When a friend he had sold the house next door to suggested Richard Jordan buy the old Victorian for sale at 658 Elizabeth Street when it went on the market in 1971, the former real estate agent at first expressed misgivings.
"I said, 'That old dump?'" recalled Jordan, 78, who in the end purchased the house and spent decades rehabbing it. "It was uninhabitable when I came here."
Constructed in 1893 and built in the Italianate style, the mustard-colored duplex features slanted bay windows, Corinthian columns, and a cow motif frieze a friend created specially for Jordan, who has a wide selection of bovine collectibles.
"I wanted to try the best I could to keep it in the style it was built," said Jordan, a gay man who lives alone in one half of the house and rents out the other unit and a separate downstairs garden apartment he had built.
He named the house Rosewood Hall due to the rose bushes planted in the backyard and the narrow, hall-like structure of the home.
"I always liked old houses," said Jordan, who was born in San Francisco, grew up in Glendale, and returned to the city in the late 1950s. "My family lived in many of them over the years."
Many gay men share Jordan's fondness for the city's older housing stock of roughly 13,000 Victorian era structures that remain, according to the Victorian Alliance of San Francisco. The preservation group, formed in 1973 to protect the historic houses from being torn down, estimates that half of its 3,000 members are gay homeowners.
"The alliance was formed in response to the wholesale slaughter of these buildings during the urban redevelopment era of the 1960s and 1970s," said Roger K. Reid, a gay man who is the current president of the Victorian Alliance and owns his own interior design firm.
Victorians derive their name from England's Queen Victoria, whose reign lasted from 1837 to 1901. They come in a variety of styles, such as Stick, Italianate, and Gothic Revival.
The rarest style of Victorians are Queen Anne's, with 400 left in the city, according to the Victorian Alliance. They are known for their arches and turrets, often resembling a witch's cap.
While they can appear to be similar to Victorians, homes constructed between 1901 and 1910 are known as Edwardians, due to their being built during the reign of King Edward VII.
In San Francisco many of the neighborhoods with large concentrations of Victorians were attractive to the influx of gay men arriving in the city five decades ago. As longtime straight homeowners fled for the suburbs, these newer arrivals scooped up the housing stock at relatively cheap prices.
In August 1965 Richard Reutlinger acquired the Italianate house at 824 Grove Street, the site of a black Baptist church for the prior 12 years. City officials were bulldozing many of the stately old homes in the surrounding area, which at the time was the heart of the city's African American community, and replacing them with public housing developments.
"It was in pretty bad shape. But because I wanted a big Victorian house, and this was the only neighborhood I could afford at the time, I bought it," said Reutlinger, 78, who worked for 35 years as an office manager at Arthur Andersen and Company. "Nobody else wanted it. It was just junk and redevelopment was about to start."
Since moving to San Francisco in 1956, the Nebraska native had been enamored with the city's famous Victorian housing stock. He first bought a small Victorian in the Mission that he fixed up and sold prior to buying his current home, originally built in 1886 for businessman Henry Brune.
"I couldn't believe they were going to tear down all these old homes in the Western Addition," said Reutlinger. "But, of course, they did."
As it turned out, several other gay men had bought homes on his block and were also restoring them to their Victorian grandeur. Three gay male friends in 1957, for $13,000, had bought the Victorian at 814 Grove Street.
Because Bill Plath, Dick Rousseau, and Billy Brunski were white, it spared the 800 block of Grove from being included in the city's redevelopment plans for the area, said Mike Finn, a gay man and performance artist who in the early 2000s inherited the home from the men. He had befriended Plath and later became his caretaker.
"We were friends long before I knew they had this house," said Finn, 48, who rents out several of the houses' five bedrooms via Airbnb to help pay the property taxes, which are now "more than what they paid for the house."
Desirable homes
In today's super heated real estate market, the once frowned upon Victorians are now some of the most expensive housing to be had in the city. Finn readily acknowledges he would be unable to buy his home in the current market, as he estimates it's worth $4 million.
"No one lives in these houses today unless they are rich," said Finn.
Reid, 54, the Victorian Alliance's president, is himself priced out of owning a Victorian. He and his husband own a mid-century house built in 1947 west of Twin Peaks.
"I think it is an interesting thing to note that even though I don't live in a Victorian, I am willing to volunteer so much time and energy into the preservation of these buildings," said Reid. "It is because of how important they are to our sense of place."
"The only way to have a sense of place is to have historic houses in town," added Reid. "Otherwise we run the danger of looking like a strip mall or Anywhere, USA."
Yet many Victorians are being bought by housing developers or younger homeowners, who rip out their historic interiors to install more open layouts to the horror of preservationists. Others are simply torn down to make way for modern buildings.
"They are being destroyed. It is appalling," said Jordan, a member of the Victorian Alliance. "People don't like restoring things. What can you do?"
The Victorian Alliance has been pushing the city to enact tougher rules for what developers and homebuyers can do to both the exteriors and interiors when remodeling a Victorian. The current zoning, argues the group, provides very little protection for either.
"Interiors are the most important aspects of this whole thing and there are no protections for interiors and indoor spaces. It is something I want to personally draw a lot of attention to as president," said Reid, who specializes in historic interiors. "The resources they were made of cannot be replicated. All these houses are built out of old growth redwood that are gone."
One issue is that the layout of many Victorians, said Reid, has fallen out of favor with today's homeowners. The houses were typically built with front and rear parlors, dining rooms, and a servant's area that included the kitchen and a laundry porch. Upstairs were the bedrooms and shared bathrooms.
"People completely gut the entire thing and get rid of the historic mantel. They get rid of the walls separating these rooms and put in sleek European cabinetry," said Reid. "In some cases they rip out gorgeous wood staircases and put in a glass railing. I think there is a huge sense of loss. It is hard to put into words."
The city's zoning rules can also hamper attempts to restore a Victorian's exterior that has been removed or hidden behind stucco, argued Reid.
"It is illegal to create false historicism," he said. "They do not allow you to restore the facade even if the building is a Victorian and has shingles or been stucco-overed."
The rules follow the Secretary of the Interior Standard for Rehabilitation of Historic Properties, said Tim Frye, a preservation coordinator with the city's planning department. The guidelines require a homeowner to use historical images of the house to recreate what the facade looked like when it was first built or some other evidence to support the design of the proposed fa�ade.
"For instance, the standards say don't use conjecture in restoring a building. Don't guess what a building looked like," said Frye. "Use physical evidence."
That could include historic siding found underneath the stucco or shadow or paint outlines on the building that can provide clues to what the shape of the millwork initially was on the house, explained Frye. Visual clues from nearby identical houses can also be used.
"Your building may have been modified, but two doors down is a similar building that has not been modified. We can use that as a guide," said Frye. "We don't want people creating a false sense of history. We want people to look at the building and know what they are looking at."
Tighter controls
If a property has been listed on the city's register of historic places, then there are tighter controls on what can be done to a house's exterior. If it is within a historic district, then there are more protections even if the house is not registered individually as being historic.
Neither such designation applies to a house's interior. Indoor spaces can only be protected if publicly accessible.
"Those give us a framework in outlining how work should occur on a building," said Frye.
Anyone can petition the city to landmark a property or create a historic district, noted Frye. It is up to the Board of Supervisors to approve any such requests.
"You do not necessarily have to own it," he said. "We are always supportive of folks wanting to preserve these buildings. It is part of what makes the city special."
The planning approval process can be so cumbersome as to discourage homeowners from attempting to protect the historical integrity of their home, argued Jim Warshell, a longtime Victorian Alliance member.
"The cheapest and easiest way to go is either do nothing or do it modern," said Warshell.
He and his wife 12 years ago bought a Victorian, known as the Fisk House, in Hayes Valley built in 1883 and spent years giving it the "love and attention and nurturing and repair" it needed. Yet they have not sought to place it on any historic register to date, fearful doing so would negatively impact their preservation work on the house.
"Here, it seems, anything I want to do to it then requires so much more review. You lose so much control over the process of doing anything, and everything is going to be slower, infinitely more expensive, and possibly less the way I wanted it," said Warshell. "So why the hell would I even consider doing it?"
Apart from talking to city officials and planning staff on re-examining the historic preservation rules, the Victorian Alliance also tries to recruit the public to support its goals of saving these 115-year-old plus homes. Each October it hosts house tours in a different neighborhood where alliance members open the doors to their homes and invite the public inside.
"It is depressing and it is frustrating," said Reid of the fight to save the city's remaining Victorians. "The only thing we can do is have our annual house tour to show the public how fabulous these houses are."
For more information about the Victorian Alliance, visit its website at https://www.victorianalliance.org/.