'Like moving a herd of elephants': San Francisco's history of houses on wheels
Hundreds of San Franciscans lined the streets on Sunday – phones drawn and ready – to glimpse a unique procession slowly making its way through the city. “Ladies and gentlemen, please stand on the sidewalk,” a police speaker blared. “There’s a house coming down the street.”
The two-story, 5,170-sq-ft green Victorian, known as the Englander House, had spent more than a century in the heart of San Francisco. But for years it stood vacant and fell into disrepair, sandwiched behind a gas station and loomed over by new apartment buildings. The city, which suffers from a housing shortage, was ready to build a 48-unit building in its place.
But instead of demolishing the beautiful building, teams lifted it off its foundation, put it on wheels, and heaved it to a new home six blocks away. Tree-trimmers, city workers, and excited observers joined the parade through sharp turns and narrow misses with balconies and light poles, as the six-bedroom house inched along at no more than 1mph.
The move, which cost the owner, Tim Brown, roughly $400,000 (£280,000), was no easy feat. It was the first time a Victorian had been relocated in roughly 50 years, according to the San Francisco Historical Society – but it is certainly not the first time ever. San Francisco has a long history of relocating buildings, often in similarly dramatic fashion.
Even as far back as 1886, Samuel Clemens – better known by his pen name, Mark Twain – mockingly chronicled an ill-fated move for the local newspaper, the Daily Morning Call, as SFGate’s Andrew Chamings noted in an article about the history of house moving late last year. “An old house got loose from her moorings last night and drifted down Sutter Street towards Montgomery,” the author wrote, adding that, for several days, “the vagrant twostory frame house has been wandering listlessly about Commercial Street”.
Back then, horses had to do the lugging. Crews used boards, ties, and oiled planks to slowly pull the houses over San Francisco’s hills. It seems a difficult way to do things, but Diane C Donovan, who detailed the centuries of house-moving in her book San Francisco Relocated, found it was a fairly common practice. Some homes were even brought to the city by ship before being transported across town.
The city’s most famous move – and
probably its biggest – happened in the 1970s, when 12 Victorian homes were spared from destruction during San Francisco’s Western Addition redevelopment plan. Two decades prior, the San Francisco redevelopment agency had set out to clear an entire community and build new housing that would attract affluent residents. Home to mostly Black and immigrant families, the Western Addition neighborhoods were slated for demolition in what is now considered one of the most egregious acts of gentrification. In the end, more than 800 businesses were closed and 4,729 households had to leave their homes. Roughly 2,500 Victorian homes were torn down.
But 12 were spared. With public anger growing over the Victorians being wiped from the city, the redevelopment agency agreed to auction some of the houses and transport them out of the area.
“It was like moving a herd of giant elephants – and about the same speed,” said a former redevelopment agency official, Carlo Middione, in a video about the experience, published by FoundSF, a local history organization. The project took nearly a month to complete.
“It was a big spectacle,” said Dave Glass, a photographer whose parents emigrated from Poland and raised him in the Western Addition. They moved out to the Sunset District by the beach when his childhood home was demolished. Years later, he documented the relocation of the houses that were saved. “People who lived nearby would open their windows and see a big Victorian house passing by. It was really something to see.”
Glass was also out watching the Englander House move through the city last weekend. The process, he said, hadn’t changed much. But he thinks the sentiment has. He lamented how the structures had not been valued in previous decades. “People didn’t give a damn about the Victorian houses,” he said, noting that even though dozens have been preserved, thousands were destroyed. “Now they are prized.”
Glass hopes it stays that way, that San Franciscans will have enough pride in the city’s history and aesthetic to protect the Victorians – even if that means making big moves. “We have these tall, ornate, redwood buildings,” he said. “Nobody else has those.”