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This fine peaked building with the lacy bargeboards is Meeteer House, sometimes called “Matear House”. It was originally built by Marshall Meeteer(the most-misspelled man in history), a carpenter from Baltimore who came to San Francisco around 1860.

Meeteer House at 429 Castro St, on a rainy April 28, 1901. Photo by DH Wulzen Jr.
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The style is what we’d generally call “carpenter gothic”, which is to say fancy, but fancy made by hand rather than with machined millwork and engine-powered lathes. The house clearly started as a single peaked structure, but quickly developed porches and verandahs. Eureka Valley was rich in water, and it looks like Meeteer capitalized on that by digging a well and fitting it with a wind-driven pump and a large water tank. With the city’s history of fire, these improvements were more than a luxury - they lowered your fire insurance premiums! The rest of the parcel was taken up with gardens, animal sheds, outbuildings, and some rental flats that sat directly at the property line.

Detail of June 28, 1900 photo by DH Wulzen Jr., showing Meeteer House from behind.

Meeteer died in 1886, and his widow sold the entire parcel, including house, grounds, and rental flats, to Andrew Spaulding. Andrew was a watchmaker and jeweler and silversmith who came to SF in 1867, working at a number of different jewelry stores and investing in real estate. Spaulding passed away in Nov 23, 1906, and his widow Susan Shockley Spaulding moved across the street to 428 Castro, where she lived until her death on Nov 27, 1915. Before her passing, Susan rented out the house.

William C. Hopper, a physician, is listed in the SF Directories first as a tenant, and then owner of the address starting in 1907, and continuing until 1912. The SF directory lists several others as living at this address until 1922.

Meeteer house was torn down around 1921 to make way for the Castro Theater. San Francisco nostalgia being what it is, a newspaper columnist eulogized the early block of Castro in 1923 in their column “Cities within a City”. Meeteer House is briefly mentioned (and badly misspelled), and this misspelling continues in historical records to this day.

The parking lot behind the Castro Theater is still called “Spaulding Court” on older city and Sanborn maps.