June 17, 2026
Engine House No. 33 and the long, layered history of Oceanview
San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission · Regular Meeting
On Wednesday June 24, 2025, I was sitting in my car in front of two presumed earthquake shacks in Oceanview when Jane Cryan died. Though I didn’t know it yet. Cryan was a jazz pianist who came to San Francisco after receiving a postcard invitation from Jack Kerouac. In 1982 she signed a lease on a tiny peeling cottage in the Sunset right near my own home. The cottage, according to her, was a disaster and at the same time everything she had ever wanted. A month later she discovered she was living in three earthquake refugee shacks cobbled together. That discovery made her the city’s foremost champion of their preservation. She spent the rest of her life crawling under houses with a flashlight, identifying checkerboard framing in rafters, arguing with developers and city officials, and making sure someone was paying attention. That day of her passing, I was sitting outside two of the buildings she had devoted her life to saving. I just didn’t yet know the connection.
I struggled writing this article. My initial intent was only to share about the freshly landmarked Engine House No. 33. However, my next instinct was to zoom out and try to understand this part of the city that I knew so little about. I had never even set foot in this part of town until the week after San Francisco’s Historic Preservation Committee voted on the landmark status of a Victorian era firehouse. I decided to go to the place where the landmark stood and found so much more. I learned of Jane Cryan’s passing during the following hearing on July 1 when Woody LaBounty, president of SF Heritage, made a public comment about Jane’s passing. That moment reminded me that 1) San Francisco is a magical place; 2) there’s a purpose to my instinct for paying closer attention.
To better understand the situation of Engine House No. 33 I started by standing on a hill overlooking the neighborhood and taking it all in, then zoomed in closer where I unexpectedly found myself sitting in my car, wishing for a taco truck to open, and realizing that two earthquake shacks were within feet of me. This is when it hit me. There was a lot to learn about this place. In many ways the place reflects the long human history of California itself, from at least 5,000 years ago until today, July 4, exactly 250 years after our independence and, simultaneously, Spain’s establishment in what is now called San Francisco. So this article has taken a life of its own, extended by the Oceanview’s many layers and incarnations.
Lay of the Land — Oceanview from Brooks Park
While this next landmark is in San Francisco’s Oceanview neighborhood, Brooks Park is not. It’s in Merced Heights at the top of one of San Francisco’s fifty hills, the one that is southwestern-most. I’m standing in Brooks Park at the top of this hill so I can get an idea of the terrain, specifically where Oceanview fits in, somewhere between Visitacion Valley and Lake Merced in a valley running along the southern edge of San Francisco. It’s foggy on this June day so I can’t see as far as the ocean in one direction and the bay in the other, but I know they’re there. I can hear the freeway below and then the BART train’s metallic hum as it zooms by. I try to imagine how this slope must have appeared over 250 years ago before its gradual yet dramatic evolution.
I previously only knew about Oceanview because it’s in the name of the M Ocean View line. I used to ride the L Taraval to and from Parkside, and at West Portal the streetcars would split with the L heading west along Ulloa and the M going south down West Portal Avenue, into a neighborhood I had never visited and never thought to. Then in June 2026 the Historic Preservation Commission voted to designate old Engine House No. 33 a landmark and I had a reason to go.
Engine House No. 33 — A Historical Landmark
Engine House No. 33 is on Broad Street, three blocks from where the neighborhood’s original downtown used to be, when Oceanview was a village. It was built in 1896 by the city architect Charles R. Wilson in the Classical Revival style. It’s constructed of California old growth redwood with ceilings twenty feet high and a hose drying tower over sixty feet tall. According to lore, it was built to protect a women’s college planned for the area. However, the college was never built. The firehouse operated regardless and, in fact, Engine House No. 33 was the very last fire company in San Francisco to give up its horses, holding out against motorization while every other company in the city converted. The firehouse was decommissioned in 1977 and sold at public auction. It is a private home now.
A Faded Downtown
Today you’ll find the landmark firehouse surrounded by homes from predominately WWII era with older structures, the Victorians and Edwardians, peppered throughout. Along Broad, which features the M Ocean View streetcar line, there is a thumbnail of a business district but no sense of a downtown. One can easily assume this area was simply infill sprawl from surrounding districts. Most San Francisco districts are like this: a grid of homes with a commercial corridor or two (or more). So that observation is partially correct but there are many layers to this humble place, some almost completely obscured.
For instance, around the corner, on what is now a traffic interchange where Alemany meets 280, there used to be a plaza with a public water fountain. Going back to Gold Rush times. The fountain was both place-maker and horse watering station. There was a train depot, the anchor for this plaza, along the Southern Pacific Railroad taking travelers between San Francisco and San Jose following the old Spanish road. Streets fanned out like spokes around the station. Businesses such as the Diamond Saloon, Pesce’s Grocery, and Canada’s Barber Shop operated in this hub. There was a police station and a public school. The five-points intersection of Plymouth, Sagamore, San Jose, Sickles, and the Southern Pacific railroad line was so dangerous that locals named it Death’s Crossing. But it was a hub nonetheless.
You can’t see any of this anymore mostly because the Southern Pacific rerouted its mainline in 1904 and then ceased stopping here. Then Alemany Boulevard came through in 1926 on a different railroad’s right-of-way and the fountain came down and the plaza disappeared under asphalt. What’s left from those old times is a cluster of Victorians peppered throughout the blocks around the firehouse, harkening to the village that assembled here and then lost its anchor.
The First People — 3000 BCE to 1776 CE
A California poppy doesn’t transplant. It throws its seeds explosively from a dry capsule, high up into the air from the parent plant, and the seeds lie in the soil waiting for disturbance like a grading, a fire, or patch of bare ground where the light gets in. For thousands of years poppies on the sandy slope threw their descendants long before the place was called Oceanview. Each disturbance called them in. Each generation threw its seeds into whatever came next. They’d migrate to other parts carried by wind or wildlife or collected and sowed by the people who lived here for thousands of years before.
Yelamu people, the Ramaytush- Ohlone-speakers whose territory encompassed the San Francisco peninsula, would have moved seasonally through this landscape for thousands of years. Some of their settlements clustered near the bay shore to the east and to the west at what is now called Lake Merced. Between those water bodies they must have traveled along routes that followed the low ground, the gullies, the base of the ridge where seasonal water ran, terrain that is now Geneva Avenue, Brotherhood Way, Ocean Avenue. The Association of Ramaytush Ohlone is mapping those routes now. What we have in the meantime are the logical lines: water, grade, and resources. These paths were probably established first by migrating wildlife, then found by the people who knew them for so long, then industrialized, and then paved over.
The First Rupture: European Intervention — 1776
The Spanish arrived exactly 250 years ago as of this writing and everything changed. The Yelamu were forced into labor for the mission and their land was converted to cattle grazing on the open hillsides. In 1845 the Mexican government granted the land to José de Jesús Noé, the last alcalde (mayor) of Yerba Buena (soon to be San Francisco), who continued to run cattle for the hide-and-tallow trade, the daily work done by vaqueros who were mostly former mission slaves. The American takeover ended the rancho system and by 1867 the land was described as almost worthless. Worthless to whom the assessor did not say. The poppies were still coming up in the disturbed ground where the cattle had grazed, but now accompanied by the bright yellow mustard that made their way from Europe in the shoes and hides of interlopers.
In 1856, a state assemblyman named Horace Hawes drew a line across the tip of the San Francisco peninsula to consolidate city and county governments and contain the political corruption that was rife at the time. The line was drawn the only way you draw a line across “empty land”: straight, because there was nothing to negotiate over. Oceanview ended up just barely on the San Francisco side of it, not because anyone wanted it there, but because the border ran just north of a roadhouse at the intersection of Mission and San Jose known as the Top of the Hill in what is now Daly City. Called the Abbey House, owner and political boss Chris Lilly wanted his establishment in a county where San Francisco law couldn't reach it.
The Railroad and Homesteads — 1865-1905
Soon thereafter in the 1860s, the Southern Pacific came through and the speculators followed, platting streets and filing homestead maps for a neighborhood they were certain would materialize. It didn’t, not really, not for decades. Instead came the farmers: Italian, Irish, and German immigrants who had figured out early in the Gold Rush that a hungry city needed vegetables and dairy. They rented the sandy soils below the Merced Heights ridge and hauled produce downtown by horse wagon. The 1880 census lists seventeen farmers and dairymen on what was then the Ocean House Road and the old San Jose Road, none given specific addresses because the settlement was so sparse. They showed up as names in a ledger and attached to a direction.
An 1869 map shows the Oceanview’s early homestead plots with Orizaba serving as the western border. The other side of that border shows the plots to be established by a different development firm in what would be a different neighborhood. The seam at Orizaba is still visible today with dead-ends, offset blocks, and streets that don't quite meet. It is the physical record of two competing speculative ventures filed three years apart. Those western plots would sit mostly empty for another seventy years. The terrain worked against it: steeper grades, rockier outcrops, a drainage gully running southwest that made the low lots seasonally wet and unattractive.
The firehouse arrived in 1896 into all of this: the sometimes green, sometimes golden hills, the empty lots that remained wildflower meadows, frog ponds, barns, farm wagons, and the village assembling around the railroad like grid island. Robert T. Browne was the commanding officer and his crew consisted of hosemen, drivers, and engineers. They had a grueling 24/7 schedule and lived at the house 6 days of the week. Some had homes nearby but most lived at the house. Their dorm was on the second floor while the horses dwelled below behind the engine. Their inaugural assignment was the first instance of a San Francisco fire crew giving mutual aid outside the city limits when they took care of a munitions fire in Colma.
The Village Loses Its Core — 1904-1907
The firehouse had been standing for eight years when Southern Pacific broke ground on the Bayshore Cutoff in 1904. The new route would go along the bay shore, through five tunnels, saving miles, minutes, and headaches compared to the original route that came through Oceanview. The original line had always been an operational pain: too steep, too winding, requiring helper engines to haul trains over the grades west of San Bruno Mountain. The railroad had been planning an alternative since at least 1892. The village had built itself around a railroad that had never fully committed to it.
Without the trains the village emptied over the coming years. The electric streetcar lines pulled development north and east. The saloons, the grocery, and the barber shop lost their reason to exist. What remained was the firehouse on Broad Street, still protecting a neighborhood the railroad had now abandoned, waiting for whatever came next. Developers had been promising a respectable suburban neighborhood since the 1880s: wide streets, long rectangular blocks, the grid that the Railroad Homestead Association laid out in 1867. And that’s what remained.
The final blow would come in 1926 when the city paved Alemany Boulevard on the old Ocean Shore Railroad right-of-way, a diagonal roadbed left by a failed coastal line that had run from 12th and Mission through Oceanview to the Pacific and never made a profit. The railroad stopped operations in 1920, beaten by the automobile, and left its graded roadbed cutting diagonally across the old plaza for six years before the city decided to pave it. The new boulevard was named for Archbishop Joseph Sadoc Alemany, San Francisco’s first archbishop. Its diagonal cut went directly through the plaza that had been the geographic center of the village, across the convergence of streets, through the space where the fountain had stood.
The Next Rupture: the Big One — 1906
In the midst of Oceanview’s looming challenge came an even bigger one in the form of San Francisco’s next inflection point. On April 18, 1906, an earthquake struck and the fires that followed burned for three days. Much of the city lay in ruins. Two hundred and fifty thousand people were left homeless. The army built over 5,000 small cottages for the families who couldn’t afford to decamp, painted green to blend into the public parks and open spaces where the camps were set up. Residents could eventually buy their cottages for fifty dollars and would move them to cheap lots in the western and southern parts of the city. These families were renters prior to the quake. Now they were homeowners. Horse-drawn wagons hauled those green cottages into Oceanview for weeks.
In the larger story of the 1906 earthquake, Oceanview is a rare thing: not a dispersal story but an arrival story. Cheap lots that nobody had wanted, that the homestead associations had platted and failed to sell and the railroad had abandoned, became the foundation of a neighborhood. Like a sea of poppies making their homes in disturbed ground, San Francisco families found their own place to take root. Two certified earthquake cottages still stand on Niantic Street, a stub of a road now hemmed in between Alemany Boulevard and the 280 freeway. Others on Lobos Street, near a taco truck that operates on weekends behind Minnie and Lovie Ward Recreation Center. Many of the cottages have been absorbed into the houses built around them, renovated past recognition in most cases, but occasionally identifiable by the checkerboard framing in the rafters.
Aftershocks: Another Post-Quake Boom, then a Bust — 1910s, 20s, and 30s
Two electric streetcar lines crossed the Oceanview corridor, decades apart and on different trajectories. In some ways, patterned after the competing developments separated by Orizaba. The first was San Francisco's oldest electric line called the San Francisco and San Mateo Electric Railway, which opened in 1892 running from the Ferry Building down through the Mission and south along San Jose Avenue, all the way to the cemeteries in Colma and eventually to downtown San Mateo. The line changed hands repeatedly through receivership and consolidation, and kept running through two wars and a Depression. Buses replaced it in 1945, part of the car-centric postwar conversion that dismantled most of San Francisco's streetcar network.
The streetcar line would contribute to a boom along San Jose Avenue. Edwardian era homes purchased or built by another wave of earthquake refugees popped up amid the fields and earthquake shacks. These new residents could hop on the streetcar for their daily downtown commutes. House by house, the neighborhood filled in unevenly, each block a record of whoever arrived when and what they could afford. A carpenter on Broad Street, a plumber on Capitol Avenue, a furniture salesman on Lakeview. The houses were practical: flat facades, bay windows angled toward the light, modest millwork, a room for a boarder if times got tight. By the time Alemany Boulevard cut through the old plaza in 1926 and erased the last trace of the railroad village, the neighborhood that had been promised for sixty years was finally actually there.
Coincidentally it was at this time that my great-grandfather-in-law made a home on his own plot on Lakeview Avenue near where it ends at San Jose Avenue. He had been renting in the Mission, working as a salesman for a furniture factory in South of Market, when the earthquake displaced him. He bounced between addresses before buying on the eastern slope of the ridgeline at the edge of Oceanview mere steps from the streetcar line. He built a modest Edwardian cottage on a corner lot with three bedrooms, pitched roof, wood frame, a bay window angled toward the view. He stayed the rest of his life. The house is still there.
While the southern stretch of Oceanview found itself fading into a new car-centric thoroughfare and the northeastern portion experienced its boom, the western end would hang on to its rural nature a bit longer. This fits a pattern that runs across the entire western half of San Francisco. The city's development had always moved east to west, slowed by sand dunes, fog, poor drainage, and the sheer distance from downtown. West of Orizaba, the terrain compounded the problem: the steep southwest face of the ridge defeated the surveyors who had drawn streets over it in the 1860s, some of those streets taking eighty years to become anything other than lines on a map. Below the ridge a gully ran seasonally west toward Lake Merced, poor drainage making the low lots unattractive to builders. Even federal Depression-era subsidies wouldn’t cover the expense of building on the steepest parts of the ridge.
The Twin Peaks Tunnel opened in 1918, boring two miles under the hills that had challenged westward expansion since the city’s founding. The tunnel’s immediate benefit went to the neighborhoods clustered around its West Portal entrance: the high end residence parks of St. Francis Wood and Forest Hill, West Portal itself. Seven years later, in 1925, the M Ocean View streetcar line extended that promise another mile and a half, running south from West Portal out through open farmland along 19th Avenue to Broad and Plymouth. It was infrastructure built for a neighborhood that existed mainly on paper. But for at least three more decades this side of Orizaba would remain sparse. Ridership stayed low through the Depression and in August 1939 Muni replaced the streetcars with buses. The line was restored in 1944 when the wartime population finally surged westward and a transit merger gave it the volume of riders it needed.
The Brookses Arrive — 1936
It was during this time that Jesse and Helen Brooks bought the rocky peak of that southwestern-most hilltop (fourteen city lots to be exact) because, as Helen put it, it was out in the country. Her primary view would be that sparsely developed, nameless neighborhood west of Orizaba. The ridgeline was interchangeably called Pansy Hill, Poppy Hill, and Kite Hill by the locals. Those locals would frequent the area in the spring and summer seasons to pick wildflowers. Here, high above surrounding lands, the couple built a country home that was designed by Helen’s architect brother. Jesse ran Brooks Stationery and Records on Irving Street near 20th Avenue. Helen had the property terraced with stone walls and worked the land for thirty years where she maintained native plants, a vegetable garden, beehives, chickens, dogs, even a deer who occasionally hopped the fence. She gave plants and seeds to anyone who asked.
I try to imagine what she saw in the land below. There’d be open fields filled with wildflowers. Victorian era buildings peppered throughout. The shacks would be there and the Edwardians. On the other side, the curving roads and charming detached homes of the residential parks. Over time, more and more homes would fill in. Children would play in the open fields, screeching and shouting as they do. On clear days she’d see all the way to the ocean on one side to the bay on the other. On overcast days she’d see what I saw: a marine layer with a denser blanket of fog in the low lying areas. The tall Monterey Cypress trees on top of the hill would capture any moisture and drip it into the soil for the surrounding plants, cultivated and wild. In the mornings the poppies would be curled up in a twist and by midday, fog or sun, they’d unfurl their petals and shine vibrant orange and even sometimes white.
War and Urban Renewal — 1940s, 50s, and 60s
War and ships brought the M streetcar back to Oceanview. San Francisco’s shipyards, Hunters Point chief among them with between 17,000 and 18,500 workers at peak, helped make the Bay Area the nation’s premier shipbuilding center during World War II, responsible for thirty percent of American wartime shipping. Workers poured in from across the country, and the Bay Area’s population grew by more than fifty percent between 1940 and 1950. The city’s transit systems, straining under the load, merged in 1946, and the newly consolidated Muni restored full streetcar service through the Twin Peaks Tunnel to Oceanview.
What came after the war was not what any resident had planned for. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency designated the Western Addition as blighted in the late 1950s and displaced an estimated 13,000 people, most of them African American who came to build the ships, for urban renewal. Families scattered to wherever they could find housing they could afford. Oceanview, once again, was one of those places. It was affordable because the same disinvestment that had made it the city’s southern frontier since 1856 had kept property values low, and because white working class families were leaving for suburbs whose FHA loans explicitly excluded Black buyers. It was not generosity. It was abandonment turned opportunity, and the families who came made something of it. By 1960, nearly 60% of Oceanview’s residents were African American. The neighborhood became a working class Black neighborhood.
The local residents started calling it Lakeview. Lore suggests the name migrated from Adolph Sutro’s 1890 development on the western slope of the Merced Heights ridge. He called it Lakeview for the spring-fed pond on Geneva Avenue way over on the eastern side of the ridge, the one locals called Lake Geneva, that fed Islais Creek on its way to the bay. But by this time the pond was long gone, filled in and paved over. The African American community that arrived in the 1950s and 60s took the name and made it their own.
In the 1960s the city built Interstate 280 on the abandoned right-of-way of the railroad that had built Oceanview a century before. The tracks had been pulled for wartime scrap metal in 1942. The corridor sat empty for two decades and then the bulldozers came and paved it. The freeway followed the ghost of the railroad so precisely that BART, when it opened in 1973, ran parallel to I-280 through the very same corridor using the same basic line through the same basic landscape. While the route was the same, the impact to the neighborhood was quite different. The noise, grit, and sheer energy of millions of cars rushing past at high speeds would significantly alter what was previously a quiet, removed neighborhood.
By now the Brookses were ready to retire, this time further south to La Honda in San Mateo County. Civilization was closing in with so many houses popping up the slope and along the ridge and the constant hum of the freeway below. The city purchased the hilltop from them in 1966 for $70,000, well below other offers and independent appraisals, after threatening eminent domain. The house was never opened as a community center as the neighborhood had hoped. Vandals set it on fire. Then again and again. After the third fire the city bulldozed what remained. When I walked the park in June the old stone terrace walls remained, the outline of a life that had been there. What also remained were the poppies, defiant in the muted light, rooted in the rocky crags and bits of disturbed earth. The rocks and stone walls would keep the plant life warm in the chilly San Francisco summer air.
A Rupture of a Different Sort: The Crack Epidemic
By the 1980s the neighborhood the shipyard workers had built was in trouble. Crack cocaine arrived in San Francisco’s Black neighborhoods around 1985, following the same pattern it followed in cities across the country: cheap, fast, and devastating to communities that had already been systematically denied investment, jobs, and services. In Oceanview, as in Bayview and the Western Addition, the crack trade moved into the spaces that disinvestment had left open. Unemployment was high. The schools were underfunded. The streets below the ridge that had been lined with owner-occupied homes began to feel less safe. Brooks Park became a site of drug dealing and violence. At least two bodies were found on the hill. And in the slope below, people who had bought their homes in the 1950s and raised their children here watched the neighborhood they had built, against the odds, on land nobody else had wanted, being hollowed out from the inside.
The same years that saw crack cocaine tearing through the neighborhood also produced something else. Oceanview became a hub for Mobb music, the Bay Area’s homegrown strain of gangsta rap. Like poppies boldly springing from disturbed ground, young men from the blocks around Randolph articulated in music what they were living. An M.C. named Cougnut, from the 200 block of Lakeview, had a gravelly voice that was intimidating and a boldness that made him walk up to other rappers and get directly in their faces. His group I.M.P., the Ill Mannered Posse, started in 1989 and released their album, “Ill Mannered Playas” in 1993. The album featured the track, “Frisco” that was peppered with references to the neighborhood, its problems, and the artists’ defiance against the forces that were against them.
Cougnut is considered the first San Francisco rapper to make an impact throughout the whole Bay Area. Dregs One, another local rapper and a hip-hop ambassador, put it plainly: there might not be a hip-hop scene in San Francisco if not for Cougnut. His contemporary Cellski grew up on Randolph Street, started selling tapes from the trunk of his car at thirteen, earned $6,000 in his first year, and appeared on over one hundred releases. The Oceanview produced something that cast its seeds across the whole Bay helping evolve what Bay Area music and all of hip-hop could be.
Oceanview’s Continued Evolution — 2000 Onward
The violence continued and something had to give. Eventually the community that had built Oceanview had enough and fought back. They did it slowly, person by person, block by block. Minnie and Lovie Ward had already been organizing for years through Neighbors in Action, pushing for rebuilt schools, youth programs, and a viable recreation center. By the early 2000s the serious violence had receded. A new library opened at 345 Randolph Street in June 2000. The recreation center was rebuilt and renamed for Minnie and Lovie Ward after they died in the mid-aughts. And then the prices rose. The stability the community had fought for made the neighborhood attractive again, and the neighborhood that had been affordable because no one wanted it became desirable, at least to some. The area is now majority Asian American. There’s an H Mart on Alemany.
Who knows how long that stability will sustain and what Oceanview will become in its next evolution? For thousands of years there was stability. Fields. Ponds. Gullies. Then a rupture. Then visibility. And visibility in San Francisco consistently has a way of becoming a real estate proposition. Then another rupture followed by another wave of new residents. Then another and another. But the neighborhood has defied prediction before. It became something nobody planned for. The land at the edge of the city, that was taken then dismissed and abandoned and rediscovered, has its own way of determining its own character. The poppy doesn’t ask permission. It finds the disturbed ground and it just comes back.
This is a reprint from my Substack.
Sources
Western Neighborhoods Project (the vast majority of my research was here)
San Francisco Planning Department
Association of Ramaytush Ohlone