San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Visitacion Valley seeks spot on history map
As the legend goes, San Francisco’s Visitacion Valley was named by a group of Franciscan missionaries who were lost in the fog on their way to the new Presidio of San Francisco. When the fog lifted, they celebrated Mass on a large rock. It was July 2, 1777, the feast of the visitation of the Virgin Mary to her cousin Elizabeth. The valley was inhabited by native people, of course, but their name for it was lost in time. So “Visitacion Valley” with the Spanish spelling stuck.
In a way, Visitacion Valley has been lost in the fog ever since. The neighborhood, on the southeastern edge of the city, is one of the city’s least-known neighborhoods. It is the first part of San Francisco drivers see coming up the Bayshore Freeway from the Peninsula, but it has none of the panache of San Francisco’s celebrated neighborhoods such as North Beach, Chinatown, the Mission, Noe Valley or the Sunset.
And it has been ignored by historians.
Though there are 288 official city landmarks in San Francisco, not a single one is in Visitacion Valley despite 254 years of local history. “Sadly, this is not surprising,” the historical group San Francisco Heritage said in a statement last fall. Designated landmarks “heavily favor master architects and downtown edifices,” and leave out outlying neighborhoods where working people live. Places like Visitacion Valley were “unfairly overlooked.”
San Francisco Heritage is trying to put the neighborhood on the map — with an election to pick a landmark and push for it to become an official city landmark before the city’s Historic Preservation Commission.
The group has narrowed the field to three candidates, each with a story. The election deadline is March 1. It’s online at sfheritage.org/ visitacion-valley -heritage. Anyone can vote.
It’s a curious trio: a 108-year-old firehouse, a classic church, and a building full of statues that comes with a rollicking past. Some historic places were left off the list — the historic rock (hard to get access), the site of San Francisco’s first auto court (it was demolished) or the Cow Palace (it’s in Daly City).
I took a tour at midweek with four women from the neighborhood led by Edie Epps, the doyenne of Visitacion Valley history. The first stop was Fire Department Station 44 at the corner of Wilde Avenue and Girard Street, just off the Bayshore Freeway. It’s a brick building with three balconies and looms over the valley like a fortress. Inside it’s packed with modern firefighting equipment and an old clock that stopped at 5:12 a.m. April 18, 1906, the exact time of the great earthquake. “Be Prepared Engine 44!” a sign says. Across the street is the former site of the Five Mile House, an old-time bar and roadhouse, way out in the country, 5 miles from the center of the city.
We headed south a bit, down San Bruno Avenue then Bayshore Boulevard, right on Leland Avenue, the district’s main shopping street.
St. James Presbyterian Church is where the street turns residential, and it is the second of the three candidates for landmark status.
The church traces its roots back to 1908, when Visitacion Valley had a building boom after much of the city was destroyed in the 1906 disaster. The valley was fairly empty in those days, and land was inexpensive. The present church was built in 1923, another boom time for the neighborhood.
Times were so good, the congregation engaged Julia Morgan, one of the West’s most celebrated architects. The church has a striking stained-glass window in the center of the facade, showing the biblical Parable of the Sower who casts seeds; some fall on rocky ground and are lost, some fall on good ground and prosper. Betty Parshall, one of the neighborhood historians, says it fits. The window, she says, was originally installed in a church in a town in Nevada. Both the town and the church failed, and the St. James people “liberated” the window and brought it to more fertile ground in Visitacion Valley.
The last stop was the most lively — a fake log cabin that was once the center of nightlife in this part of San Francisco. The building began as an ordinary wooden structure on the old Bayshore Road, the main road out of the city. It even had board sidewalks “right out of the Old West,” said Cynthia Cox, one of the guides.
But that wasn’t Old West enough for Sam Chappat, who converted it into a log cabin-style roadhouse in the early 1930s. By this time, the old highway had turned into the fabled U.S. 101, and Sam’s Lodge was right on the biggest north-south highway in all of California. Not only that, Sam’s was built right on the San Francisco-San Mateo county line, and just to be sure everybody knew it, Sam had a yellow county line painted down the middle of the dance floor.
It was one of those first and last chance places. What was legal in San Francisco County was illegal in San Mateo County, and vice versa. There were slot machines, and after-hours drinking along a 40-footlong bar. Not only that, but the cops from either county didn’t pay too much attention to nightlife on the edge. People still talk about it.
Later, when Sam sold out, it became a Chinese restaurant and nightspot, and later a Polynesian place with evening fire dancers. Even later the place became a venue for San Francisco’s first punk rock scene. Not to mention a period when the log cabin sold tropical fish. How’s that for history?
For the past 50 or so years, the place has been the home of the A. Silvestri Co., which manufactures and sells statues, fountains, birdbaths, planters, benches and pagodas. The log cabin and a garden outside are the showroom, packed with statues, iron fixtures, plants and fountains, a building with one foot in San Francisco and the other in San Mateo County.
There is a big garden with plants on the San Mateo side, and a classic black 1934 Fiat automobile stored on the San Francisco side, guarded by a life-size plaster statue of the Venus de Milo.
So the place has both a gaudy past and an unusual present. But should it be an official landmark? “Well, why not?” said Sandra Silvestri, who runs the company from behind a big oak desk. Visitacion Valley, she says, deserves to be recognized. “We’re the unsung heroes of San Francisco.”