Category: Poole-Bell House

The Widows Do Business: How the Poole-Bell House Got Its Name

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One of a series of articles about the Poole-Bell House on Laidley Street in Fairmount Heights, San Francisco.

By Amy O’Hair

On the first day of October 1906, Annie Poole, widow of a disgraced public official, and Teresa Bell, widow of the city’s once-richest financier, met to discuss the sale of the small mansion that now bears both their names, the Poole-Bell House.

Bell was moving out to this remote enclave, the sparsely settled Fairmount district, where the house sat perched on a hill with a fine view of the city in the distance. She wanted to put a bit of space between her and the nattering classes of society. It was a prickly conference; Bell wanted to move in a day earlier than the transfer of the funds between the two women, a presumptuous request that Poole resisted. Bell recorded their conversation, with commentary, in her diary.

“Mrs Poole said she could not personally let me move in until Wednesday. I said I only cared because of the family, her and their discomfort. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘tell them I am an old cross crank.’ I said, ‘No. I told them the facts that you had no right to let me in your house until you had your money, and that you would not let me in.’

“She stopped laughing quickly and her eyes popped out with surprise. She saw she was not fooling me. With all the lies she had told about ‘the people not removing their things yet,’ her stare of astonishment showed I was right in my surmise as to her not letting me in.

“Of course I do not blame her a bit, but she could have accommodated me one day, considering my paying her in cash down for her furniture, and I paid enough for it too. But it’s all right, she knows nothing about me nor I of her, and she didn’t do business on trust evidently. She is one breed and I another, that is evident.”[1]

Bell thought herself a cut above, as if more money granted greater nobility. The irony is that the Bell family scandals far outpaced the minor frisson of shame that the Poole family endured. The Bells provided sensational fodder for newspapers for decades, whereas Poole’s husband had made a mistake and in the way of the times taken the ‘honorable’ way out through suicide.

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The Contractor with a Heart of Gold

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One of a series of articles about the Poole-Bell House in Fairmount Heights, San Francisco. This story contains references to sexual abuse of a minor, drug use, and attempted suicide.

By Amy O’Hair

The Poole-Bell House had become a bit dilapidated by 1956, its Victorian charm not much cherished in that era of modernist tastes. That year a contractor named Joe LoPresti bought it, one of his many fixer-upper projects. He renovated the large building, removing some of its period features in the process; it took the Gilmores in the 1980s to restore its original appearance. It wasn’t yet the time for San Francisco to rediscover the beauty of its old houses.

1957c. Joe LoPresti about the time he owned the Poole-Bell House, with one of his many cars at one of his many houses. Photo courtesy Diane LoPresti Christensen.
1957c. The Poole-Bell House taken by Joe LoPresti during the time he owned it, with one of his cars in front. Photo courtesy Diane LoPresti Christensen.

LoPresti was a character about town; just before he bought the Poole-Bell House, he got entangled in a public scandal—not as a perpetrator of vice, but as a kind of savior to a “fallen woman.” It was a renovation project, played out on newspaper pages and Herb Caen’s column, that was not destined to end well. The story was built for the 1950s, full of secret sin and dope fiends, public outrage and salvaged female virtue—a tale to put fear into the straight-laced parents and make them worry about their teen daughters—or the seemingly innocuous house on the corner in their middle-class neighborhoods, as a few houses in the city were revealed to actually be prostitution venues.

The story starts in 1954, with a young woman named Paula Winters. That was her prostitution pseudonym—her real name was Shirley Grimes of Daly City. Continue reading “The Contractor with a Heart of Gold” →

Bodies in the Well, Trapdoors in the Foyer: How the Poole-Bell House Became Mired in Myths

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One of a series of articles about the Poole-Bell House in Fairmount Heights, San Francisco.

By Amy O’Hair

When interest in San Francisco’s unique Victorians houses revived in the 1960s and 1970s, Fairmount Heights’ local example of the glorious era, the Poole-Bell House on Laidley Street, became an object of interest of preservationists and aficionados.

The Poole-Bell house in 1957. Photo: Russell Leake. San Francisco History Center. San Francisco Public Library.
The Poole-Bell house in 1957. Photo: Russell Leake. San Francisco History Center. San Francisco Public Library.

Legends that had grown up around the house—local lore and neighborhood stories—finally saw print. In the way of things, once in print, the stories had a resilience, despite the lack of historical grounding. From then until the 2000s, the house was noted in various places, but almost every fact recorded about it was wrong. The stories took on a robust life of their own, and hung on for decades.

Much of the narrative centered on the legendary Mary Ellen Pleasant, although she never lived there—she never even set foot in the house. But her own sensational history meant that when something of the building was published, Pleasant’s previous association with one important owner, Teresa Bell, cast a long heavy shadow over every account. (Pleasant did however have a ranch in nearby Ingleside for many decades. That story is here.)

The ghost of these stories clung onto the house for decades, and it has taken some digging to find true stories about the house. Here is a brief synopsis before diving into the myth-making: Continue reading “Bodies in the Well, Trapdoors in the Foyer: How the Poole-Bell House Became Mired in Myths” →

Chipped! The Poole-Bell House in the 1930s

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One of a series of articles about the Poole-Bell House in Fairmount Heights, San Francisco.

By Amy O’Hair

The Poole-Bell House was never quite a mansion, but it was grander than most homes in Fairmount Heights in the early years of the district. It was built in the Italianate style in 1887 by attorney John P Poole; later a top story was added by Teresa Bell in about 1908. Such a fine home was in line with the original aspirations of the investors who laid out Fairmount Heights with generously sized lots—San Francisco’s first suburb, circa 1862. (Read more about the founding of Fairmount here.)

Poole-Bell House, January 1957. Photo: Russell Leake. San Francisco History Center. San Francisco Public Library.
Poole-Bell House, January 1957. Photo: Russell Leake. San Francisco History Center. San Francisco Public Library.

The district was planned to coincide with the building of the San Francisco-San Jose steam railroad in the early 1860s. It was a kind of commuter district; if you could afford the property, you could also spring for the steeper fare for the steam train—more than the nickel for the streetcar. There was a railway depot located nearby to deposit passengers from downtown. Streetcar service did not come this far south until a line was laid on Mission Street to Valencia in 1883.

Fairmount homestead map, 1864. North is on right side, Poole-Bell property in red. Railroad ran along curved lower border. San Francisco History Center. San Francisco Public Library.
Fairmount homestead map, 1864. North is on right side, Poole-Bell property marked in red. Railroad ran along curved lower border. San Francisco History Center. San Francisco Public Library.

Later the original large Fairmount lots were subdivided, and smaller, more modest houses went up all over the district, especially after the construction of the electric streetcar line along Chenery Street in 1892. (Read more about that here.)

Still, even as late as 1930, the large Poole-Bell property was basically intact, sitting in an expansive lot on the hillside, with a good view of the growing city. It took a man with a dark past as a notorious Alaska gold-mining claims jumper, to change forever its stately elegance. Robert Nixon Chipps bought the property in 1929. He promptly sold off numerous lots from the large estate to developers for smaller houses, and divided the large aging house into three flats.

Robert Chipps, about 1900. Ancestry.com.
Robert Chipps, about 1900. Ancestry.com.

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The Gilmores and the Poole-Bell House

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One of a series of articles about the Poole-Bell House in Fairmount Heights, San Francisco.

The Poole-Bell House once sat alone on a massive lot on the hillside above Laidley Street, overlooking the city—a large elegant home built in 1887 by attorney John P Poole. It was subsequently owned by Teresa Bell, the widow of nineteenth-century financier Thomas Bell. But many other people have lived there since she left in 1918. In the 1930s, it was subdivided into three flats, and later into four units.

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The sensational and now rather tired legends about the house are due for retirement; there are better stories to tell about this local landmark. In 1967, it was acquired by another widow, Polly Gilmore. She and her adult son Read Gilmore lived there for twenty years; they had a big impact on the life of this historic house, and on the life of the city.

Polly GIlmore. 1988c. Photo: Francisco Gutierrez. Courtesy Roger Heffner.
Read Gilmore. 1988c. Photo: Francisco Gutierrez. Courtesy Roger Heffner.

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The First Black Family in Glen Park

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One of a series of articles about the Poole-Bell House in Fairmount Heights, San Francisco.

By Amy O’Hair

In researching the real history of the Poole-Bell house in Fairmount, I discovered an untold chapter in its story. In 1918, after Teresa Bell moved out of her “gloomy old house,”[1] she rented to a family named Tyrrel. They turned out to be the first African-American family in the Glen Park-Fairmount district.[2] They stayed for three decades, finally settling in a house on Chenery.

Their lives tell us something of what it was to be Black in San Francisco in the decades before WWII. Fortunately, the family archivist has shared with me many photos of the Tyrrels, some of which were taken at the Poole-Bell house, as well as family stories. The Tyrrels were in the public record for their church and fraternal group activities. These fortunate gifts have made it possible to tell a story of the family.

Bertram and Frances Tyrrel moved to the big house at the corner of Laidley and Fairmount Streets during the last years of Teresa Bell’s ownership. They had two children still living with them, Irma, then 22, and Wendell, 21. Frances also had two older children from a previous marriage who had both since started their own families: Pearl Hinds, who had three small daughters and kept a farm in Tulare County with her husband; and James Barber, who had a wife and young daughter in San Mateo County.

The family was very close, including Frances’ sister’s and brother’s families. Photographs during these years bear out the family’s sense of belonging and their pleasure and pride in their shared lives.

1920c. Group photo in front of the Laidley Street house. From left: Bertram Tyrrel, Irma Tyrrel, Marjorie Lake with Eleanor Hinds, Harriet Cady Lake in back, and next to her Frances Tyrrel, and Wendell Tyrrel with Marian and Frances Hinds in front.
1920c. Group photo in front of the Laidley Street house. From left to right: Bertram Tyrrel, Irma Tyrrel, Marjorie Lake with Eleanor Hinds in front, Harriet Cady Lake in back, and next to her Frances Tyrrel, and Wendell Tyrrel with Marian and Frances Hinds in front. Courtesy Charles Reid/Ivy Reid Collection.

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