The Westerfield House Victorian Mansion On Alamo Square
The Victorian architecture movement that can be seen in great glory in San Francisco includes both relatively modest homes as well as grand ones. And some of the grands ones are so stunning and well, large, they really take your breath away! Well at least if you are an architecture buff like myself, otherwise they may not even show up on one’s radar? I spotted the silhouette of the Westerfield house’s tower one night a few weeks ago, as I was combing the neighborhood for a supermarket, and it was both haunted mansion and architectural splendor, even from afar and in the dark. I knew I had to return by day to take a closer look, The early evening on which I returned, was a foggy one, so my photos are well, foggy, but such is life in San Francisco. The Westerfield House in on Alamo Square, which I wrote about here, and just down the street from the famous “painted ladies” which I wrote about here. Let’s take a closer look at this Victorian Stick or Eastlake style Victorian beauty and learn a little bit about its history, which I always find so very interesting.
The William Westerfeld House is located at 1198 Fulton Street (at Scott St.) in San Francisco, California, United States, across the street from the northwest corner of Alamo Square. Constructed for German-born confectioner William Westerfeld in 1889, the home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is San Francisco Landmark Number 135.William Westerfeld arrived in San Francisco in the 1870s. By the 1880s, he had established a chain of bakeries. He hired local architect Henry Geilfuss to design for his family of six a 28-room mansion with an adjoining rose garden and carriage house. The house was constructed in 1889 at a cost of $9,985 (equivalent to $287,600 in 2020).
When Westerfeld died in 1895, the home was sold to John Mahony, of Mahony Brothers, noted for building the St. Francis Hotel and the Palace Hotel after the 1906 earthquake. Mahony replaced the rose garden with flats to meet the city’s dire need for housing. In 1928 a group of Czarist Russians bought the home. They turned the ground-floor ballroom into a nightclub called Dark Eyes and used the upper floors for meeting rooms. The house became known informally as the “Russian Embassy”. In 1948 the home was converted into a 14-unit apartment building. For most of the next two decades, the units were rented to musicians who played in the neighborhood jazz clubs. John Handy was allegedly one of many to call the Westerfeld House his home, although he later denied having been a boarder there.
The first attempts to rehabilitate the building began in the 1970s. Two men purchased the home for $45,000 in 1969 (equivalent to $318,000 in 2020). They remodeled the fourth floor servants’ quarters beyond recognition. The house was left standing despite an urban renewal project, which claimed 6,000 Victorian-era buildings over a 60-block area in the Western Addition.
Jim Siegel purchased the home in 1986 for $750,000 and has since retrofitted the foundation, removed the dropped ceilings, re-wired, re-roofed, and re-plumbed, and restored the interior and exterior woodwork and the historic, ground-floor ballroom, and decorated the 25-foot (7.6 m) ceiling with period wallpaper crafted by Bradbury & Bradbury. I have no idea how one might gain entrance to see the interior, but taking a look from the street is also a treat!
