Homes and Gardens

Surface impressions of San Francisco assail the visitor like colors in a gypsy's scarf lustrous and salient. There is so much vivacity in the streets downtown, so much to see in the haunts talked about, that one is apt to overlook in a brief sojourn an outstanding characteristic of the city - its many distinctive homes.

Hardly a month passes that is not marked by pages of appreciation in national architectural journals about the creative originality shown in the landscape gardening and in the structural conceptions achieved in the residence parks of San Francisco. In versatility of treatment the architects who have specialized in home building in the San Francisco Bay region have had their designs of contoured streets, parterres, terraces and plantings published more widely than those of their professional brethren in any other section of the country.

Tour leisurely by motor car or afoot through the city if you would convince yourself how lovely the homes of San Francisco are. Leave the traveled boulevards and journey out into the districts that lie along the hills north of Washington street and west of Van Ness avenue as far as the Presidio wall. Skirting that dividing line, wander through the area between Geary street and the military reservation.

Pacific avenue, Broadway, Vallejo and the cross streets leading into them are built up with splendid homes, outlined against inviting lawns and gardens. There are noteworthy residence tracts in this section - Presidio Terrace, West Clay Park and Sea Cliff, where homes that look like villas and chateaux perch on heights that afford a sweeping range of ocean, hills and harbor entrance.

The district west of Twin Peaks, which may be reached either by the Municipal street cars that go out Market street or by automobile, has restricted residential areas that are reminiscent of the illustrations on the satiny pages of de luxe architectural folios.

Rapid transit has brought country life to city dwellers in San Francisco, Third and Market streets being only twenty minutes away from St. Francis Wood and its fountains and trees; Ingleside Terraces; Westwood Park, lying along the lower slopes of Mt. Davidson; Forest Hill and other verdant home areas, the tunnel through Twin Peaks making all this possible.

Coming back downtown over the shoulder of Twin Peaks your eyes are bewildered in trying to chart the sea of roofs and gables that stretch over the Mission district. Where once a few tiled adobes clustered around Mission Dolores, founded by Padre Junipero Serra, now spread homes flooding the level places and gradually climbing up toward the tops of the hills that are like watchtowers over the Golden Gate.

Country Life in the City
Rapid transit makes residence parks twenty minutes from downtown