The shabby open space that makes up the remaining portion of the Balboa Reservoir was certainly one place where a person was unlikely to catch Covid this year. Plenty of people came to chill out, literally in the fog or figuratively in the solitude.
From February to June 2021, the reservoir land played its part in the recovery by serving as an overflow route for people in cars coming to the adjacent City College of San Francisco mass vaccination site. The goats were back for their annual munch in August. The big storm in October briefly left more standing water than this would-be reservoir ever held before. Construction on the planned housing project. for the site is due to begin in 2022. All photographs Amy O’Hair except where noted otherwise. Thanks to Susan Sutton and Joanna Pearlstein for their contributions.
A sunset at Balboa Reservoir in March 2021.This modest swing has seen a lot of both joy and contemplation over the years. Sept 2021.Masked teens, lounging on the berm. Mar 2021.
The rain is pelting down today, prompting me to revisit a moment in early Sunnyside history when the cumulative effects of an El Niño winter melted the hillside above Monterey Boulevard (then Sunnyside Avenue) between Acadia and Detroit Streets, sending several houses sliding down. No one was injured, but two of the houses were never rebuilt. Besides the copious rains that winter, a major contributing cause was a massive street grading project on Monterey, wherein earth was removed in large quantities by an unscrupulous private contractor named Kelso, leaving several houses on the north side hovering at the top of sheer cliffs. It was not a time of robust and well-planned public works in the City. Residents felt naturally wronged, and threatened to sue (although without much success it later turned out).
Sunnyside then was very sparsely populated, with only a few houses on each block, largely in the eastern end. It was a bit of a company town; many residents worked at the Sunnyside Powerhouse,the coal-fired power plant for the pioneering electric railway. Notes on people mentioned in the accounts below: Patrick Amrock, lived at the current address 134 Monterey (rebuilt in 1960). The Lufsky/Kuestermann houses were never rebuilt, but were located around 126 Monterey. Percy C Cole, a carpenter, lived in a house at the current location of the 370 Monterey apartments. Andrew Dahlberg (“P Doylberg”), a contractor, lived at what is now 137 Joost (which may be the original 1890s house). Charles Lufsky departed Sunnyside later in the year, but here’s a good story about the saloon he left behind.
Fortunately, 20th century building techniques and City codes have prevented many such disasters since. (Although one happened here in 21st century Sunnyside.)
Read the account below from the San Francisco Examiner published the next morning, followed by another account from the San Francisco Call. Read the related story about Sunnyside’s some-time creek here.
Drawing of houses affected by the landslide of January 1895 landslide on Monterey. Below, current locations of 134 and 126 Monterey. Above oval, current location of 370 Monterey apartment building. SF Examiner, 25 Jan 1895.
Okay, it’s been more than a year of photographing this soon-to-be-lost semi-wild open space. By this time next year, maybe, the lower portion of the Balboa Reservoir will have begun its transformation into a housing development.
Graffiti. Balboa Reservoir. Nov 2020. Photo: Amy O’HairA coyote, quietly hunting on the Balboa Reservoir. Dec 2020. Photo: Amy O’HairBerm walker. Balboa Reservoir. Nov 2020. Photo: Amy O’Hair
On a week when being outdoors is hazardous, history can substitute for fresh air. Here is a story from a century ago, about a group of Sunnyside children called the Log Cabineers, who were led in many activities around the then-undeveloped hills in the neighborhood by a remarkable young woman, Elfreda Svenberg of Foerster Street. She introduced them to the joys of being outside with plants and animals, taking them on hiking trips–even a ten-day vacation in Marin.
SF Examiner, 20 Mar 1917. View larger. Newspapers.com.
Miss Svenberg included both boys and girls in her club, saying they were “too occupied with the joys of outdoor life” to become boy-struck or girl-struck.
The group was featured in the SF Examiner article above during a fund-raising drive for a club house. It was customary to give a small token in thanks for a donation–a wild flower boutonniere in this case, perhaps picked from Mount Davidson, where native wild flowers famously grew before development. (Read an account here.) Continue reading “1917: The Log Cabineers of Sunnyside”→
In February 1906 at the Wilson farmhouse on Gennessee Street in Sunnyside, a woman suffered a brutal attack by a robber on a Friday afternoon. The attacker got away by running into the thick grove of eucalyptus trees nearby. The whole neighborhood was involved in the hunt for the man. The news reports about the incident tell us a lot about Sunnyside in that year – including something of its largely untold dairy history, as well as the lay of the land. The house where it happened still stands today, at the SE corner of Gennessee St and Joost Ave (where it recently sold for almost $2m).
The house at 418 Gennessee (now 440 Gennessee), SF Chronicle, 11 Feb 1906, p21.
440 Gennessee Street, 2016. Photo: Amy O’Hair.
“Defenseless Woman is Beaten Brutally by Robber” SF Chronicle, 11 Feb 1906, p.21.
Before it was diverted into the drains–probably in the 1920s after improvements to streets and sewers–Sunnyside had a tributary of Islais Creek running through it. Sounds bucolic perhaps, but it seems mostly to have been a nuisance to residents, and for one man, his death-trap.
Where the creek in Sunnyside ran. Composite from SeepCity.org map and googlemaps for position of streets. Please visit SeepCity.org for more about our old waterways.
Before our hills were crowded with houses, there were cows grazing on them. There were big dairy farms near Sunnyside, such as Rock Ranch and Smart’s New York Dairy, as well as many small producers. It was a rough and ready urban business then, serving the needs of a growing city–but subjected to little health regulation (read a good summary here).
Even into the 1920s Sunnyside residents on the north side were irked by the damage done to their gardens from cows that had wandered over the hill from a farm near Glen Canyon. But the surprising thing is that many early residents kept a cow or two of their own in the backyard, even breeding and selling them on.
Woman milking cow, Excelsior District, late 19thC. From San Francisco’s Excelsior District by Walter G. Jebe Sr.
