Then…
A special two-author feature about this historic luxury section of San Francisco traces its history back roughly seventy years. From the archives, the story begins with a piece published in April 1992, written by then social editor, the late Frances Moffat. Merla Zellerbach brings us up to date, filling in the last eighteen years.
Joan Hitchcock, the jet set queen of the 1960s who boasted she was number 102 on the list of Jack Kennedy’s girlfriends, gave memorable parties with her wealthy socialite husband, Peter, in their Italian Renaissance palazzo.
Up the street, the son of a Chicago steel magnate filled his stately white mansion with an arsenal of weapons. When federal agents and police broke in one rainy afternoon in April 1967, they found it crammed with machine guns, flame throwers, anti-tank weapons, and enough ammunition to blow up the neighborhood.
Welcome to Outer Broadway, San Francisco’s Gold Coast, where millionaires and their wives entertain other millionaires and their wives, heads of state, and important personalities; where, for years, the Archbishop of San Francisco lived next door to the Soviet Consul General.
Things change: Peter and Joan divorced and both died young, the weapons collector was murdered by his wife, and the Catholic Archdiocese decided that Willis Polk’s version of a Spanish Renaissance palace was too grand for a church with a vow of poverty.
In 1972, Gordon & Ann Getty bought the Hitchcocks’ palazzo and had it transformed by New York’s Sister Parish into an elegant but comfortable family home. Recently, the Gettys bought the house next door belonging to Anne & Jim McWilliams, and they plan to join the houses.
Ingrid Hills and her four dogs, circa 1992
“The family library will connect the two buildings,” says Barbara Newsom, an interior designer who tracks down antiques for the Gettys and is overseeing the house merger. “John Stefanides of London will work on the new rooms,” Newsom continues, “and Ed McEachron is the architect. Most of the Sister Parish work will remain. Although she has a designer from London, Ann insists that all building materials and furnishings will come from San Francisco and the Bay Area. The new building, which we think of as a wing, will house a music performance room that will seat seventy and three more bedrooms.” The Gettys have four sons, and they are looking forward to the time when the young men are married and want to return for a visit.
The Gettys made another major change in their décor when they put a glass roof over the courtyard of their Willis Polk–designed house. What was once an open-air area where the Getty sons played basketball now seats one hundred for dinner.
The sister house to the Getty’s home is the former archbishop’s palace that was bought by Dodie & John Rosecrans. As with many Willis Polk designs, a courtyard is the core of this beautiful house that was decorated by the late Michael Taylor.
The consular residence no longer houses diplomats from the USSR. The new consul general represents the state of Russia, which means that Mikhail & Raisa Gorbachev will have to bunk elsewhere when they visit San Francisco next month. On their last visit, in 1990, Gorbachev was president of the now defunct Soviet Union and the Gorbachevs stayed at the consular residence.
The prospect of the Gorbachevs’ return is exciting to the “Friends of Raisa” whose co-chairs include Dodie Rosecrans and Ingrid Hills, who founded the organization. “We know where they will stay,” says Hills, “but it’s supposed to be a secret. Of course, it will all come out.”
Ingrid and her husband, Reuben, live on the 2900 block of the two-block stretch along the north side of Broadway that is generally considered to be the most elite parcel of real estate in town. The Hills’ house also has a history. It was vacant for years after a prominent society woman committed suicide there. Ingrid says she refused to move in until all the rooms—“even the closets”—were exorcised.
Ingrid’s next door neighbor is Maryon Davies Lewis, who moved in when Joan Hitchcock still lived in her palazzo. “She welcomed me with a bottle of chilled champagne,” remembers Maryon. And on the other wide of the Hills’ house is the Brooks Walters’ home, and next to that is the large red brick home where Mel & Lia Belli lived that was spruced up several years ago when it was the Decorator Showcase.
Despite a serene exterior with beautiful gardens, life inside the house was tumultuous. When the flamboyant lawyer and his wife engaged in a noisy, well publicized divorce, Lia got the house. She has it on the market for $7.2 million. It was front page news when a mysterious intruder allegedly got into the house when Lia was alone there in June 1989 and took a couple shots at her. The bullets smashed a bedroom mirror while she ran into the street. Police went door to door questioning neighbors, but no clues were found and the shooting remains unsolved.
“I think somebody was trying to scare me,” said Lia when she was here recently from England, where she is studying at Oxford.
The Sanford Lowengarts live next door to the Belli house in a jewel box of a house that was built for Sidney Ehrman. Ehrman was the grand old man of the street, and he loved to sit outside and watch his neighbors go by.
The next house belongs to the street’s newest family, Anne & Lanely Thornton and their four children. The house is another Willis Polk design and features his trademark courtyard. Known for years as the Schwabacher house, it was also a Decorator Showcase. The Thorntons are adding a touch of youth and vitality to the street. Recently, residents rushed to their windows to investigate the source of a strange new sound. It was all six Thorntons gliding on roller blades.
The last house on the 2900 block is the spectacular new home of Lucy & Fritz Jewett, designed by Sandy Walker. It is the only house build on the Gold Coast in the 1980s and its ample garage space is the envy of the neighbors.
The 2800 block starts with a twin house where the Rosekrans family lived before they moved down the block in 1978. One half of the house belongs to James Klingbeils, the other half to Mimi & Peter Haus. Like almost everyone on the street, the Haases have a second home, in their case, a recently completed showplace in Woodside.
Three house down—past the red brick consular residence and the Rosekrans mansion—hidden behind a high, ugly fence, is a home designed by William Wurster for John Rosekrans’s mother, Alma Spreckels. Its stark contemporary lines are in contrast with the other houses on the street. Apparently, they didn’t suit Lawrence Ellison, president of a Peninsula software company, who bought the house in 1988 for some $3 million. He gutted the place, except for the spiral staircase and the indoor pool. It is said that he wanted to turn it into an English Tudor home, but the Planning Commission turned him down. Ellison’s next door neighbors are Catherine Jane & John Metcalf, who boast they have been on the street longer than anyone else. “Johnny’s mother bought it for us in 1944,” says K.J., as she is called, “while he was in the Army, and I was living at Army posts. We moved in in 1946.”
The two-unit Getty house is next, and then comes the oldest house on the street, the circa 1899 Dutch Colonial that the Harry de Wildts sold for $4.2 million in 1988 to Jim & Barbara Wilenborg.
Although there are no more weapons collectors or party girls like Joan Hitchcock on the street, Outer Broadway is never without rumors and bits of scandal. Of course, since many Outer Broadway homeowners are away most of the time, traveling or staying at second and third homes, much of the gossip has to be picked up by “the help.” The hottest tidbit of the moment is that there is a streaker in their midst who goes out in her garden at night in her raincoat and disrobes.
And that’s the latest from the Gold Coast.
…and Now
“Outer Broadway never changes,” observed a visiting New Yorker who used to live here.
Not so! Maybe the mansions look familiar, but the intervening eighteen years have seen major changes in the street and its occupants, even its nickname, Millionaire’s Row, in 1992, is today’s Billionaire’s Row.
While some of its best known homeowners have moved heavenward—Weyerhauser heir Fritz Jewett, Levi Strauss descendant Peter Haas, philanthropist/tenor Jimmy Schwabacher, coffee mogul Reuben Hills, Spreckels heir John Rosekrans, to name a few—the progressive news is that today’s residents are far less “elite” and far more community and cause-oriented.
Ann & Gordon Getty lead the parade as the city’s most generous hosts. Perhaps their best-known fundraiser was the evening of April 6, 2008, when guests paid $2,300 (each) to get sniffed by bomb-sensitive dogs, appraised by a horde of Secret Service persons, and meet (or at least see across the room) President Obama.
Five years ago, according to Ann’s niece Beth Townsend, the Gettys bought their third property on the block, the house of the late K.J. & John Metcalf next door. As of this writing, Ann hasn’t decided what to do with it. Laney Thornton and his second wife, Pasha, also entertain in grand style, sometimes closing off the whole street for their benefits. Lucy Jewett supports the SF Ballet in a big way, and Ingrid Hills sold her home to author Sloan & Shaklee CEO Roger Barnett, both of whom passionately promote environmental projects.
Even tech genius Larry Ellison recently joined Bay Area residents George Lucas, Barney & Barbro Osher, Tom Steyer & Kat Taylor, and Marion & George Sandler in signing a pledge to give the majority of their wealth to charity.
Web wizard Trevor Traina—son of philanthropist Dede Wilsey and author/vintner John Traina, and hubby of Alexis—serves on at least six nonprofit boards, as do generous art supporters Norah & Norman Stone. This year, ARTnews again listed the Stones among the world’s two hundred top collectors.
Then there’s the amazing Gold Coast real estate. In 2006, Apollo Group (University of Phoenix) CEO Peter Sperling’s Broadway mansion was the city’s most expensive house for sale. After fourteen hundred days priced at $65 million, Sperling has taken it off the market.
A mere $45 million will buy Gladyne Mitchell’s Italian Renaissance hilltop palace, a 2007 Decorator Showcase home. And soon, bargain hunters may only have to shell out $35 million for the remodeled manor at the corner of Broadway and Divisadero.
Art patron Dodie Rosekrans’s elegant Willis Polk home is not for sale. She sometimes leaves her Paris apartment and her Venetian Palazzo to visit her Broadway residence, just as Larry Ellison has been known to drive from his $70 million Woodside estate to set foot in his stunning modern Gold Coast house.
In 1997, a long-vacant lot, former site of Grant grammar school, was sold, making it possible for Nicola Miner & author Robert Mailer Anderson to buy a parcel that fronts both on Pacific Avenue and Broadway.
In 2004, they spotted a robot sculpture by their friend Nemo Gould in the window of a gallery. “We liked it, but we didn’t look at it too closely,” says Robert. “We just thought it would look good on the Broadway steps of our new house.
“When the crew came to put the sculpture together,” he laughs, “We were—well, surprised!” The robot’s anatomical correctness was later okayed by the neighbors “about seventy to thirty.”
The fascinating Gold Coast continues to keep up with the times, yet one point hasn’t changed. “If you want to 
know what’s really going on,” confides a resident, “talk to the dog walkers.”
Merla Zellerbach was a Chronicle columnist for 23 years, Nob Hill Gazette editor for 12 years, and is the author of 14 books. Her newest, The Missing Mother – A Hallie Marsh Mystery, will be available November 1, 2010, at Books, Inc. in Laurel Village.
