Peculiar S. F. home holds bizarre past
Shady exploits of a crooked cop at root of sprawling house in Corbett Heights
One of the largest, and oddest, Victorian houses in San Francisco stands on the corner of Caselli Avenue and Douglass Street, in a neighborhood variously known as Corbett Heights or Eureka Valley. While ostentatious Victorians are not uncommon in the Western Addition, Pacific Heights and parts of the Mission, there is no building even remotely on the scale of this one anywhere in the vicinity.
A vast, 45room Queen AnneBaroque pile with a profusion of gables, turrets and other overthetop adornments, Nobby Clarke’s Mansion — also known as Nobby
Clarke’s Folly — rises above the smaller houses around it like a gingerbread behemoth. And the history of this gigantic home — and its deeply eccentric original owner — turns out to be as unlikely as its location.
The mansion was built by a selfenriching police officer turned egregiously litigious lawyer named Alfred Clarke. Clarke emigrated from Ireland in 1850. After a failed stint as a gold miner, he joined the San Francisco police in 1856, where he soon became known for
his rough treatment of suspects on his waterfront beat.
According to “Rancho San Miguel: A San Francisco Neighborhood History” by Mae Silver, Clarke’s hand was bitten so severely during a fight that he never regained full use of it, which is how he acquired the nickname “Nobby.” As a result of his injury, he was taken off the streets and given the job of clerk to the chief of police.
This position afforded Nobby ample opportunity to line his pockets. According to a 1902 Chronicle story, “For years the sure road to favor in the ‘ front office’ was believed among the policemen to lead through ‘ Nobby’ Clarke’s private pawnshop and warrantshaving parlors in the City Hall. In his capacity of money lender, warrant shaver and all around Shylock and police clerk, this onetime Irish wharfman accumulated a modest competency of some $ 500,000. ... Many a police officer still remembers how Clarke used to extend the insistent palm for ‘ voluntary’ contributions of $ 10 and $ 20 each for a suppositious ‘ Widow Jones.’ Those who demurred speedily found themselves on undesirable beats.”
Soon Clarke was making as much money as the chief of police. Apparently as a result of his dubious practices, he was suspended from the police force in 1867 for three years. He used this time to pass the bar, and when he returned to the Police Department became the chief legal adviser to both the department and the chief. When Clarke retired in 1887 he had amassed an astounding fortune — most sources place it at $ 200,000.
In 1890, Clarke bought 17 acres from three fellow police officers in a remote area of San Francisco
called Corbett Heights. As Michael Corbett notes in a historic context statement about the neighborhood, Clarke’s property appears to have included all of what is now Kite Hill, along with the two blocks bounded by 18th, Douglass and Danvers streets and Caselli Avenue.
The area’s first residents were milk ranchers, most of them German, who had begun settling there in the 1860s. At the time Clarke bought his land, it was very sparsely settled, with many milk ranches still operating. ( In 1888, there were 7,0008,000 cows within the city limits.) The stillstanding MillerJoost house at 3224 Market St., built in 1867 and the oldest house on Twin Peaks, is the only property associated with milk ranching in the area known to have survived.
The mansion Clarke began to build must have boggled the minds of his neighbors as they herded their cows on the surrounding slopes. At a time when onestory cottages could be built for about $ 1,000, he spent the inconceivable sum of $ 100,000 to buy the land, landscape it and construct his mansion.
The former waterfront beat cop was riding high, but his life was about to begin a downward trajectory. Clarke’s problems started even before he moved into his dream house, when his wife refused to live there with their child because it was too remote. It was not an unreasonable position. According to Corbett, Clarke and his neighbors initially had to provide their own sewage system, power and water.
Water was at the center of a bitter feud with a neighbor that would consume Clarke for the rest of his life. Another successful San Francisco entrepreneur, Behrend Joost, was operating a small water business, the Mountain Spring Water Company, drawing on springs near his home, which was about 1,000 feet west and uphill of Clarke’s Folly. Joost had started selling water by the bucket and cup in 1867 from a surface spring near the corner of presentday Clayton Street and Corbett Avenue. ( There are still numerous springs in the area, including one that can be heard constantly running in a manhole at the end of the appropriately named Mountain Spring Avenue.)
The Mountain Spring Water Company provided water for the handful of residents in the neighborhood. But Clarke refused to buy his neighbor’s water, instead opening his own waterworks, using water that Joost claimed he owned. Clarke’s system included dams, flumes, reservoirs, tanks and pumps. An 1895 photograph shows workers spraying a fire hose, demonstrating the water pressure in Clarke’s waterworks.
Relations between Clarke and Joost quickly became acrimonious. They fought verbally, and, according to Silver, physically: “Neighbors recount stories of their fist fights on 18th Street,” she writes.
Initially, it appeared that Clarke had won the water war. The neighborhood’s other residents began purchasing their water from him instead of his rival. But in 1891, his neighbors asked the Board of Health to condemn his water. The Call newspaper reported, “The water furnished the residents of Eureka Valley is impure and pumped from all the old wells and cess pools, and ... a large amount of disease to the children of the neighborhood has resulted.” The Board of Health condemned Clarke’s waterworks, but he continued to operate them, leading to a warrant for his arrest.
This was just the beginning of Clarke’s legal problems — problems that he exacerbated by becoming one of the most litigious figures in the city’s history. Clarke’s incessant lawsuits, combined with his defiance of the courts and his shady and disastrous business dealings, wiped out his fortune, caused him to be thrown in jail and made him a citywide figure of ridicule — with a bit of amused affection, a la Emperor Norton, thrown in. The story of Nobby Clarke’s downfall, and the peculiar fate of his mansion, will be the subject of the next Portals.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestselling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. His new book, with drawings by Paul Madonna, is “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City.” All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle. com/ portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle. com/ vault. Email: metro@ sfchronicle. com