Why write a book about San Francisco’s house-moving past? And why move a house in the first place? Who were these “urban cowpokes,” as one reporter described them, whose businesses revolved around picking up and moving houses? All three questions ultimately formed the nexus of San Francisco Relocated.
I was about nine years old when my parents moved to the Portola District, renting a common row house that seemed to hold no special attributes. It was not a Victorian, it could not be described as “ornate” by any manner of means, and it did not stand out from any other house on the block. It was sandwiched beside two other houses with the usual San Francisco propensity for allowing only a few inches of space between buildings.
Had it not been for hours of hanging on the back fence listening to our landlord tell stories about how he had made a thriving business out of buying up “houses that needed moving” and relocating them onto vacant lots, I would have never even known that a building could be picked up and moved.
Our house on Sweeny Street was one of those houses; its twin next to us was another. Joseph Caruso moved numerous homes throughout the Portola District, his center of operations. He was just a small-time contractor who, it turned out, was one of the last San Francisco house-moving entrepreneurs in the waning years of the city’s moving history.
Now fast forward 40 years, when an amazing photograph of a two-story Victorian house being moved downhill via a team of draft horses and some wooden rollers caught my eye, releasing a floodgate of memories of Joseph Caruso and his unusual business.
As I investigated San Francisco’s moved-building history, I was amazed to discover that the city’s house-moving adventures were second only to Chicago’s. It is also astonishing to note that the heyday of San Francisco’s relocation actually occurred between 1850 and 1920, when so many houses were moved that San Franciscans came to consider them a nuisance and complained about the street-hogging houses that wandered irresponsibly from block to block in search of new lots as the city expanded and constantly revised its sidewalks, boundaries, and grid lines.
Mark Twain, one of the loudest (and most literary) of these protesters, used his position as a local reporter for San Francisco’s Daily Morning Call to document the wayward buildings and their troublesome journeys through the streets of San Francisco: “An old two-story, sheet-iron, pioneer, fire-proof house, got loose from her moorings last night, and drifted down Sutter Street toward Montgomery.”
An 1868 article in the California Alta documented the damage done to cobblestones and pavement by house-moving operations as follow: “The business of buying those old shells, moving them out of the fire limits, repairing or patching them up, and selling them on long credit, at round prices, has become a regular trade, which is followed by a number of persons with profit to themselves, but loss to the general public.” The California Alta called for regulation, fines, and even imprisonment.
And sometimes, the city supervisors took matters into their own hands, as when they decreed that, on Golden Gate Avenue, “no permit shall ever be issued allowing the moving of any house along said street for any distance whatever, and no housemoving shall, ever, be done on said street, either along, upon or across the same.”
Now, we come to the crux of the matter—why move a structure instead of tearing it down and rebuilding elsewhere?
In 1900s San Francisco, building materials were expensive to procure; so once built, it was no light matter to demolish a building. A house-moving industry sprung up to address the growing need of relocating structures throughout the city. A renegade bunch of house-herding cowboys, who tended to rebel against regulations, hoisted up and pulled buildings down the streets of San Francisco via draft horse, rollers, and capstans.
Moving houses was generally a popular venture in other cities at the turn of the century; however, homes on the East Coast were largely built of brick, making them too heavy and difficult to move on a regular basis in contrast to the sturdy, comparatively lighter redwood structures of San Francisco. Also, San Francisco’s streets were regularly rerouted, redone, and regraded to cope with the city’s growth, so there was simply more impetus for house moving in San Francisco than in the rest of the nation.
In 1900, the city proposed licensing and taxing these house movers and house-raisers, which resulted in movers protesting about the interference of government in small business and the accusations of house movers due to unjust taxes that favored larger companies over smaller independents.
In the mid-1800s to 1910, there were minimal overhead electrical or telegraph wires to worry about; but in June 1905, house mover D.J. Sullivan went to court for cutting electrical wires without permission (a crime that could be deemed either a felony or a misdemeanor at the judge’s discretion). His act reflected an ongoing war between house-moving companies and the San Francisco Gas and Electrical Company, which eventually was resolved by a court injunction requiring house movers to post bonds for damages before moving structures.
All manner of buildings were moved in San Francisco over the decades that followed, from two-story Victorian structures to churches, earthquake shacks, and commercial buildings.
Today, the business of moving buildings in San Francisco is all but dead, killed off by a combination of traffic, density, and the preponderance of services that cannot be interrupted, however temporarily, to make way for a moving building. Contrast the increased challenges and costs of house moving (and its associated liability) with the ready availability of building materials and the (comparatively) easier process of obtaining a building or remodel permit in the city and it is easy to see why the heyday of San Francisco’s relocation has long since passed.
San Francisco Relocated is not intended as a definitive history; it should be noted that many more buildings were moved in the city than appear here.
It is a story for anyone who wants to know how the city was shaped, and it is a tribute to those unsung heroes of San Francisco—the house movers and structural engineers—who attempted the impossible. It assures that their lasting legacy will not be forgotten.
As the daughter of a longtime house mover said, “House moving has been good to our family. We owe the life that we have been able to live to it, along with the hard work by our father and his guts to take on such a crazy profession! As my CPA once said to me, ‘Who in the world would ever think of taking a house, such a big and enormous thing, and move it and decide that that is what they want to do for a living? That’s just crazy!’ I had never thought about it that way.”
It is a crazy profession, it is exciting, and it ultimately changed San Francisco forever.
Within any history, there are mysteries. Some moving jobs have been identified as being within San Francisco, but little else is known about them. On my website lies your chance to contribute to their stories and solve these UMOs, or “unidentified moving objects.” If you have any information or new findings on UMOs, please e-mail sfrelocated@gmail.com. Your research will help add to San Francisco’s history by identifying these mysterious wanderers and will be posted on the book’s website at www.sfrelocated.com.