Jane Cryan, 1942-2026

Protector of Hope and Earthquake Shacks

On Wednesday, June 24, 2026, I sat in my car, in the fog, looking at what might be two 1906 earthquake shacks pushed together under one roof. The very next day, Jane Cryan died. I didn’t know yet. Woody LaBounty, who’d known her since they crawled under Outer Sunset houses together, checking rafters for checkerboard framing, posted the news the following week.

“Might” be, because the shacks are unverified. Unlike the certified shacks peppered throughout the city, this location has never been formally verified; only photographed and flagged as likely, on the strength of its low double gable and the telltale 14-by-18 footprint of a Type B relief cottage, times two. The shacks may be exactly what they should look like, but they’ve never been made to prove it.

After California’s statehood the Mexican rancho that made up much of the southern part of San Francisco was carved up and sold off in pieces. The piece under Lobos Street became, in 1867, the Railroad Homestead Association tract: a speculative grid of streets platted alongside the new San Francisco and San Jose Railroad, sold off in shares to investors who’d never seen the land. Italian, Irish, and German families farmed dairy and vegetables here for decades. This was Ocean View before it was a neighborhood: a farm village at the end of a rail line, a short ride from the city though the farmers preferred horse and wagon.

Then came April 1906. The earthquake and fires left more than two hundred thousand homeless, and the Relief Corporation answered with 5,610 small green cottages thrown up fast in camps across the city. Refugees paid two dollars a month toward a fifty-dollar purchase price, on one condition: once paid off, the shack had to be hauled by horses to a permanent lot. That is how a farm village at a rail stop became one of the places those cottages landed for good, joined two and three at a time into real houses, the way the structure on Lobos may have been joined.

It’s a unique kind of story for this part of the city’s history: residents dead set on staying in San Francisco, dragging green cottages behind them.

Jane Cryan gave much of her life to buildings like this one. She came to San Francisco on a postcard invitation from Jack Kerouac, a jazz pianist looking for a home for herself and her grand piano, and in 1982 signed a lease the same evening she saw a cottage in the Outer Sunset with peeling paint and a feral cat with kittens in the yard. Soon, an elderly neighbor told her she was living in a couple of relief houses cobbled together. She’d lived in the city for years and never once heard of the 1906 shacks. That sentence sent her into the newspaper archives, and out of them came the Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of San Francisco’s 1906 Refugee Shacks, founded in 1983, and a survey that eventually turned up something like seventy surviving shack sites citywide.

Today the count is closer to thirty. Her own cottage became San Francisco Landmark No. 171, a victory that came with the bitter requirement that she vacate it so her landlord could sell the property unencumbered. She called it the people’s landmark anyway, because working people had lived in shacks like it first. And former renters, this was their opportunity for ownership and stability in a boom and bust town that knew instability well. The shacks were more than a simple structure, they represented hope.

I live near Cryan’s landmark cottage and remember so clearly the cheery light yellow paint, the bright colorful dahlias, and the multitude of hummingbird feeders lined along the front. Walking past her home was like walking along a living rainbow buzzing with color, light, and winged activity. Her cottage is the reason I first learned about the shacks. I even once thought another nearby home could be one, too, only to learn it couldn’t due to the lack of checkerboard rafters. Oh well.

She spent her last years in Wisconsin, priced out of the city she’d given two decades to, still trying to find a publisher for the manuscript she called Hope Chest. Too exacting about her own words to compromise with an editor, by her own account. It remains unpublished. It is nonetheless the primary source behind the city’s official planning documents on the building type. In the end she handed it all over to LaBounty who now possesses the large and important weight of carrying her perspective forward.

I didn’t know any of this sitting in my car on Lobos, other than suspecting that I might be staring at two shacks cobbled together into a home on a street platted for a railroad speculation scheme, in a neighborhood that had long been farms, then a landing place for people who’d lost everything else. That’s usually how it goes here in San Francisco. You don’t go looking for the history. You sit in the fog for some other reason and it turns out to be right there in front of you.

Rest in Peace, Jane Cryan.

This is a reprint from my Substack.