Thursday January 6, 2025

Historical Tidbit: Boardinghouses in San Francisco

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1618:

For the month of February, I will be offering, for free, the fifth short story in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Beatrice Bests the Burglars. If you want to see the post about why I wrote this story, click HERE. Today, I thought I would provide a little background on boardinghouse living in general in San Francisco. But first, a brief check-in.

Brief check-in: As expected very full morning yesterday, then I got word that best friend was in hospital, accident during colonoscopy that damaged her spleen! So cleared decks so I could be available to talk around dinner time. Didn’t need this reminder of how fragile life is. Today, as usual for Thursdays is full with zoom meeting and phone calls.

O’Farrell Street Boarding House

The main protagonist of my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series is Annie Fuller, a fictional character who owns a boardinghouse on the south side of O’Farrell Street, between Jones and Taylor. She uses the small downstairs parlor of this house to do business, initially as the clairvoyant, Madam Sybil. Much to my amusement, when I started writing this mystery series, I went to check out what this section of the city was like in the present, and I discovered a several hotels and a psychic!

In the 1870s, O’Farrell street would have been a mixture of older homes and businesses, with a number of homes located above businesses on the first floor. The street itself was named for Jasper O’Farrell, the Irishman who surveyed and lay out the original street plan for the city, creating its unique pattern of streets going up and down the steep hills that exist north of Market Street. This would have put the boardinghouse on a slight decline going down towards Market Street. If Annie looked up Taylor from O’Farrell, she would have been looking up the steep incline towards California Street and Nob Hill. This section of the city, after 1873, with the opening of the first cable cars, had become the home of the most wealthy citizens of the city.

San Francisco was known for its boardinghouse living, with travelers commenting on the number of people who lived in fashionable boardinghouses and hotels. From my dissertation work based on the 1880 Federal census, I had learned that keeping boarders or lodgers (where meals weren’t provided) was the primary way that married and widowed women contributed to their household incomes. While the size of boardinghouses varied, I found that the average number of boarders that women cared for in their own homes was 5.6. Since single rooms in San Francisco rented for two to eight dollars a month, this represented income of $262 to $537 a year, a very respectable income for that time period, especially considering women’s wages. Annie initially rented out six rooms (although there were 9 boarders in total), which made her a very typical boardinghouse keeper.

Annie Fuller’s boardinghouse was built in the late 1850s, by her Aunt Agatha and Uncle Timothy, from whom she inherited the home. It is two stories—actually four if you count the attic, which has multiple usable rooms, and the basement, with the kitchen, laundry and a servant’s room. The building is in the Greek Revival Style, which was briefly popular in San Francisco in the 1850s, before the Italianate and Second Empire styles began to dominate. Few of the homes in Greek Revival survived the Earthquake and Fire of 1906, which would have destroyed Annie’s House as well.

Residential houses in the Greek Revival style included a front porch and a pitched roof over the attic, as well as a symmetrical floor plan. In Annie’s boardinghouse, the front door is in the center of house, with a small parlor and study, a formal parlor and dining room on the right, and stairs going up to a landing then turns to go on up to the second floor and main bedrooms. The hallway leads past the stairs to the back of the house (officially the servants’ realm.) These stairs go up to the second floor and attic, and down to the short flight of stairs that went to the basement kitchen.

This house resembles quite closely a house I actually lived in, which served as a model for the boardinghouse. In my early twenties, my husband and I lived in a small college town (and eventually managed a small rooming house that had been built in the 1880s. For one year we lived in the beautiful front parlor (with bay windows, wooden wainscotting and a wooden ceiling!) Eventually, we moved up and lived in the attic for two years. The house held between 8 to ten students, and I loved taking care of this old home and helping build a little community within it.

As a result, every time I return to Annie’s boardinghouse I get to relive, just a little, that tiny bit of my own past. Here is a photo of that house.

I am curious, have any of you every lived in a boardinghouse? If so, did you identify at all with the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse?

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