This is a work in progress. :)

This page is devoted to documenting the history of this tiny slice of Eureka Valley, partly because I enjoy researching and sharing.

Hartford St North is an example of blue-collar Victorians in the “streetcar suburbs” growing in San Francisco at the turn of the century. These houses are the transition period between the vernacular, non-professional infill housing in chaotically inclusive urban spaces, and the commissioned exclusive automobile-reliant suburbs of the 1920s and later. While Hartford North was a new residential block and thus exempt from the “annoyances of neighborly industry”, it was also populated by workers of those indutrial jobs, as well as itinerant peddlars and service laborers. As non-status buildings - specifically meant to be owned by blue-collar workers and not just rented to them - the buildings on Hartford St are a rare survival, and illustrate the incredible quality of life available to migrants willing to make the trip West.

The 0-100 block of Hartford St is almost solely the work of “master builder” Fernando Nelson, who famously built thousands of homes in SF over the course of his half-century career, and acted as one-man loan agency to many of his customers.

The first new house on Hartford St

A moment in time - 10:30 am on June 28, 1900

Ed note: Laura wrote this long description to the block mailing list, and as the rest of this site is a mess, is including it here for interested folks. This is best enjoyed with the picture open in a separate tab so you can zoom in on the different parts.

This is a scan of a glass plate negative by D.H. Wulzen Jr., whose family owned the pharmacy at the southwest corner of 17th and Castro (the building that says “drugs” on the side). As his grandson Warren says:

“Late in the 1890s, DHW took on a Kodak agency and he became seriously interested in more than just snapshots. He acquired an 8x10 and a 5x7 glass plate camera. His pharmaceutical training made the necessary chemical processes for coating the plates and developing the photos easy for him. (Sidenote, our father, Frank Eastman Wulzen, learned these processes in DHW’s darkroom and later became a commercial photographer himself.)”

DHWulzen-Hartford-June-28-1900-1030am The newly cut 0-99 block of Hartford Street, 10:30 am June 28, 1900, photo by DH Wulzen. The first house on the block is just about to get roof joists from the workers of Fernando Nelson & Sons, Builders. Click here to open the full size image in a new tab.

The bright white street near the center of this photo is Castro St north of Market St, and to the upper left you can see the Corona Heights quarry still being worked. The gore point of the east intersection of 17th and Market (Jane Warner Plaza, where the Shell is now) is still a grass lot, and south across the street are some of the oldest buildings in the neighborhood, some even appearing on the 1869 US Coastal Survey map.

The whole block between 17th and 18th and between Castro and Noe had been purchased by JP Treadwell and others some time between 1854 and 1864, and so was omitted from the Eureka Valley Homestead Association and so escaped a lot of the legal wrangling that came from the piecemeal sale of Noé’s estate. You can see a low fence around the part not owned by Treadwell, and the varied houses around it. Most of these buildings were torn down around 1921 for the construction of the Castro Theater.

Of note is the building to the left of the windmill - this was known as “Matear House” or “Meeteer House” after Marshall L Meeteer, a carpenter originally from Baltimore. By 1862 Meeter had constructed this extremely fancy house with beautiful verandahs and its own well, windmill-pump and water tower, out on the edge of town. Meeteer passed away in 1885 and his widow sold the house to Andrew Spaulding, a watchmaker and jeweler (with a fairly tragic family story).

The parking lot behind the Castro Theater is still technically named for him, as “Spalding Court” [sic], although the entrance was originally where the Castro’s south fire escape alley is now. The 2.5 storey building to the right of the windmill stood against the back “fence” of 24-32 Hartford, and was listed as being rental flats. The building was torn down around 1921 for the construction of the Castro Theater.

James Parker Treadwell Sr had owned the rest of the block until around 1900. He was a prominent SF attorney (with a lot of professional and family drama - subject for another day) and he passed away in late 1884. He left his estate in such a contested shambles that parts of it did not clear probate until 1905 or 1906. Between 1884 and 1900, Fernando Nelson purchased a large parcel of land in Eureka Valley, and subdivided, built, and sold it off to form a large portion of the local housing stock. His goal was to build houses near the desirable horse-drawn streetcar lines, for people who wanted to work in the Barbary Coast, but live far away from it. He must have had his eye on this last empty plot of land for some time, waiting to snatch it up. Earlier pictures of the plot show cattle grazing on the land (probably from the dairy that was up 19th on Kite Hill), and locals clearly had no qualms cutting through diagonally on foot or in their wagons.

In this picture, you can see the start of Nelson’s grading on the southwest part of the block as he divided it into lots and laid out the continuation of Hartford St. (Ask us about Ford St West some time.) One of the tributaries of Dolores Creek originally flowed downhill just south of 18th St, so building up the base of the block there was a hedge against spring flooding.

Nelson usually built single family or 2-flat houses, but could customize his plans to suit. He’d started his career building big apartments with his brother-in-law William Hamerton, but he didn’t enjoy being a landlord as well as builder, and struck out on his own. In fact he usually sold off the valuable corner lots to developers who didn’t mind building big apartments. It looks like the owners of 27/29 knew they needed a little extra space, commissioned Nelson early, and so got in on the block first.

Nelson was living at 20th and Noe at the time of this photo, with a small lumber yard and planing mill onsite, so getting lumber down to the building site would’ve been a short trip. You can actually see five or six workers on the third floor putting up the top plate that the roof joists will sit on. You can also see that these are balloon framed buildings, meaning that the studs you see in the picture are a single piece of timber that continues all the way from the sill plate sitting on the bricks of the foundation, to the top of the wall where it meets the roof. The floor joists are hung on “ribbon boards” or “ledger boards” at each level.

The last bit I’ll comment on is the tiny diagonal slip of land at the southwest corner of 17th and Noe, where you can see a tiny church sitting squeezed between fences. That weird diagonal line is the edge of the original Rancho San Miguel land grant, so that parcel is just out of a contested area. (You can actually still see this border in satellite photos of the buildings along upper Market st.)

This corner lot was so tiny that the owners donated it to the Olivet Congregational Church, who built there anyway. However, in 1908 the Olivet Congregational Church merged with the Third Congregational Church to form the “Mission Congregational Church”, and having outgrown their pocket-sized church, Olivet returned the land to the original owners, Jacob A. Fisher and James Coyle. (They presumably sold it to a neighbor to consolidate the block, since it doesn’t appear as a separate parcel in later block books.) Together the two congregations raised funds to build a new, bigger church at 601 Dolores, which started construction in 1909 and opened on July 2nd 1911. They later merged with the First Congregational Church and moved to Polk St.

In 2015 the old-new church on Dolores was renovated to become the Children’s Day School Middle School.

More to come…

Among the many subjects I’ll be eventually writing about, we have:

  • Yelamu and Ramytush Ohlone
  • Mission Dolores
  • Californios
  • Mission Block 114
    • Pond, Dorland, Ford, Hart-Ford
  • Frontiersmen
    • J. P. Treadwell Sr.
    • Marshall Meeteer
    • Andrew Spaulding
    • Olivet Congregational Church
    • Water Wars
  • Fernando Nelson
  • 1906
  • Castro Theater
  • Streetcar suburbs and Auto suburbs
  • Immigrants
  • LGBT history
  • Mission Block 114
  • What’s up with those weird roads
  • Claim drama
  • Olivet Congregational Church
  • James Parker Treadwell Sr
  • Fernando Nelson
  • Fernando Nelson and Sons, Builders
  • Marshall Meeteer
  • Victorian house building
  • Queen Anne Style
  • Nelson details
  • Household technologies
  • The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906