Location

Forest Hill is located near the middle of the city, south of the Inner Sunset and northeast of West Portal

West Portal, San Francisco, California

West Portal is a small neighborhood in San Francisco, California. Like adjacent Forest Hill and St. Francis Wood, West Portal is an affluent, primarily residential area of the City...

. Boundaries are roughly Seventh Avenue/Laguna Honda Boulevard to the east, Taraval Street to the south, and 14th Avenue to the west.

History

Construction on the neighborhood began in 1912, on land originally owned by Adolph Sutro

Adolph Sutro

Adolph Heinrich Joseph Sutro was the 24th mayor of San Francisco, and second Jewish mayor, serving in that office from 1894 until 1896...

 was purchased from his heirs

Inheritance

Inheritance is the practice of passing on property, titles, debts, rights and obligations upon the death of an individual. It has long played an important role in human societies...

 by a private firm. Streets in Forest Hill were not built to San Francisco's specific standards regarding width, grade, etc., and therefore were not accepted nor maintained by the City until 1978. (Many of the streets are extravagantly landscaped curving lanes.)

Attractions and characteristics

Forest Hill is one of the only non-condominium developments in the San Francisco that has an active homeowners' association, requiring membership of all property owners and payment of an annual fee for maintenance of the planted common areas owned by the association http://www.foresthill-sf.com/association/ The association also governs remodeling and new construction.

The area south of Dewey Boulevard is known as Laguna Honda or Forest Hill Extension. The extension is another section of Forest Hill, except with smaller homes and more moderate pricing. The name Laguna Honda means "Deep Lagoon" in Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 and presumably refers to the Laguna Honda Reservoir

Laguna Honda Reservoir

Laguna Honda is a reservoir on the southwest shoulder of Mount Sutro in San Francisco, California, U.S.A..-History:In 1865, the Spring Valley Water Works built a long redwood pipeline to transport drinking water from Pilarcitos Canyon to this reservoir. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed...

 at the intersection of Laguna Honda Boulevard and Clarendon Avenue.

Laguna Honda Hospital and the Muni Metro

Muni Metro

Muni Metro is a light rail system serving San Francisco, California, operated by the San Francisco Municipal Railway , a division of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency...

 Forest Hill Station are located between Forest Hill and Laguna Honda, near the intersection of Laguna Honda Boulevard and Dewey Boulevard. School of the Arts

School of the Arts High School (San Francisco)

Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts is a public high school in San Francisco, California, in the United States. S.O.T.A. ranked by Newsweek's Jay Mathews Challenge Index as the best high school in the United States in 2007....

 high school is on Portola Drive near Woodside Avenue, in the south-eastern corner of Laguna Honda. As the name implies, landscaping throughout Forest Hill is unusually lush for San Francisco: Magellan Avenue's elm

Elm

Elms are deciduous and semi-deciduous trees comprising the genus Ulmus in the plant family Ulmaceae. The dozens of species are found in temperate and tropical-montane regions of North America and Eurasia, ranging southward into Indonesia. Elms are components of many kinds of natural forests...

s make it one of the few streets in the city with a true tree canopy. Several homes and a community clubhouse designed by celebrated California Arts and Crafts Movement

Arts and Crafts movement

Arts and Crafts was an international design philosophy that originated in England and flourished between 1860 and 1910 , continuing its influence until the 1930s...

 architect Bernard Maybeck

Bernard Maybeck

Bernard Ralph Maybeck was a architect in the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 20th century. He was a professor at University of California, Berkeley...

 add to the picturesque, rustic quality of the neighborhood.

Forest Hill http://www.foresthill-sf.com is one of the least densely populated neighborhoods in San Francisco and residents take pride in what they perceive as a small-town community. The Forest Hill Association, http://www.foresthill-sf.com/association/, has been serving the residents of Forest Hill for nearly one hundred years, and holds its Board meetings on first Monday evening of each month at the clubhouse. The historic Forest Hill clubhousehttp://www.foresthill-sf.org/association/FHA-clubdesc.html on Magellan Avenue is also home of the Forest Hill Garden Club http://www.foresthill-sf.com/gardenclub/, the neighborhood women's social organization founded in 1931 to promote the cultivating of flowers and gardens in the community. The Clubhouse is also the site of the Forest Hill Musical Days,http://www.foresthill-sf.com/musicaldays/, an intimate neighborhood chamber music festival, founded in 2003 by pianist Mari Kodama and her husband, conductor Kent Nagano

Kent Nagano

__FORCETOC__Kent George Nagano is an American conductor and opera administrator. He is currently the music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal and the Bavarian State Opera.-Biography:...

, both of whom are residents of the neighborhood. The festival is organized entirely by volunteers from the neighborhood, as music loving residents open their homes to host performing artists from all over Europe.