San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
From basement ceiling falls tale of love long ago
Christina Lalanne opens the worn notebook and traces a finger along the slanting script.
The text is written in Danish, which Lalanne doesn’t speak, and it’s jotted in an archaic hand that’s hard to decipher. To many people, it would look like gibberish, but not Lalanne.
Sitting at her dining room table, she flips to a random page and scans the yellowed paper. “Ah, mill builder,” she says, pointing to a word midparagraph. Then, from memory and recognition, she starts building the story around it. It’s the tale of a Danish carpenter who immigrated to San Francisco in the early years of the 20th century and the young woman he ventured across the world to find.
That story literally fell into Lalanne’s life in January 2019, when a 119-year-old diary slipped from her basement ceiling during seismic retrofitting. Others might have skimmed the foreign words and set it aside as a curious relic, but Lalanne was captivated. Over the next two years she followed its
“I was basically just sitting there staring at those words, and the enigma of it all just kind of ate at me.”
Christina Lalanne
breadcrumbs through census records and newspaper archives, across the Atlantic and deep into the history of San Francisco and her own past.
Because, once Lalanne unlocked what the pages contained, she felt an overwhelming responsibility to share it. To make sure the words scrawled in a diary and hidden in the ceiling of a house in San Francisco for more than 100 years would not be lost to history.
***
Lalanne and her husband, Mat Temmerman, were looking for a project when they purchased the Sunset District house near the intersection of 20th Avenue and Irving Street in 2015. They were taken with the oddities of its construction and the vintage handpainted murals adorning the walls.
A scene of early 1900s San Francisco stretches around the dining room: Mission Dolores with Twin Peaks’ barren hills rising in the background, Spanish galleons docked along the bay, a drunk slumped against a building while a miner strides Dolores Street into the distance.
The price was more than they wanted to spend, but Lalanne knew immediately: This would be their home.
“I’ve been in hundreds of old houses here in the city, but I’d never seen anything like it before,” she says. “This one just so clearly came from somebody’s imagination.”
It took about five minutes to find out whose. With a few online newspaper archive searches, Lalanne had a name: Hans Jorgen Hansen, a Danish immigrant and carpenter who arrived in the United States in 1904.
Hansen built the home as his own at age 30 in 1910, laying the parquet floors with contrasting inlays in the dining room and installing the stained-glass tulips by the front door.
He lived there with his wife, Christine, and their three children, back when developers were starting to sculpt the area’s sand dunes into housing lots, and a diverse community of immigrant laborers was moving to San Francisco’s west side to put down roots and take up work.
As Lalanne set about restoring the property, she amassed a trove of artifacts that spoke to its past, plucked from corners or revealed as she took the house apart and put it back together: an advertisement for a tailoring business stashed under the floor tiles; building plans jotted in Hansen’s tilted script; a stack of court summonses alleging he had neglected to pay his subcontractors; and a full set of dentures, smiling up from a crumpled paper bag. Then there was the wood. The house, Lalanne says, had been “battered into conformity” ahead of the sale, its graceful oak buffet and grand mahogany mantel hidden beneath layers of thick white paint.
Lalanne has spent the past six years stripping it, replacing modern minimalism with Bradbury & Bradbury patterned wallpaper and glowing refurbished wood. She compares the transformation to the scene from “The Wizard of Oz” in which Dorothy steps from sepia-toned Kansas into vibrant Technicolor.
“I love stripping,” Lalanne says on a spring afternoon this year, just days after finishing the foyer carved from richly grained fir. “It’s a way to enact physical change in the world, and it’s the way it was supposed to be.”
Learning the diary’s secrets would become a similar calling.
The more she uncovered, the more compelled she felt to continue.
***
It is not uncommon to find antique documents in historic homes in San Francisco. There are scraps of the past tucked beneath floorboards and wedged behind fixtures all over the city.
“These homes have been lived in for over 100 years,” says Nicole Meldahl, executive director of the Western Neighborhoods Project, which has a collection of photographs, art and artifacts from the western realms of San Francisco. “Builders would stash things in the walls and the ceilings.”
One night in 2019, when Lalanne and Temmerman were having soft-story earthquake work done, the Wi-Fi cut out. Temmerman went down to the basement to reset the modem and found a pile of debris shoved into a plastic bucket destined for the trash.
Mixed in with the dirt were two faded notebooks.
Back upstairs, he held the journals behind his back. “No amount of hype will oversell what I’ve found,” Temmerman said.
The next moments were kind of a blur. They leafed through the books and laid out a railroad map of the American West, split at the seams, that was tucked inside. The opening page of one volume had a date: January 1, 1900. Lalanne stared at the handwriting with a flash of recognition.
“I know his name,” she said. If the fact of the diary’s existence isn’t particularly unusual, Meldahl says Lalanne’s reaction was. “Christina is incredibly rare and unique in that she cared to keep it.”
Lalanne, 36, grew up in Forest Hill, a fourth-generation San Franciscan whose great-grandfather emigrated from France around the same time as Hansen arrived. When she was young, her parents died a year apart, leaving Lalanne and her three siblings as orphans when she was only 9. The four children were split between two relatives; Lalanne was raised by an aunt and uncle who lived two doors down.
Even as a child, she had an appreciation for the historic architecture of her neighborhood, turreted Tudors next to Norman chateaus. After she moved into Hansen’s century-old home, Lalanne learned a grade-school classmate had lived there growing up. Perhaps, she muses, she played there as a kid. But Lalanne can’t remember now. It just hovers as a possibility, a small, unknowable detail among so many.
At times, she feels as though she was meant to own the home, meant to unravel the diary’s secrets and share them. In a sense, she’s the ideal person for the job. A historian with a master’s degree in historical preservation, she has spent the past 15 years as a tour guide, leading busloads of travelers around the monuments of Washington, D.C., and the national parks of the American Southwest.
She is, in essence, a professional storyteller.
***
To tell Hansen’s story, though, Lalanne first had to understand it. The diaries were written largely in Danish. When Lalanne showed the text to some acquaintances from Denmark, their responses amounted to benevolent shrugs. The turn-of-the-century cursive was too hard to comprehend.
So, Lalanne decided to translate them herself. Letter by letter, she typed the words into Google Translate, but the first blocks returned nonsense — a jumble of letters that were neither Danish nor English.
“I saw my friend for the first time and in my quiet mind I imagined myself and Anna engaged.”
Hans Jorgen Hansen
Christina Lalanne lays out century-old diaries, letters and maps, including those discovered in the basement of her home, in her dining room where the original wood paneling and painted murals still stand. The home was built by Hans Jorgen Hansen, a Danish immigrant, in 1910. Hanne Oosterom. Oosterom spent a week tracking Hans and Anna through church parish books, government records and into the Swedish national archive, uncovering that Anna, born to a Swedish mother, had immigrated to the United States with her paternal grandmother.
“It’s like a puzzle,” Oosterom said over Skype from Denmark. “I think I helped her with some of the puzzle pieces, so she can better see the whole picture.”
Assembling that picture became a compulsion for Lalanne. Some nights she would stay up for hours, typing queries into Ancestry.com on her iPad, hunting for a home address or death certificate that might connect the dots or create a new one.
And the more information she gathered, the more it corroborated what was in the diary — and hinted at what might have happened after Hans quit writing.
***
The Atavist is an online magazine that publishes just one story each month — juicy, long-form tales about, say, an informant who duped the FBI or pet detectives on the trail of a feline serial killer. Lalanne’s pitch to the publication was a historical romance from a writer who had never been published before, but something about it caught editor Seyward Darby’s eye.
“Even that first email was just so well crafted,” Darby says, recalling a description of Lalanne’s home so vivid she felt like she was walking the halls. “She had all of the right words for the space.”
But when Lalanne sent along her first draft, Darby’s heart sank. She could imagine the best possible version of the essay Lalanne wanted to write, but she couldn’t see the path to getting there. “I like the story so much,” Darby told Lalanne over email. “The thing I keep tripping up on is how it changed you.”
Obsessed with unraveling the mystery of Hans and Anna, Lalanne had resolved to share their story with the world, but she squirms slightly when the con