‘Vertigo’ mansion suffered fate of real-life horror story
The most recent Portals told the tumultuous early history of the Fortmann mansion, a Victorian at Gough and Eddy streets in San Francisco that plays a cryptic role in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece, “Vertigo.”
To review: In “Vertigo,” the building is the McKittrick Hotel, where Kim Novak’s character is briefly spotted from the outside — or is she? — by the detective played by James Stewart. When he goes inside to investigate, it turns out she’s gone, and perhaps was never there.
In real life, the 18-room home in the Western Addition was built in 1879 by a banker and
politician named “Old John” Conly. But Conly’s ne’er-do-well sons squandered his estate, and the building was purchased in 1895 by Henry Fortmann, the son of a German immigrant.
A wealthy businessman and pillar of society, Fortmann and his wife raised two daughters in the mansion. By the time he moved out in the 1940s, however, the Western Addition had been transformed from the middleand upper-class neighborhood of the late 19th century into something else.
It started after the 1906 earthquake and fire, after which many single-family Victorian homes were converted into apartments. World War II resulted in another massive change: The federal government forcibly removed the 5,000 Japanese Americans living in Japantown, on the northern side of the neighborhood. Crowding into the increasingly dilapidated housing were 12,000 African Americans from the South who came to work in wartime shipyards.
When the war ended and the shipyards closed, unemployment and crime spiked. But for all its problems, the Western Addition was still a living neighborhood, the “Harlem of the West,” the vibrant center of San Francisco’s black community. Its main drag, Fillmore Street, was lined with black-run restaurants, barber shops, stores and jazz clubs.
City officials, however, saw only the negatives. In 1947, a city report said that only a “clean sweep” could make the Western Addition “a genuinely good place to live.” In 1948, the Board of Supervisors declared the neighborhood a “blighted area” and designated it for redevelopment, for which federal funds were made available.
The newly created San Francisco Redevelopment Agency was charged with cleaning up the “blight.” For years, it accomplished little. But when a hardcharging executive named Justin Herman was appointed as head of the agency, “urban renewal” — which the writer James Baldwin famously called “Negro removal” — began in earnest.
By the time the bulldozers were finished, 2,500 Victorians in the Western Addition had been demolished and 883 businesses shuttered. Between 20,000 and 30,000 African American residents were displaced. There was no plan to rehouse them, and few of them ever returned. It was one of the most disgraceful episodes in the city’s history.
Like its neighborhood, the once-opulent mansion at 1007 Gough St. had fallen on hard times. Sometime after Fortmann’s death in 1946, the building was sold. According to a real estate compendium of the day, the owner in 1951 was the Golden Gate Commandery, a local chapter of the Knights Templars fraternal organization. From 1951 to 1953, the building was occupied by one Harold L. Heakin. It was then vacant for several years, and by 1957 it had become a rooming house, listed in the city directory as “residence club-lodgings.”
So when Hitchcock portrayed the mansion as a rooming house called the McKittrick Hotel, everything except its name more or less reflected its current rundown reality. In 1959, the Redevelopment Agency acquired the building and marked it for demolition.
The mansion now entered its surreal twilight. As wrecking companies began bulldozing the old wooden buildings, the Western Addition became a no-man’s land, haunted by vandals, scavengers, thrill-seeking teenagers and what were then called “bums” or “hobos.”
Arson was rampant: A 1959 Chronicle story headlined, “A race to wreck the Western Addition,” noted, “Every time the Redevelopment Agency buys another building in the Western Addition area, a race begins between the wrecker, the kids and the firebugs.”
The paper reported that there were 90 fires a year in the 28-block redevelopment area. Redevelopment Director Eugene Riordan said it started with kids, who would smash all the windows in vacant buildings. Thieves would then remove the plumbing fixtures and cabinets. “Then hoboes come in and often start fires,” Riordan said, adding that “bums” were responsible for night blazes and youths for daytime ones.
On the night of July 23, 1959, the Fortmann mansion fell victim to the flames.
In a story the next day headlined, “Kids set fire to SF movie mansion,” The Chronicle reported that “the musty, threestory structure, recently featured in the movie ‘Vertigo,’ apparently was set afire by matches. The building had been condemned for the Western Addition redevelopment and had been abandoned for the past two weeks.”
One hundred firefighters managed to limit the damage to the upper story and attic. Fire Chief William Murray said youngsters had “roamed at will” through the old mansion ever since the last occupant left. He said they apparently had set fire to it.
It turned out Hollywood had kept its eye on the mansion — neighbors interviewed after the fire said the building had been used as a backdrop for episodes of the TV police drama “The Lineup.”
Sometime in 1959 or 1960, the old house was demolished, along with almost all the other Victorians in the redevelopment area.
Fittingly, given the air of mystery that surrounds the building in its star turn for Hitchcock, the exact date the Fortmann mansion vanished from the face of the Earth is not known. The Redevelopment Agency was dissolved in 2014, and no records of the building’s demolition could be found in its archives. A soccer field belonging to Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory school now occupies the site.
The old mansion that once felt the footsteps of politicians and debutantes, magnates and hobos, is gone forever. But thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, it has a ghostly immortality. To the innumerable ways in which illusion and reality are intertwined in his hypnotic film, one more can be added: the haunted real history of the McKittrick Hotel.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. 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