The William Westerfeld House sits across the street from the northwest corner of Alamo Square

Alamo Square

Alamo Square is a residential neighborhood and park in San Francisco, California, in the Western Addition, a district of the city's fifth Supervisorial district, and are served by several Muni bus lines including the 5, 21, 22, and 24...

 at 1198 Fulton Street (at Scott St.) in San Francisco. Constructed in 1889 at a cost of $9,985, the home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is San Francisco Landmark

Landmark

This is a list of landmarks around the world.Landmarks may be split into two categories - natural phenomena and man-made features, like buildings, bridges, statues, public squares and so forth...

 Number 135.

William Westerfeld, a German-born confectioner, arrived in San Francisco in the 1870s. By the 1880s he had established a chain of bakeries. He hired builder Henry Geilfuss to design for his family of six a 28-room mansion with an adjoining rose garden and carriage house.

When Westerfeld died in 1895, the home was sold to John Mahoney, noted for building the St. Francis Hotel

St. Francis Hotel

The Westin St. Francis is a historic luxury hotel located on Powell and Geary Streets on Union Square in San Francisco, California. The two twelve-story south wings of the hotel were built just before the San Francisco Earthquake, in 1904, and the double-width north wing was completed in 1913,...

 and the Palace Hotel

Palace Hotel, San Francisco

The Palace Hotel is a landmark historic hotel in San Francisco, California, located at the SW corner of Market and New Montgomery streets. Also referred to as the "New" Palace Hotel to distinguish it from the original 1875 Palace Hotel that it was built to replace, the present...

 after the 1906 earthquake. Mr. Mahoney replaced the rose garden with flats to meet the city's dire need for housing.

William Westerfeld House timeline

• 1928 -- A group of Czarist Russians
  Russians
  The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....
  
   buys the home. They turn the ground floor ballroom into a nightclub called Dark Eyes and use the upper floors for meeting rooms.

• 1948 -- The home is converted into a 14-unit apartment building. For about the next two decades, the units are rented mostly to African-American
  African American
  African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
  
   musicians who play in the neighborhood jazz clubs. John Handy
  John Handy
  John Richard Handy III is an American jazz alto saxophonist.-Biography:In the 1960s, Handy led several groups...
  
   is one of many to call the Westerfeld House his home.

• 1965 -- Charles Fraccia purchases the building to use as a residence but never occupies it. It is mentioned in the book the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The Calliope Company, a fifty-member collective, moves in.

• 1967 -- Underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger
  Kenneth Anger
  Kenneth Anger is an American underground experimental filmmaker, occasional actor and author...
  
   takes up residence. He films Invocation of My Demon Brother starring Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil
  Bobby Beausoleil
  Robert Kenneth "Bobby" Beausoleil is a convicted American murderer and associate of the Charles Manson "Family" who is serving a life sentence. He killed music teacher and fellow associate Gary Hinman on July 27, 1969, and has been imprisoned since his arrest for that crime...
  
   and Anton LaVey
  Anton LaVey
  Anton Szandor LaVey , born Howard Stanton Levey, was the founder of the Church of Satan as well as a writer, occultist, and musician...
  
   and featuring music by Mick Jagger
  Mick Jagger
  Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger is an English musician, singer and songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist and a founding member of The Rolling Stones....
  
  .

• 1968 -- Members of the Family Dog occupy the house while promoting acid rock concerts at the Avalon ballroom. Members of the Grateful Dead
  Grateful Dead
  The Grateful Dead was an American rock band formed in 1965 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The band was known for its unique and eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, folk, bluegrass, blues, reggae, country, improvisational jazz, psychedelia, and space rock, and for live performances of long...
  
   and Big Brother and the Holding Company
  Big Brother and the Holding Company
  Big Brother and the Holding Company is an American rock band that formed in San Francisco in 1965 as part of the same psychedelic music scene that produced the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane. They are best known as the band that featured Janis Joplin as their...
  
   are frequent visitors.

• During the 1970s, the first attempts to rehabilitate the building began. Two men purchased the home for $45,000 in 1969. They remodeled the fourth floor servants' quarters beyond recognition. The house was left standing despite an urban renewal
  Urban renewal
  Urban renewal is a program of land redevelopment in areas of moderate to high density urban land use. Renewal has had both successes and failures. Its modern incarnation began in the late 19th century in developed nations and experienced an intense phase in the late 1940s – under the rubric of...
  
   project which claimed 6,000 Victorian era buildings over a 60 square block area in the Western Addition.

• In 1986, Jim Siegel purchased the home and has since retrofitted the foundation; removed the dropped ceilings; re-wired, re-roofed, and re-plumbed; restored the interior and exterior woodwork and the historic, ground-floor ballroom, and decorated the 25-foot ceiling with period wallpaper crafted by Bradbury & Bradbury.

External links

• Noe Hill website - entry for Westerfeld House