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.

The story begins with the arrival of the Spaniards and the founding of Mission San Francisco de Asis in 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 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 hoped to build 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 even ordinary citizens to indulge their wildest fantasies in house design and decoration.

Houses and commercial buildings 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.

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.

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A little knowledge of San Francisco's history can be enormously enriching, to tourist and resident alike. Beautiful Mission Dolores, completed in 1791 and carefully maintained as the single remaining adobe structure in the city, is the starting place for anyone who wants to get some understanding of San Francisco and its reason for being here. In the Mission District the streets bear the names of Mexican citizens who came here to realize their dream of a prosperous, agrarian society in a gentle climate: Valencia, Guerrero, Sanchez, Noe, Bernal, Castro.

The early Yankee settlers, too, have left their names behind: Folsom, Howard, Spear, Beale, Leidesdorff, Larkin, Green, Van Ness, Montgomery, Stockton. Place names — Portsmouth Plaza, Union Square, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill, Potrero Hill, Sutro Forest, Lone Mountain — have meaning only if one knows something of the city's history. The past is with us, every day, if we are informed enough to recognize it.

The explosive growth of San Francisco during and after the Gold Rush resulted in a city that was unlike any other on earth, and it has carefully preserved a reputation for eccentricity down to the present, proud of its mystique, of being different from other cities. An eccentric city is likely to have eccentric architecture. The highly decorated 19th-century houses in San Francisco are called exuberant by admirers and excessive by critics. But, like them or not, they contribute much to the city's unique character.

This book attempts to do something no other book has done — to explore the intimate connection between people and the structures they built, to show how people changed the city, how the city inspired its citizens, and how San Francisco became, in a new sense, everybody's dream city.

This book brilliantly combines history, anecdotes, legends, humor, and scads of pictures. A great addition to any library, but a must for a San Franciscan.

—Adair Lara, San Francisco Chronicle
columnist and author

The result of some sixty years of research into the city's history and its architecture, this book brings the two subjects together in a new and unique way. Hundreds of historic pictures reflect life in the 19th century, while full-color photographs show us what has survived to the 21st century. The book is an important contribution to San Francisco.

—Charles Fracchia, author, and Founding President,
San Francisco Historical Society

— The book is now available—

416 pages, profusely illustrated with
455 archival photographs, maps, drawings
and 140 full-color photographs
Deluxe hardcover edition
ISBN 0-942087-12-7
$60,00 Plus s&h & sales tax

James Beauchamp Alexander was born and raised in San Francisco, and has spent more than sixty years studying the architecture and history of his native city. He has travelled widely, earning certificates from four universities: Washington and Lee in Lexington, Virginia, the National University of Mexico, the Ecole d'Architecture of Fontainbleau, France, and the Royal Academy at Copenhagen, Denmark. He worked for some years as an assistant to John Bakewell, architect of San Francisco City Hall, with whom he collaborated on a book about the classical tradition in architecture.

A veteran of World War II and the Korean conflict, Beach later served for years as a guide, ranger, and historian for the state historic parks at Hearst Castle, Benicia and Sonoma. He lives in Sonoma, in a Palladian villa of his own design. He has also designed Palladian-style houses in Sonoma and San Francisco, and most recently a vineyard estate in Tracy, California

James Lee Heig was born and raised on a farm in South Dakota, where he rode a horse to a one-room country school. After receiving a MasterŐs degree in English at U.C. Berkeley, he taught for 20 years at College of Marin, and for one year as a Fulbright exchange teacher in Germany. His interest in California history grew out of his experience in restoring old houses in San Francisco. He has published nineteen books on Western history and biography

Lawrence Reed Peterson has been a book designer for more than 25 years. In the '70s, working with Stanford University Press, he learned the classical traditions of book design and production. His designs have received several national and international awards. With the advent of computer technology he was at the forefront of publication systems development. Scottwall Associates has used his designs for many books, as well as for this website.

Stephen Fridge, who made the color photographs in this book, is an architectural photographer whose work has appeared in national magazines, and has won national awards. He took the color photographs for this book between 1992 and 1994. He lives in San Francisco.

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