Eye-catching landmarks in S.F. neighborhoods - SFGate - http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea...
Jul 6, 2014
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"San Francisco's residential architecture gets reduced to easy stereotypes: Victorian frills at one extreme, storybook stucco at the other. Then you navigate the streets and hills and realize how simplistic such shorthand can be. Here's an alternate view of the domestic terrain - five buildings with the same individualist spirit that you encounter in the city's residents. Nothing you'll see on a postcard, but a quintet of idiosyncratic landmarks that caught my eye when I encountered them, and have remained vivid in the memory ever since...La Casa de los Pechos de la Cholla, 30 Mountain Spring Road You figure there must be a story behind a Spanish Moroccan mirage like this, and you're right. This was the lifetime work of Edward Moffitt, who bought four parcels on a then-unpaved slope of Twin Peaks in 1921. He and his wife built a cabin and the road, but his ambitions grew after he purchased the remnants of an abandoned city incinerator - more than 50,000 charred red bricks. He died in 1963, remembered as "a newspaperman, artist, furniture maker, machinist and builder." But that's not all: the deep broad arches housed a workshop where Moffitt, among other things, built a racetrack for rats."
- Anne Bouey
Jack and I lived here our last year in San Francisco.
- Anne Bouey
The main residence has an attached apartment, and there is another apartment below the arched workshop area where we lived. At that time Mrs. Moffitt still lived in the home, and her daughter and son-in-law lived in the apartment. There is a gorgeous garden courtyard inside with stunning views of SF. Several years later the workshop was also turned into housing. I'm not sure what happened with the lower apartment because it was never built to code. We were very fortunate to live there.
- Anne Bouey
Take a wild guess what we paid in rent!
- Anne Bouey
When Jack first moved in, it was $200 per month. By the time we moved out, it was $265!
- Anne Bouey
It was such a great place that we kept it in the family a few more years. One of my brothers moved in when we left. Then when he bought his first house in SF, Jack's sister moved in.
- Anne Bouey