The Detroit Steps: Some historical images, and a vignette

By Amy O’Hair

The public stairway in Sunnyside called the Detroit Steps is currently the focus of an art and landscaping project. The stairway runs along the route of a planned street that was never built due to the steep hillside. In other places in Sunnyside, such unbuildable “paper” streets—that is, streets that only existed on maps—were simply excised altogether. (More about that here.)

Stairway beauty spots, decorated with art and landscaping, free of cars, and perhaps with a view, are a longstanding San Francisco tradition, given the impracticality of building roadways on various blocks of the city’s steep hills. From the high-buzz tourist attraction at 16th Avenue—to the many undecorated and largely unknown stairways such as Mandalay Steps or the Detroit Steps—this is a city full of wonderful public stairways.

The Detroit Steps Through Time

The present-day concrete stairs were installed at the Lower Detroit Steps (south of Monterey) the 1930s, and the Upper Detroit Steps (north of Monterey) in the 1960s. Like many of the steeply sloped blocks on either side of Monterey Boulevard, the nearby lots went undeveloped for a long time, as the photos below well show. It took the apartment-building boom in the 1950s-1970s to fill out Monterey’s unbuilt hillsides (and thereby deprive the neighborhood kids of some adventures). The great increase in density along Monterey makes the preciousness of any public open space away from traffic all the more important now.

Images below were taken in the 1930s and 1940s, showing the area around the Detroit Steps—although just on Monterey Boulevard. I’ve also included bits of the Sanborn maps and aerial photos.

The Lower Detroit Steps 

The Upper Detroit Steps

From the Air

These images show how sparsely built the area was before the 1960s. Early on, there was but one house along the route of the present Upper Detroit Steps, at 398 Monterey, gone for the apartment building now at 380 Monterey (1988). That house and its little wooden stairway was clearly visible in the 1938 and 1948 aerials below, and also in the images above. Also notable are the well-worn paths up the hill.

By Sanborn Maps

1915 Sanborn map of area around Monterey at Detroit Steps. Tiny indication of wooden stairway north of Monterey. Lower Steps yet to be built. Sheet 917. ProQuest.

Landslide!

One notable event nearby was an incident in 1941 that the San Francisco Dept Public Works called the Joost Ave Slide #2 (the first one being in 1928 a bit to the east). It was a minor landslide on the slope between Joost and Monterey, on either side of the site of the present Upper Detroit Steps. The two photos here, taken on either side of the steps, show what lies beneath and behind the current apartment buildings—steep crags of rock, largely dug out for construction.

1941. View north from Monterey Blvd, just west of Detroit. Two houses behind trees are 412 and 400 Joost Ave. OpenSFHistory.org

1941. View north from Monterey Blvd, just east of Detroit. Houses on hill on Joost Avenue (L to R): 364 (gone) – 350 – 335 – 318- 311. OpenSFHIstory.org

Vignette

A sketch of of this patch of Sunnyside before World War II, based on early residents’ accounts in oral histories contained in the Sunnyside History Project of 2006, period photos, and my own research.

Imagine, if you will, it is the 1930s and you’ve taken the No.10 streetcar out to Sunnyside to visit a family friend. The fare is still a nickel, and that includes the transfer. Travelling along Monterey Boulevard—which not long ago was still named Sunnyside Avenue—you look around to see that as the car gets toward the end of the line at Gennessee, it is nearly empty on this Sunday afternoon. Sitting on the sunny side of the car, you look out between the few houses on the street for a clear view of the San Bruno Mountains to the south.  The land along the boulevard seems to drop away suddenly down the bare hills on the south and rise steeply in crags on the north. Large billboards fill in between the houses, three or four each block, advertising beer or gasoline. There is a gas station on nearly every block—small, one-man establishments that are little more than a shack and a pump or two. In all, this is the impression you have, that the “boulevard” in this sparsely built neighborhood is thin on car traffic and thick with gas stations and billboards, and many vacant hillside lots—a lot sleepier than the neat but dense block where your apartment is now located, or the crowded and dirty alleyways of North Beach where you grew up.

At last you reach your destination, Detroit Street; never having been here before, you had asked the driver to alert you when the car arrived at the stop. You get out at the foot of a narrow rickety-looking wooden stair, which serves as the way up to a lone house up the hill. You cross over the street—there is no real danger here as car traffic is so infrequent—and stand at the top of a new concrete stairway that goes down the hill. It is wide, with steel bannisters. The view is wide and open from this spot, and you can seen the bell tower of the local church, Saint Finn Barr, as well as the new building for Sunnyside School on Foerster Street.

At the bottom of the steps is a cul-de-sac, surrounded by a few houses. You walk to the intersection at Hearst Ave, to the little old-fashioned-looking house of the Molinari family, who moved here decades before, giving up the familiarity of North Beach for the quiet of this new neighborhood. This is your destination. On the tiny porch sits Theresa, the grandmother and matriarch, as her ten-year-old grandson Andy comes running out with a crude homemade sled, a couple of friends trailing behind. “Watch me, Nona! We’re gonna slide down!” The boys mount the stairs and get ready to sled down the grassy slope beside the concrete steps. Theresa offers you some of the red wine her husband Giovanni makes in their basement wine press. Prohibition is over now, but they have always made wine since moving here in 1908, even during the dry years. You join her on the porch and cheer on little Andy when he reaches the bottom of the hill on his wooden contraption. It doesn’t quite feel like you are still in the city, but it makes for a good visit on a lazy Sunday.