by Michael Helquist
Copyright 2007 All rights reserved, Michael Helquist
The next time you walk past the double bay-windowed building at 525-527-529 Baker, take a closer look at the transom window above the entry for 529. There you will see the colorful stained glass work of co-owner Rob Romano. The address numbers are festooned with our state flower, the California poppy. If you are lucky enough to enter the home of Romano and Sharon Nearn, you will also see a much larger, brilliantly colored stained glass window at the top of the stairs, inset in what was likely a small fainting area just large enough for a bench and a much-needed rest. Rob and Sharon both work with stained glass as a hobby. That pursuit and the renovation of their flat has kept them busy since they first purchased their Baker Street home in 1991. Their efforts to transform a long-time rental unit into home ownership reflect the many transitions that our very westerly Western Addition neighborhood has sustained during the last one hundred years.
Although the North Panhandle blocks were fully plotted and sold to investors by the late 1800s, actual building construction awaited the laying of several cable car lines along Haight, Oak, Hayes, and McAllister Streets. Once the trip from the city center to the new Golden Gate Park became an easy open-air ride, the nearby blocks yielded their dairy farms and small ranches to houses and apartment buildings. The cable car lines, of course, made travel into the city just as easy, and families could settle in the recently annexed Western Addition and still have quick access to jobs downtown. Grand Queen Anne style houses, like those on the 700 block of Broderick Street, were joined by transitional styles with Colonial and Classic Revival designs after the turn of the century.
The property at 525-527-529 Baker was first owned by Eliza T. Grosh in 1894; seven years later ownership had changed to that of Louis M. Sage. (It was not unusual in those days for property ownership to be listed in a wife’s name). The building at this location was completed in March 1903; soon thereafter, the three flats provided comfortable homes for the first residents: in 525, Maurice James Sullivan, a dentist, and his daughter Nellie, a school teacher; in 527, John Ferem, an engineer and naturalized citizen from Norway, and his son Francis Edgar, also an engineer; in 529, George Robertson Lindsay, born in Scotland, his wife Mary and their son, Fred J who joined his father as a marine engineer, and their daughter, Anne B, a nurse.
With the enormous housing shortage resulting from the earthquake and fire of 1906, many of the grand homes and single family residences in the Western Addition were converted into boarding houses and housekeeping rooms. The building on Baker Street, however, provided a stable home for many years for its first residents.
The Sullivans in 525 and the Lindsays in 529 were to remain for nearly 15 years; the Ferems in the middle flat at 527 for five years.
The neighborhood changed once again when the single family population moved further west to the newer “suburban” homes in the Richmond and Sunset. In the 1940s and 1950s, defense workers, emigrating from the southern U.S. and elsewhere, made the area more transitional, reflecting their needs for immediate, but not long-term, housing. Housing stock declined as the tenants, no doubt, were kept busy with their jobs and families with little time to make investments in apartments and flats owned by someone else. City directories for the 1950s reveal that most tenants remained at 525-527-529 Baker for just one or two years. The 1959 city directory listed three separate apartments for each of the three flats, an arrangement that likely permitted shared kitchen and bathroom privileges with separate, locked bedrooms.
In the 1960s and 1970s many city workers settled in this area, drawn by the low rents. Turnover was common, although a Helen G. Smith, who worked at the Fairmont Hotel, lived first at 525 Baker for four years (1968-1972), and then another two in the middle flat at 527. African Americans, displaced by urban redevelopment in the Fillmore district, moved to this neighborhood not threatened by urban building schemes.
Today’s housing crunch and sky-rocketing real estate prices make home ownership a challenge for most tenants in the city. Romano and Nearn first lived in a rental unit on the 1800 block of Golden Gate Avenue while they looked for a home of their own. In 1991, when they purchased their Baker Street flat, the North Panhandle neighborhood was a rather unnoticed area with its full share of urban problems. Even then, being able to purchase a flat as Tenants-in-Common helped these renters become homeowners. As a result, a nearly century-old building is being restored and, with many other examples, a neighborhood is returning to its original state of providing housing to a diverse population with single-family homes as well as rentals.
A touch of ancestry for Rob Romano graces the entry area at the top of the long flight of stairs from the front door: a lovely ceiling lamp, once owned by his grandmother in Rhode Island. An equally beautiful chandelier lights the first room off to the right: it comes from Sharon Nearn’s aunt’s dairy farm in the San Joaquin Valley. Both the fixtures are complemented by the original ceiling medallions. An intricate picture railing, now highlighted with gold paint, can be found in each of the public rooms, and the wainscotting in the stairway and hallway is in remarkably good condition. Other fixtures, such as the hardware for the pocket doors between the two adjoining rooms on one side of the hallway had to be replaced.
The building’s exterior reveals the double bay windows: one with rounded glass and the other with slanted panes. Inside the rounded bay floods the large formal sitting room with daylight. This room also retains the original coal-burning fireplace with built-in mantle and mirror. The slanted bay window lightens the guest room to the other side of the hallway. Down the hallway, one finds a traditional split bath, another bedroom to the right, and a fully remodeled kitchen to the left. Leading from the kitchen and the hallway is the formal dining area, large enough to accomodate not only a long custom-made dining table and chairs but also a built-in cabinet with Rob’s leaded glass panes and another original coal-burning fireplace. The deep green-painted walls prompt thoughts of leisurely meals and good conversation, perhaps interrupted with views of the stars aided by the formidably large telescope at the far end of the room.
The last room of the flat is the master bedroom, across from the dining room -- light and bright with views of the garden below that Sharon has designed and developed with one of the neighbors downstairs. Although the rooms and hallway still had their original wood floors in good condition, Sharon and Rob, out of consideration for the downstairs neighbors, laid a deep-blue carpet with an intricate design of pink roses and leaves.
Rob and Sharon both mention the convenience of living in the center of the city as one of the neighborhood’s prime attractions, an appreciation shared through many decades by the series of tenants taking advantage of the building’s central location, close to many transportation lines.
Rob is a clinical lab techinician for UCSF, located at the Davies Hospital campus, and Sharon is a nurse, thus sharing a profession with a much earlier resident of 529 Baker, Anne B. Lindsay. Sharon works for OnLok Senior Health Services. Both are active volunteers in the Christmas In April program. If you get a chance to take a close look at that stained glass transom window, you will likely be greeted first by their stout and friendly dog, Cody.
City directories, Municipal Reports, Sanborn Maps, SF Block Books, and SF Naturalization Records from the Main Library; SF Water Department Records; geneological sources on the Internet, and San Francisco Architecture by Woodbridge, Woodbridge, and Byre, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1992.