Historic mansion restored and ready
Victorian emblem of S.F.’s Gilded Age reopens for tours
“I’m thrilled at what they’ve done to the house. It’s come to life again.” John Rothmann, descendant of William and Bertha Haas, who built the house 164 years ago
a new day for the Haas-Lilienthal House, a San Francisco classic that is the grand dame of the city’s Victorian homes.
The big gray mansion on Franklin Street on the edge of Pacific Heights has just gotten a $4.3 million overhaul to make sure it lasts to be enjoyed for generations to come.
The house, a survivor of San Francisco’s Gilded Age, nearly fell victim to the greatest enemy of wooden buildings — old age and dry rot. The house was built of redwood and oak in 1886 in the grand Queen Anne style, with turrets, peaked roofs, balconies, and a brick chimney three stories tall. The house, which has 24 rooms, is capped with a 67-foot-high tower faced with red shingles and shaped like a witch’s hat.
The years had taken their toll, and surveys showed that the place needed serious work. If something wasn’t done, said Alice Russell-Shapiro, “we might have to close it to the public because it wasn’t safe.”
That would have been a tragedy for RussellShapiro, a Haas descendant whose family built and lived in the house for four generations. She became cochair of a campaign to raise more than $4 million in private funds to make the old place look good as new. The HaasLilienthal House is owned by San Francisco Heritage, a nonprofit corporation that protects the city’s architectural and cultural identity.
The repairs came just in time. “As it turned out, some parts of the exterior were held toings gether only by the paint,” said Mike Buhler, Heritage’s president. “That’s how far the dry rot had gone.”
Now the house gleams with polished wood, sparkling crystal, and grand furnishIt’s in the style of years gone by. But underneath, San Francisco Heritage has added a few 21st century touches, like modern wiring, and accommodations that make it accessible for people with disabilities.
Now, Buhler said, everyone can visit the house, which is open to public tours Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Heritage also opens the mansion for special events, like the grand ball held in the mansion’s ballroom on Valentine’s Day, when many couples came this year dressed in Victorian finery and danced to
stately waltzes.
“I’m thrilled at what they’ve done to the house,” said John Rothmann, another descendant of William and Bertha Haas, who built the house 164 years ago. “It’s come to life again.”
The Haas-Lilienthal House is more than a handsome face. It comes with a story, and that helped the National Trust for Historic Preservation choose it as one of America’s treasures.
The story begins in 1868, when Wolf Haas, a 19-year-old with big ambitions, landed in San Francisco to seek his fortune. He was born in a small town in Bavaria, part of the Jewish community there. He left the old country and came here, Rothmann said, “because of the free air of San Francisco, where it was possible to not be afraid of being a Jew.”
Haas had relatives in the city, got a job as a clerk with Haas Bros., a wholesale grocery firm owned by a cousin. He worked his way up to salesman and then partner in the firm. The company prospered, Haas changed his first name to William, and bought a house for $1,000. In 1880, he married Bertha Greenebaum, daughter of another San Francisco merchant.
By 1886, William and Bertha Haas had three children and had done so well they were able to hire architect Peter Schmidt to design the grand mansion that stands today. The building cost $18,000, not including the land.
The Haas family led the good life in San Francisco. They entertained at home, traveled abroad, had servants and even a country estate in Atherton, away from the city’s summer fogs.
They were members of what San Francisco historian Fred Rosenbaum calls “the German Jewish elite” who operated many successful businesses. They moved in the same circles, married each other and worked together, and the names of their enterprises are all over Northern California from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley to Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. Stern Grove, the Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate Park, and even the celebrated and now vanished Fleishhacker Pool near the zoo all have links to the Haas-Lilienthal House.
“This was the epicenter of it all,” Rothmann said of the house. “This house is part of the fabric of San Francisco.”
The family, their friends and associates and the businesses they built, “made San Francisco the commercial capital of the West,” Rothmann said.
But the story of the HaasLilienthal House was also one of parties, births, weddings, funerals, and Sunday family dinners for children, grandchildren, uncles, aunts, cousins. The last member of the family to live in the house was William and Bertha’s daughter Alice, who married Samuel Lilienthal in 1909. She and her husband moved into the house after William Haas, the patriarch of the family, died in 1916.
Alice Haas Lilienthal spent the rest of her long life there. Her beloved sister, Florine Haas Bransten, lived just down the street. When Alice died in 1972, the family presented the family home to San Francisco Heritage, a gift of the past to generations to come.