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By Robert Shurell

I remember my first visit to San Francisco. It wasn’t cold or windy, and there wasn’t any fog. My friends, who had moved here just after college, arrived at the airport to pick me up in a beat-up Toyota truck, and the three of us sat on the bench seat for the ride into the city. Highway 101 was moving fast that evening, and we curved quickly through the hills. I remember the outline of those hills defined by orangey lights, crisply contrasting with the dark sky. We rounded a hill going 85 and suddenly a city appeared, an array of tall buildings defined as sharply as the hills’ edges by office lights and just as quickly it was behind us as we navigated the narrow elevated freeway at the roof level of a warehouse district. Following signs for Fell Street, the most incredible moment of this exhilarating ride occurred: the freeway abruptly ended, and we stopped. That screaming, wild freeway ride dropped me in a quiet, sleepy Victorian neighborhood. I looked around in Hayes Valley and came away with an impression that I’ve carried with me ever since.

It turned out that one of my friends lived in that neighborhood, and I had an opportunity during that brief visit to become familiar with the area, and the buildings in it. When I moved here a few months later, I studied the Victorian buildings as I walked or rode the bus. It turns out the quaint Victorians aren’t quite the historic prize they seem at first glance. Actually, a good number of them are abused, neglected, stripped down and beaten up. The problem is common in cities around the country: the existing housing stock from the city’s “heyday” building boom slowly deteriorates and becomes a liability. The amount of care you bestow upon your brand new car is not typically commensurate with the care you give the 15-year-old beater, and this correlates with the care given to our post-Gold Rush housing stock. Of the surviving stock, only a select few have been given the meticulous care that is required for a building’s longevity.

One of the most common, visible and unfortunate modifications to these buildings is the removal of their distinctive trims. This is a loss that commonly goes unnoticed and may not seem critical on a case-by-case basis; but when viewed on a neighborhood-wide scale, this unique, unifying feature seems to have been completely expunged. These once-decorated, stylized homes are left as simple boxes with bland bay windows attached to the front. The trims that define Victorian exteriors were fabricated and installed in a time of inexpensive labor and unsustainable forest management practices. They were affordable at the time, but if the trims are removed for some reason over the years, they are generally too expensive to replace. Often the building received either a stucco exterior cladding or simply remained stripped. Some dedicated preservationists have taken these bare walls and performed façade restorations on them, bringing them back to their original design. This, however, is rare, and most often the change for the worst is a permanent one.

The interiors, similarly, have changed over the decades: a grand single-family house may now house up to six separate apartment dwellings. Victorian apartment buildings, originally three full flats on three levels, may be haphazardly partitioned in the most grotesque manner. I have personally lived in a Hayes Valley apartment building configured in an abysmally sad display of interior layout skill, no doubt accomplished over years and years of modification and adaptation to the neighborhood and tenants. My apartment was on the third floor, in the kitchen and dining room of the original flat. This two-room arrangement suited my needs, and was desirable because (as I was in a rundown building ignored by the landlord) I was able to repaint the walls in a color of my choosing, put new flooring in the kitchen, and change the front door to the apartment from the dining room door to the kitchen door, helping the layout and circulation immensely. This contribution to the building’s historic legacy was done in an afternoon by locking the dining room door and putting away the key, installing a hanger rod across the inside of it to create a closet space, and then using a hammer and chisel to remove the hardened and painted-over putty sealing the kitchen door closed, drilling in and installing a new lock. I gave the landlord a key, as he stopped by every couple of weeks, and he was amicable enough with the change. He understood that I had made a modification for the better.

I had to share a bathroom and shower with my next-door neighbor, unfortunately. Although I had a small two-room apartment, he had it worse. He lived in one of the bedrooms of the old flat, with the walk-in closet converted to a galley kitchen. I always wanted to rent that room as well, if he had moved out. I would have put up a door in the hallway between the stairs and the bathroom door and claimed that part of the hall as my personal apartment space. Then I could have removed the wall between the dining room and the hallway and really opened the place up. The lucky person in the front apartment wouldn’t have minded; they had the original living room, the drawing room that was now a bedroom (connected to the living room with two four-foot-wide sliding pocket doors), a kitchen that was once a bedroom, and a large walk-in closet that was now the bathroom. But I didn’t get the chance to execute my grand plan; I began dating my future wife and she couldn’t stand sharing the bathroom with the neighbor. I could see her point of view, and we moved out.

This type of makeshift arrangement, although fun, seriously damages the fabric of an original Victorian layout. Once lost, it is highly unlikely the original layout will ever be reconstructed in the future. Plumbing chases have been cut vertically through the building. Interior wainscotings, picture rails and crown moldings have been cut and discarded to make way for new partitions; historic doors and windows are removed and lost; the list goes on. I cannot admit to being a fan of the Victorian interior layout—so many doors and hallways—but the haphazard way they have disappeared is downright sad.

The question I pose is one of legacy: what does the city want its neighborhood buildings to say to its residents and the rest of the world? This aging housing stock, with its distinctive features gone for all time, is not sending a progressive message to the world. Victorianism was an interesting stylistic period, but I believe there are better homes to be designed. The city (including its residents) shouldn’t hold designers and builders to emulating the form and scale of this outdated building type, but rather should embrace change, experimentation and the new forms (both good and bad) that result. True progress cannot occur in an oppressive environment. Although the cost of real estate in San Francisco (and it’s attendant conservatism) pushes this “liberal” city to the utter depths of the design world, there is a chance that we can begin turning the corner by setting aside the requirement that new residential constructions resemble a box with bay windows stuck on, with or without the trims.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or SF Apartment Magazine. Robert Shurell is a licensed architect with Stantec Architecture, a firm specializing in architecture that serves the needs of our communities in the fields of education, healthcare, transportation, and civic and cultural facilities. He can be reached at
robert.shurell@stantec.com. Copyright © 2008 by SF Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.