, disappearing into the fog.”    

Herb Caen  January 25, 1992     

From HERB CAEN’S SAN FRANCISCO 1997-1991

Published by Chronicle Books 1992