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Since 1971, a nonprofit member-supported organization with a mission to preserve and enhance San Francisco's architectural amd cultural identities.

Heritage is a 501(c)(3) historic preservation nonprofit dedicated to protecting San Francisco's historically and culturally significant sites and structures through advocacy and education. Heritage aims to help manage change over time, advocating for smart growth through the protection and reuse of historic structures and landscapes. Heritage is a membership-based organization and the owners and operators of the 1886 Haas-Lilienthal House, San Francisco’s only Victorian house museum, and the Doolan-Larson Building, located at the world-famous corner of Haight and Ashbury streets.

11/04/2026

Change is afoot at San Francisco Heritage! Our current board chair, Katherine Petrin, will step into the role of president and CEO when Stephen “Woody” LaBounty retires at the end of 2026.

Katherine has 30 years of history and engagement with SF Heritage, first coming to the organization as a summer intern in 1995! She is ready to jump in and advocate for the cultural and built resources that make San Francisco so special. Meanwhile, Woody plans to spend his retirement writing and traveling, while continuing to lend his distinctive voice to supporting SF Heritage.

“It has been a singular honor to be a part of SF Heritage,” says Woody, who will continue to assist on diverse and ongoing special projects in 2027. “No mission is dearer to an eternal San Franciscan like me, and I will always be a champion and supporter of the organization.”

Katherine echoes those sentiments: “As a fellow eternal San Franciscan, I’m looking forward to this role and to further elevating the successes SF Heritage has achieved during Woody’s tenure, including development of a fantastic staff, impactful, engaging programs, and healthy finances supported by long-time friends and donors.”

Read the full press release: https://www.sfheritage.org/news/press-release-petrin-leadership/

11/04/2026

The Ingleside Terraces National Register Historic District nomination goes before the State Historic Resources Commission (SHRC) on Nov 12-13. This is a necessary stop ahead of consideration for the National Register of Historic Places. SF Heritage strongly supports this nomination, but it’s important for locals to voice their support to the SHRC.

The deadline for submitting public comments is 9am this Thurs, Nov 5! See our website for all the details on how to submit a comment: https://www.sfheritage.org/advocacy/north-beach-and-ingleside-terraces-finally-get-their-hearing/

10/30/2026

While Lombard Street gets all the fame for being “the crookedest street in the world,” that title actually belongs to Potrero Hill’s Vermont Street. The section south of 20th Street, adjacent to McKinley Square, originally ran straight downhill (yikes!) but was curv-ified in the late 1920s. Vermont only has seven curves compared to Lombard’s eight, but they are tighter. In 2011, the SF Department of Public Works compared official city maps and calculated a 100-foot section of the streets side-by-side: Vermont’s curves are closer together. A 2014 episode of the Travel Channel TV show “Fact or Fiction?” measured Vermont’s sinuosity (curviness) at 1.56, compared to Lombard’s 1.2.

Every year on Easter Sunday, Vermont Street hosts a very San Francisco event befitting its “crookedest” title: the Bring Your Own Big Wheel race. This charming and thrilling competition draws hundreds to watch the brave careen down Vermont on child-sized plastic tricycles and similar wheeled vehicles. There are races for children and adults, and it is all made more festive and fun with costumes, bubbles, and balloons. The brainchild of Jon Brumit, the event actually began on Lombard Street in 2000 before moving to Potrero Hill in 2008.

📷 1: View south on Vermont Street from about 20th, before street grading, February 1927. / wnp14.0155
📷 2: View south on Vermont Street from about 20th, July 1951. San Francisco History Center, , AAB-5595
📷 3: Bring Your Own Big Wheel race, 2008. Scott Beale /

10/29/2026

In 1849, brothers James and Peter Donahue established a small iron works that would grow, relocate, and become one of the largest shipbuilding yards on the West Coast. Union Iron Works was a major part of Potrero Hill history, both for its physical footprint and as a primary employer.

In 1883, Union Iron Works purchased 32 acres on Potrero Hill’s east side along the Central Waterfront between 18th and 22nd streets. By the early 20th century, the facility at Pier 70 ran a machine shop, iron foundry, boiler shop, two blacksmith shops, joiner shop, copper shop, four shipbuilding slips with overhead cranes, and a hydraulic-lift drydock. During World War I, 16,000 Union Iron Works employees produced 66 destroyers and 18 submarines. In World War II, more than 70 vessels were built at the yard, including a destroyer-escort in just 23 ½ days.

Today the former Union Iron Works campus at Pier 70 SF is a public/private partnership featuring retail, offices, research-and-development labs, and, in Building 12, the Pier 70 Time Machine. This newly-opened free museum celebrates the history of the Central Waterfront and will be hosting the 27th annual Potrero Hill & Dogpatch History Night on Saturday, November 7 at 5:30pm. Go enjoy pizza, live music, historic photos, and community history in action.

For SF Heritage Special City Landmark Club members ONLY, Peter Linenthal of the Potrero Hill Archives Project is offering a guided tour of the Pier 70 Time Machine on Sunday, November 1. Join or upgrade today and let us know you want to be part of the tour!

SF Heritage named the Pier 70 project one of our Heritage Heroes at our 2025 Landmark Luncheon. Read more: https://www.sfheritage.org/landmarkluncheon/ #1758312939407-071d74cd-acf9)

📷 1: Illustration of Union Iron Works. Courtesy of Pier 70 Time Machine
📷 2: Union Iron Works Company Band, 1914. Courtesy of Brookfield Properties
📷 3: Union Iron Works aerial. Courtesy of Pier 70 Time Machine
📷 4: Page from Bethlehem Steel Company, SF Shipbuilding Division’s 100th Anniversary booklet, 1949.
📷 5: Building 12 at Pier 70, 2026.
📷 6: Keith Goldstein speaking at the 2025 Potrero Hill History Night. Courtesy of Potrero View newspaper

10/28/2026

Farley's coffee shop and cafe at 1315 18th Street in Potrero Hill has been a community gathering space since 1989. Named after founder Roger Hillyard’s grandfather, Jack Farley, the shop initially was a place for coffee enthusiasts to buy quality brewing accessories. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (Potrero Hill was one of the few neighborhoods that didn’t lose water or electricity), Farley’s became an impromptu neighborhood meeting spot, and Roger started opening earlier and selling coffee.

This legacy business prides itself on being “community in a cup”: a safe space for public engagement and discussions of community issues. Farley’s hosts a variety of neighborhood events, including book clubs, knitting groups, comedy nights, movie nights, art classes, and neighborhood planning meetings, as well as featuring local artists, musicians, and poets. They also support local nonprofits through their Give Back program.

The coffee shop marks St. Patrick’s Day with bagpipes; Independence Day with their Safe and Sane fireworks show; Thanksgiving by raising funds for the SF-Marin Food Bank; and Halloween with their Pet Parade and costume contest. Now in its 37th year, the event features over 100 dogs, cats, parrots, iguanas, even goldfish, and their owners walking up 18th Street in costume. Go check it out on Saturday, October 31 at 1pm; the parade starts at 18th and Arkansas.

In 2008, Roger Hillyard passed Farley’s on to his son Chris and daughter-in-law Amy. Tragically, Amy disappeared from the couple’s Oakland home this past March and remains missing. To find out more, and how you can help, visit https://www.bringamyhome.com/

📷 1: Farley’s, 2021.
📷 2: 1315 18th Street in 1973. SF Assessors Office photo
📷 3: Poster for this year’s Pet Parade.

10/27/2026

At the time of the Gold Rush, Potrero Hill’s east arm stretched into San Francisco Bay to an outcrop called Potrero Point. From the 1870s to the turn of the 20th century, the point was transformed into the city’s home of heavy industry, including gunpowder production, barrel manufacturing, sugar refining, and most significantly, power generation.

In 1900 and 1901, Claus Spreckels’ Independent Electric & Gas Power companies began electric power generation and gas manufacturing on the land around Illinois and 23rd streets just to the west of the sugar baron’s waterfront refinery. What became the Potrero Power Plant grew over the 20th century to occupy 30 acres containing large gas holders (see last Friday’s post), turbines, and a steam electric plant with a 300-foot-tall boiler stack, the last still a local landmark of the waterfront.

Project developer Fifth Space is remaking the former power station site into a mixed-use community of offices, housing, a cancer research center, and a waterfront park. SF Heritage assisted in advocating for the retention of significant historic features such as the boiler stack and the former Station A turbine hall, because adaptive reuse of significant structures not only retains a sense of place in new development, it pays respect to our shared history.

📷 1: Potrero Point; view southeast from about 20th and Iowa; Irish Hill in the left background, c. 1915. / wnp15.980
📷 2: Potrero Power Plant; looking northeast from 25th and Illinois, c. 1915. / wnp15.1580
📷 3: Interior of the Station A Turbine Hall, 2020.
📷 4: Fifth Space rendering of the future Potrero Power Station. https://fifthspace.com/

10/26/2026

Maybe you wondered how we can celebrate Potrero Hill month without talking about Dogpatch. Today is the day! Situated along the bay on the east side of Potrero Hill, today Dogpatch is cut off from the hill by I-280 and is often considered its own neighborhood. This area developed around 1870 in an incredible rush of industrialization along the waterfront. Shipyards, factories, refineries, and warehouses all combined to make up the largest shipbuilding operation on the west coast. Union Iron Works, Tubbs Cordage, and others employed thousands of laborers, including many immigrants whose origins were enshrined in the names of Dogpatch enclaves like Irish Hill and Dutchman’s Flat.

Dogpatch was relatively isolated from the rest of the city, so modest, economical housing was built near the shipyards for laborers and their families, turning the neighborhood into something of a company town. Clusters of these homes stand today, including 13 identical Eastlake-style cottages that sit back-to-back on Tennessee and Minnesota streets between 20th and 22nd. The designs for these 4-room cottages were taken from local architect John Pelton, Jr.’s “Cheap Dwellings” series. Contractors used Pelton’s simple plans, which were published in the newspaper, to construct housing across the city. The Dogpatch cottages were built in 1887 by contractor Rees Davis for about $850 each.

As Dogpatch began to gentrify in the late 1990s, SF Heritage and architectural historian Christopher VerPlanck worked with the Dogpatch Neighborhood Association to survey the area. The Dogpatch Historic District, bounded by Mariposa, Tubbs, 3rd, and Indiana streets, was designated by the city in 2003.

📷 1: View east from Potrero Hill to Union Iron Works and Irish Hill, with 20th St running along the right, c.1890. / wnp27.6387
📷 2: Scottish-born Daniel Law with wife Mary and their 5 children, 1897. The Law family lived in a Pelton cottage at 1012 Tennessee St. Daniel and his 2 eldest sons worked at Union Iron Works. “San Francisco’s Potrero Hill” by Peter Linenthal & Abigail Johnston
📷 3: Pelton cottages on Tennessee St, 2012. Courtesy of Chriss Carlsson
📷 4: Pelton cottages on Minnesota St, 2021.

10/23/2026

Hard to imagine today, but San Francisco’s skyline used to be dotted with gasometers, or gas holders, which stored natural gas. While not an uncommon sight, the one at Pennsylvania Avenue and 23rd Street in Potrero Hill was a whopper. Built by PG&E in 1950, it stood 26 stories tall, 254 feet in diameter (almost an entire city block!) and held 17 million cubic feet of gas. Photos comically contrast the industrial giant to adjacent homes on Pennsylvania. Neighbors were none too happy with the eyesore, which one longtime resident referred to as “Old Ugly.” Tears were not shed when it was dismantled in 1989; instead, SF Mayor and Potrero Hill resident Art Agnos held a farewell ceremony. The site is now occupied by the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank.

📷 1: View east on 24th Street to Potrero Hill gasometer, Jan 1975, by Judith Lynch. / wnp25.11842
📷 2: Potrero Hill gasometer, c. 1976, by Judith Lynch. / wnp25.1919
📷 3: View north of Potrero Hill gasometer, c. 1960. / wnp33.04207

10/22/2026

The former Olivet Presbyterian Church at 400 Missouri Street is one of Potrero Hill’s most significant buildings, with multiple associations important to San Francisco’s cultural histories.

Founded in 1868 for the workers at Union Iron Works down the hill, the Olivet congregation met at locations on Tennessee and Mississippi streets before a fire destroyed their home in 1903. The new church at 400 Missouri Street was dedicated in June 1905.

In 1968, the centennial year of the congregation, Enola Maxwell made history when she was installed as Northern California’s first women lay preacher of a Presbyterian church. In the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, she served “a mixed neighborhood of whites, blacks, and other minority groups.” Maxwell went on to be one of the most important leaders on Potrero Hill as the longtime director of the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House (see our post from last Thursday).

From the mid-1970s to the 1990s, 400 Missouri was the headquarters of the Pickle Family Circus. The San Francisco troupe was influential in the worldwide new circus movement, which favored intimate animal-free shows, a tradition which continues today in shows like “Dear San Francisco” (produced by Pickle alumni).

For all these associations and for its high architectural integrity, 400 Missouri Street is an excellent candidate for city landmark designation.

📷 1: 400 Missouri Street, 1973. SF Assessors Office photo
📷 2: Enola Maxwell in her office. Photo by Bob Hayes
📷 3: Pickle Family Circus posters. “The Pickle Family Circus” by Terry Lorant and Jon Carroll
📷 4: 400 Missouri Street, 2026.

Address

2007 Franklin Street
San Francisco, CA
94109

Telephone

+14154413000

Website

http://www.sfheritage.org/

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