107 Franconia

Elegy for Another Earthquake Shack

A few weeks after Jane Cryan died, San Francisco Planning approved a demolition permit for a tiny, faded cotton candy pink house on Franconia Street in Bernal Heights. The paperwork calls it a former refugee shack, built in 1906 or 1907. In the 120 years since, it has been added onto so many times that almost nothing of the original redwood box is visible anymore. Two bedrooms, one bath, 781 sqft, it sold for $885k in 2022. Soon it will come down and a new, modern 3-story house will go up in its place. The planning department could not justify preserving the shack because, as with most of the shacks dispersed throughout San Francisco, it had been so significantly altered over time.

Before there was a shack or even a street, the land at the bottom of Bernal Hill was creek and marsh, and then by the 1860s a small farming village grew up along the creek, thirty or so houses drawing water from upstream. The creek got tucked underground sometime around the turn of the 20th century, running now beneath what became Army then Cesar Chavez Street. The village gave way to a park in 1894, Bernal Park (renamed Precita Park in 1973).

Then, in 1906, San Francisco’s earthquake and great fire displaced thousands of families. The government set up refugee camps in parkland throughout the city. For about a year, Bernal Park held Camp 23 where something like 250 small redwood cottages provided temporary housing. Families who’d lost everything in the fire paid two dollars a month toward owning one outright. When the camp closed in 1907, horse teams hauled the cottages across the city to lots that had been empty a season earlier. That’s likely how one of those cottages came to rest on the ground that would become 107 Franconia.

Over time the one-room shelter on Franconia became, slowly, an ordinary house: a kitchen extension, a room added here, a bathroom, until it looked like other houses that were filling in the neighborhood. You can see time passing in the patchwork of exterior siding that includes wood in some parts, asbestos in some, and metal in others.

This isn’t a story about a building losing its history but about people building a life on top of very little over time as resources increased, life needs evolved, and elements broke down. The shack would do so much more than it was originally intended to do. This aspect challenges the historic nature of the building itself, but it also adds an important facet to the story of San Francisco and its people, of hope and ingenuity.

Jane Cryan spent decades making sure the city didn’t forget these little redwood boxes existed at all. Most of them, though, were never meant to hold still. They were altered and augmented to be lived in and grown past by people with evolving needs and creativity and resourcefulness. The redwood box at 107 Franconia is one of those, a story told not just by cataclysm and desolation, but of life lived over time through generations of families. We can’t preserve the building but we can preserve the story it leaves behind.

This is a reprint from my Substack.