Once upon a time (in 1868, actually), a nineteen-year-old Bavarian boy named William Haas came to San Francisco via New York with brother Abraham and joined other brothers Jacob and Sam, plus a covey of cousins (Charles, Samuel, and Kalman) in the grocery-liquor business.
Before you could say, “Cyrus Noble Bourbon,” William had metamorphosed into an entrepreneur, the moving spirit of an inventive firm known as Haas Brothers.
In 1880, William married Bertha (née Greenebaum), and by 1886 they had determined to construct for themselves and their one-year-old daughter, Alice, a solid, comfortable haute bourgeois home on the western outskirts of the town. The Gold Rush city was catching its breath after the boom of the 1850s; the sense and sensibility of the Victorian era had begun.
The Haas Lilienthal house
William paid a reported $13,500 for the lot at 2007 Franklin Street, between Washington and Jackson, and $17,500 for the house, designed by fellow immigrant Peter Schmidt. Though the twenty-four-room, twelve-thousand-square-foot Queen Anne/Stick–style home announced itself with an ebullient, visual trumpet blast—as it still does—it was seen as average-sized for Pacific Heights.
The last half of the nineteenth century often is considered San Francisco’s heyday. The little port mushroomed into the largest city west of Chicago; the grandiose Palace Hotel on Market Street was touted as the largest in the world. Rudyard Kipling was moved to comment: “I wonder what enchantment of the Arabian Nights can have equaled this evocation of a roaring city in a few years of a man’s life from the marshes and the blowing sand.”
A handful of years into the twentieth century, at 5:12 am on April 18, 1906, “the earth shook, the sky burned,” and it all came a-tumblin’ down. From their roof, the Haas family watched as the fire ate its way in their direction, and then were forced to evacuate and camp in the chilly safety of Lafayette Park. Later they found a temporary home in Oakland.
As the earthquake gods would have it, the house survived in large part and was reconstructed with much of Pacific Heights. Nob Hill and mansions along Van Ness weren’t so fortunate. (That’s another, longer story.)
William and Bertha hadn’t intended to build a time machine. (Indeed, they couldn’t have. H.G. Wells wouldn’t coin the term for another twenty-nine years.) In effect, however, the Haas-Lilienthal House has become one. It served the family for eighty-six years, three generations, until Alice inherited it upon her father’s death in 1916. (She and Samuel Lilienthal had married in 1909.) When Alice died in 1972, her family bequeathed the home to today’s Foundation for San Francisco’s Architectural Heritage. It remains the sole “splendid survivor” of classic Victoriana that is open regularly as a museum.
Step into the front parlor of the Haas-Lilienthal and watch time spin back. Randolph Delehanty’s San Francisco: The Ultimate Guide explains:
“Because all of the Victorian houses . . . employed servants, more races and classes mingled, or were ‘layered’ in Pacific Heights than elsewhere in the city. In the late Victorian era, Irish-American girls were often the parlor maids and occasionally cooks. German women were most often cooks, and as such, the rulers of the servant roost with the best room in the attic. Chinese men were widely employed as laundrymen and had separate basement rooms. In the first decade of this century, some house servants were young Japanese-American men. Some few truly grand houses had European butlers and chauffeurs.”
The exterior of the house is an imposing edifice in a restrained gray shade; its occupants would have been “horrified” by the town’s more glaring, colorful “painted ladies,” says guide Polly. The look is dressy, with ornate, bracketed gables, a curiously deceptive turret with windows ten feet above the floor, and an antic façade that Delehanty describes as “ . . . an ascending series of three triangles; the porch gable, the false central gable, and the conical roof of the turret with its triangular-pedimented window.”
He adds: “The houses of the period were the most wildly manipulated residential designs California ever saw.”
The lady of the house, in this case Bertha, did not go out to shop. Rather, tradesmen and vendors came to a side door (near today’s admission desk in the former ballroom), as described by Harriet Lane Levy in her memoir, 920 O’Farrell Street.
Entering by the staircase up from the street, you stand in the original portico facing a “pocket” door (one that slides into the framing to close off the entry hall and/or formal parlor). When it was closed, one realized the family was not “receiving.” In the hall, as throughout, gorgeous redwood panels and golden oak wainscoting dominate. The past is present in faux leather walls, and front parlor with a classical frieze of laurels, dentils, and egg forms, remodeled in the 1890s with a blond sienna marble fireplace, over which hangs a William Keith landscape.
In the middle parlor sits a pair of slipper chairs, designed to allow a lady to sit comfortably while wearing a wide gown without revealing her ankles. The distinctly masculine-feeling dining room can seat twenty; over the table, a fixture called a six-by-six offers a choice between gas lighting (up) and electric bulbs (down). On display in the china cabinet, a startling and handsome porcelain shaving-dish takes pride of place and a Russian samovar studs the round, garden-side table.
William’s study is enhanced by a jib door, one that is flush with and treated in the same manner as the walls on either side so as to be concealed. In this case, it appears to be a floor-to-ceiling window but slides open to allow access to a veranda. (Taxes were levied on outside doors at the time; this type went scot-free.)
The kitchen, though remaining old-fashioned in appearance, has been modernized several times but maintains its old servants’ call box that would, alas, remain unused in most of today’s San Francisco homes.
Upstairs, Bertha’s maid’s room shows off a giant dollhouse that would delight any non-Victorian child today; its inhabitants probably come alive at night to dance with the teddy bears. It was built by the family chauffeur, Martin Vrang, as was a giant train set that chugs about in its own chamber.
The once–master bedroom is now an upstairs family room, where light floods in through the bowed windows and art glass pre-dating Tiffany. The shades of William and Bertha may still sit there sometimes, gazing out at visitors parading up the smart street, warming their toes in front of the Mexican onyx fireplace, or flipping through the fifteen volumes of Dickens (de rigueur, one supposes, in a home of this period).
Through an antique bathroom with some graceful amenities that have slipped away from us over the decades (a built-in curling iron, for instance), we step into Alice’s bedroom, where she moved following Sam’s death; simple and pleasing in Arts and Crafts style, she herself wove the fabrics.
Too soon we must take our leave—but not without nodding thanks to the gracious family ghosts for welcoming us into their moments of history.
Seeing the House—Visitor Information. Address: 2007 Franklin St. SF. Tour information: 415-441-3004. House tours: Sundays: 11 AM–4 PM; Wednesdays: 12–3 PM; Saturdays*: 12 – 3 p.m. (*Closed for private party May 23; always call for Saturday information.); tours depart every twenty to thrity minutes and last about one hour; for groups of ten or more, make reservations: 415-441-3000
Tour prices: Adults: $8 (adults); $5 (seniors & children 12 and under). Rental for 
events: 415-441-3000. Website: sfheritage.org/house.html
Georgia I. Hesse was the founding travel editor of the Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, a job she enjoyed for many years. She is now freelancing.
