In the mid-nineteenth century, the land where Sunnyside would be located was part of the Rancho San Miguel, and used for dairy farming. In 1891 the Sunnyside Land Company was formed, and streets and lots laid out for the tract, with Behrend Joost as its president. There was no concerted development during the early decades. Instead, Joost pursued his real project of establishing the first electric streetcar line in San Francisco, which involved building the Sunnyside Powerhouse on Sunnyside Avenue (later renamed Monterey Blvd) in 1892.
In the pre-Quake years, a few brave families did build houses in Sunnyside, but most sales of empty lots were made to investors looking for profits. One notorious feature that may have discouraged development was the county jail complex, located adjacent to the district. Basics like paved streets, sewers, streetlights, gas and water service, and fire protection were lacking for many years. People lived with wells to provide water with windmills to pump it up, outhouses on the back of their lots, and many kept their own cows and horses. This is part of the reason that the lots are so deep (100 or 112 feet) to accommodate these necessities.
A creek ran through the district in those days, a tributary of Islais—although later it was rerouted into the sewer system.
One notable early resident of Sunnyside was the inventor William Augustus Merralls, who moved to Sunnyside Avenue in 1897 and in 1902 built the landmark structure that is now called the Sunnyside Conservatory.
After the 1906 Quake and Fire, the government of San Francisco made efforts to address the notorious corruption that had plagued it before that. Outlying districts like Sunnyside got more funds and attention, as people moved further from the city center. The electric streetcar line was extended down Sunnyside Avenue (later renamed Monterey Boulevard) in 1909, finally fulfilling a promise made by the company in 1892. This critical transit link made living in this district more accessible, and development picked up. Sewers were installed in 1913-—at the expense of Sunnyside property owners. Activism by residents for infrastructure and schools drove most improvements.
There were plenty of large families making their home in the district by the 1910s, and their children needed a bigger school. The Sunnyside school had been housed in a cottage, but after a long campaign by local parents, a proper schoolhouse was built in 1909.
In 1916, Sunnyside Avenue—once dead-ending at Ridgewood Ave—was extended through what had been Adolph Sutro’s eucalyptus forest. In 1920 it was renamed Monterey Boulevard. More on street names here.
Into the 1920s, construction of houses and shopping venues along Monterey Boulevard picked up considerably. Many of the neighborhood’s houses date to this time. The dirt streets were finally paved and sidewalks laid. Still, it was “the sticks,” according to an oral history with someone who grew up in Sunnyside during this time.
By the mid-1920s, Monterey Boulevard had dozens of local businesses, as well as the numerous little shops throughout the neighborhood on residential corners. In 1926, Saint Finn Barr Catholic Church was built at Hearst and Edna, and it was a center of neighborhood life for this working-class community for much of the twentieth century.
By then, the old schoolhouse from 1909 was outdated and unsafe, so a new building was completed in 1927, which is the current school on Foerster Street.
After World War Two, the undeveloped blocks on the hills north of Joost Avenue filled out with new houses. A long-needed public park for this growing neighborhood, Sunnyside Playground, was finally built in the mid-1960s.
Sunnyside Conservatory remained in private hands until it was made a City Landmark in 1975.
The 1950s to 1980s saw many of the steep and rocky lots along Monterey Blvd finally developed with large apartment buildings. The construction of the Interstate 280 freeway along the eastern boundary in the mid-1960s changed the feel of the neighborhood, and disrupted the lives of families forced to move to make room for it.
Monterey Boulevard was always planned as a commercial strip for the district, but shopping has changed over the years. Safeway, which had been a mid-sized store on the site of the present Safeway parking lot since 1942, became the current larger store in 1972; the presence of a big supermarket permanently changed the nature of shopping on Monterey, driving out a number of mom-and-pop groceries and butcher shops. Yet the boulevard remains vital, with few or no vacant store fronts as of the 2020s.
This website has a good number of micro-histories—the stories of families and individuals, of ordinary and extraordinary lives—as well as accounts of Sunnyside’s connections to the larger context of San Francisco’s history—immigration, business, growth, and development.
- Explore this website further.
- View then-and-now comparison photographs.