Residential area’s roots as racetrack
Ingleside Terraces is not one of San Francisco’s betterknown neighborhoods. There are no obvious tourist attractions — located in the southwestern part of the city, it’s a pleasant residential district, with a number of fine Craftsman, Edwardian, Dutch Colonial and Spanishstyle houses.
But this neighborhood south of Ocean Avenue and east of Junipero Serra Boulevard is worth a visit just to behold one of the strangest streets in San Francisco: Urbano Drive. This unique street, in the shape of a giant oval, traces the contours of a longvanished horseracing track that was once one of the most splendid in the West.
once one of the most splendid in the West.
The story of the street and the neighborhood is recounted in Woody LaBounty’s “Ingleside Terraces: San Francisco Racetrack to Residence Park.” Originally part of Jose de Jesus Noe’s 4,443acre San Miguel land grant, the remote area was slow to develop. When a few roadhouses opened at nearby Lake Merced, riders began to use an old path west of San Jose Road that became known as Ocean House Road, later Ocean Avenue.
By the 1860s, “sporting men” enjoyed riding their gigs on a circuit that went out Point Lobos Road (now Geary Boulevard) to the Cliff House, down Ocean Beach, and back home via the roadhouses at Lake Merced and Ocean House Road. A horseracing track opened just north of Lake Merced in 1865, but went out of business eight years later.
In 1885, a convivial businessperson named Cornelius Stagg opened what proved to be a popular roadhouse at Ocean House Road and Junipero Serra. He called it the Ingleside House, after a Celtic word meaning a domestic fireplace. Stagg was killed during a robbery in 1895, but the name he gave to his business lived on — and spread.
Not long after Stagg died, two wealthy bookmakers and a group of investors, including sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels, began construction on what was billed as the finest racetrack west of the Mississippi. They called it Ingleside Racetrack.
It cost $350,000 and featured a milelong track. The central grandstand held 5,000 spectators; the betting ring accommodated 20 bookies and 4,000 customers.
The track’s inaugural race was held on Thanksgiving Day 1895. Despite misty weather, at least 7,000 spectators made their way out to the sticks. The Call newspaper gushed that the track’s opening meant “a new era in horse racing on this side of the continent,” contrasting its genteel atmosphere with the Bay District track in the Inner Richmond, which it disparaged as “a resort mainly of disrepute. As a rule the better class of gentlemen did not care to go there, and if the impulse to witness racing could not be overcome they seldom boasted of having attended. As to ladies being present, that was out of the question.”
However, the new racetrack’s supposed respectability soon wore off. By its third season, The Chronicle was reporting that few society women were to be seen, and in the grandstand “there were some faces that always mark the racetrack. There were good women and not so good.”
The antigambling fervor of the Progressive era forced Ingleside Racetrack to cease horse racing in 1899. The owners tried to survive by staging automobile and bicycle races instead, and limited horse racing was later allowed, but the track had begun a terminal decline.
The coup de grace was the 1906 earthquake. The racetrack’s buildings were converted into residences for “special needs” refugees, “almshouse types” made up of the elderly, indigent, mentally ill and alcoholic. The Ingleside Model Camp, as it was called, served a total of 1,287 people before it closed in January 1908.
By 1910, the area around the old racetrack had begun to attract residents, with stores and churches springing up nearby. Talk that a tunnel would be bored through Twin Peaks, opening up the entire western side of the city, led the property’s owner, a turf man named Thomas Williams, to plan to turn it into a 150acre residential park, an exclusive area to be developed “along picturesque lines.” Williams optioned the property for $400,000 to a developer named Joseph Leonard, who had had great success building a neighborhood of Victorian homes in Alameda.
Leonard incorporated the Urban Realty Improvement Co., or Urico, and announced plans to build “the most beautiful suburban residence park in the city,” to be called Ingleside Terraces. Leonard said that by terracing lots around the old racetrack, his homes would have views of the Pacific and Lake Merced that could “never be obstructed.”
In keeping with the current nostalgia for California’s Spanish past, the development’s streets were all given Spanish names. The street built atop the racetrack oval would be called Urbano. As LaBounty points out, some of the names made no sense: Entrada (“entrance”) Court is an interior culdesac and not an entrance to anything, and Lunado (“crescentshaped”) Way is one of the straightest streets in the development.
By December 1912, much of the infrastructure was completed, 38 houses had been built or were under construction, 500 shade trees had been planted, and the first streetlights in six blocks were turned on. To celebrate, the developers held a grand ball in the old clubhouse, which had been converted into a “social center building” for the homeowners.
Urico began aggressively promoting the upscale new development. One ad was written as a poem, concluding, “If you reside in San Francisco, you owe it to your city to have seen this place that you may tell about it.” Another made the grand, albeit preposterous, claim that the area had better weather than “most peninsula localities.”
But the most original marketing device was a giant sundial, its vertical monument (called a gnomon) 28 feet long and 17 feet high and standing in a circle 34 feet in diameter. The sundial was dedicated on Oct. 10, 1913, with a weird allegorical performance in which two children led two live storks towing baby buggies, with real babies inside, around the dial.
The outwardly cheery tableau had an ugly side. Like other upscale residence parks of the time, Ingleside Terraces decreed that “no person of African, Japanese, Chinese or any Mongolian descent” would be allowed to buy or occupy any property. Such racial covenants were ruled illegal by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, but real estate agents continued to exclude nonwhites well into the 1950s.
So many of San Francisco’s old sites have vanished without a trace. But the grand oval of Urbano Drive remains, a reminder of the days when thousands of people made the long trek to the city’s barren west to place their bets at the greatest racetrack this side of the Mississippi.
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