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There has never been a postcard of these peak-roofed, fish-scale-shingled homes pressed together in Duboce Triangle. But starting here and working up toward the famous houses on Steiner Street is a 10-block tour of five decades of early San Francisco architecture. Leading the way is Jim Heig, publisher and co-author of "San Francisco: Building the Dream City" (ScottWall Associates, $60). Illustrated with 600 photographs going back to 1851 and co-written by James Beach Alexander, the book comes out this week, and among the Victorians featured is Heig's own home of 31 years at Scott and Waller streets. Among those not featured are those on the row on Carmelita - a Victorian secret hidden between Waller Street and the edge of Duboce Park. "The less that's known about Carmelita Street the better," Heig says. It has flowering pink fruit trees on both sides and people walking down the middle as if this were still the era before the automobile. "They haven't been changed," Heig says of the two-story houses built by the prolific Fernando Nelson in the 1890s. "They all have the original facades." Unlike the Painted Ladies, which have the Transamerica Pyramid in the background, this row is backdropped by the aggressively ugly 1960s cinder block of Davies Medical Center. That will ruin anybody's picture, but Heig can envision it a century ago when it was German Hospital, a white wooden Victorian serving the German enclave around it. (The vestiges of Germantown remain in the nearby street names Hermann and Germania.) Looking the other way, Heig admires No. 78 Carmelita. "Really a rare house, " he says, "one of only three one-story Queen Annes with a cupola tower in San Francisco." Doglegging onto Pierce Street, Heig stops to kick himself in front of No. 120, an early apartment building with 14 one-bedroom units, each with a bay window. "I had a chance to buy it and I didn't do it," he says. "It was $350, 000 in 1985." Heig is 71, and if he needs fuel to climb Pierce to Alamo Square, he detours east down Haight Street to Rosamunde Sausage Grill for a weisswurst, in keeping with the theme of Germantown. Back up Pierce, he crosses four lanes of Oak Street, and from the 19th to the 20th century in architecture. Instead of fish scale, the houses in Frederick Douglass Plaza are clad in wooden shiplap. ("This is what the outside of Viking ships looked like," says Heig.) The change in style is announced by brick entry gates dedicated to the abolitionist. "This was restored in the 1960s and it cost a fortune," Heig says. "Crocker Bank underwrote it, and the purpose was to save the buildings and provide low- cost housing." North of Fell Street, the architecture jumps another decade to the 1920s, marked by Marina-style stucco flats. "The trend is very clear," he says. "By the 1920s, they had garages built in." At Alamo Square, we come back to the 1880s and '90s. Across Hayes Street and to the east, the gabled roofs of "Queen Anne Postcard Row," built by Matthew Kavanagh in 1894Ð95 (and sold for $3,500 each), come into view. "I've been up here when there are five or six tour buses lined up," Heig says, standing on a grassy knoll. "It's a crowd of people and they have to get out of each other's way for pictures, and nobody speaks the same language." To his right, out of the picture frame, is Heig's favorite house on the square, a modest Italianate that looks tiny next to the hulk of Ida B. Wells High School. "It has to be one of the earliest houses in the area, could be even 1870s," he says. To his left and across the park is the biggest house on the square, the Archbishop's Mansion built for Patrick Riordan in 1904, at 1000 Fulton St. Crossing the street at Steiner, Heig stops in the middle of Fulton to look down to where it dead-ends at the door of City Hall. "Now that they've torn down the freeway, it's a magnificent view," he says. The new gold leaf on the municipal dome cost half a million, he remarks. For contrast he walks into the Archbishop's Mansion to see its own ornate dome of stained glass, which didn't suffer so much as a crack in the earthquakes of '06 and '89. Anybody can ring the bell for a tour of the Archbishop's Mansion. It is now an inn with 15 rooms running from $195 to $425. At the peak of Fulton and Scott streets is the William Westerfeld House, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and a San Francisco landmark. "One of the most famous, immediately recognizable houses in the city," he says, "because of its architecture and its history." Built with a stern aspect for a German confectioner in 1898, this stick Italianate became the Russian Club with a restaurant called Dark Eyes in the 1930s. It was still called the Russian Embassy in the 1960s when a commune called the Calliope Company took up residence. This drew a visit from Tom Wolfe, who described the place as "a great shambling old Gothic house, a freaking decayed giant," on page 355 of "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." Later it got stranger than New Journalism when filmmaker Kenneth Anger moved in and used it for "The Invocation of My Demon Brother." Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, used to practice witchcraft in the tower, employing a lion cub and 500 candles. The current owner, Jim Siegel, bought it when he was 30 and vowed to restore its grandeur. The exterior is now done up like Gen. Patton - olive green with gold trim. The inside is slower going. Siegel is now 46 and the jobisn't done. You can't get inside to see it, except through "San Francisco: Building the Dream City."
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