San Francisco
Building The Dream City
James Beach Alexander & James Lee Heig

A deluxe, oversize, beautifully bound book of 416 pages profusely illustrated with more than 300 archival photographs, drawings and maps, and with 140 superb full-color photographs of surviving houses having exceptional historical or architectural interest. The highly readable text brings alive the history of the city, beginning with the arrival of the Spaniards and the saying of the first mass in June, 1776. The periods of Spanish and Mexican rule, the Presidio, the Mission Dolores pueblo, the land-grant Ranchos, and the founding of Yerba Buena in 1835 set the scene for the first Yankee and European immigrants, who came first in a trickle, and then in a flood after 1848. Each wave of immigration brought new dreamers to the tip of the peninsula: the Spanish padres dreamed of converting the natives and building a Christian agrarian society; the Rancheros and their Yankee successors were building a new life in a new land. The gold and silver mines, the timber industry, the shipping and trade industries, the railroads, and the great agricultural domains produced an economy that allowed ordinary citizens to indulge their wildest fantasies in house design and decoration. Immigrants from Europe, Asia, and the eastern United States all left their mark on the city in the form of houses and commercial buildings that went up with amazing speed, often to be burnt and replaced by even more imposing structures. Prosperity trickled down to every social level, and building continued at breakneck speed throughout the 19th Century and beyond. Even the humblest cottage had its bracketed cornice and its classical window caps.

Thousands of these structures, including the palaces built on Nob Hill, were lost in the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906. Yet outside the boundaries of that fire are more than 30,000 surviving buildings that predate 1906. Many of these have been restored, often to better-than-new condition; hundreds of others await the creative imagination, hard work, and cash that go into a careful, informed restoration or remodeling.

The premise of this book is that a house is a direct reflection of a person's taste, prosperity, education, accomplishments, and hope for the future — in short, the embodiment of a dream. San Francisco has satisfied the dreams of generations of citizens, who built their dreams with adobe, canvas, wood, granite, marble, brick, concrete, and glass, all contributing to the collective dream of a beautiful, tolerant, livable city in a spectacular location. This book attempts to do something no other book has done — to explore the intimate connection between people and their city, to show how people changed the city, how the city changed its people, and how it became, in a new sense, everybody's dream city.

The book is now available.