San Francisco Heritage

10/19/2026

Slovenian Hall at 2101 Mariposa Street is one of the most interesting community spaces on Potrero Hill. The building, a prominent landmark to drivers on Highway 101, has been the center of the city’s Slovenian community since 1927 and has a uniquely “powerful” history.

When its Kansas Street substation collapsed in the 1906 earthquake, Pacific Gas & Electric constructed “Station E” at the southwest corner of Vermont and Mariposa streets to connect 11,000-volt lines from Visitacion Valley to downtown to Station A at Potrero Point. In 1918, the city’s growing electrical needs pushed PG&E to build a new Station E in the Mission District at Lexington and 19th streets, making the Mariposa facility surplus.

The neighborhood around the old Station E had become a Slovenian enclave after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Community members rallied to raise $10,000 and purchase the building from PG&E as a place to promote the education, culture, community, and welfare of the Slovenian people. Lectures, dances, weddings, festivals, and connections to community and cultural services have been a part of Slovenski Napredni Dom ever since.

Slovenian Hall will celebrate its 100th anniversary next year and needs support for essential repairs and upgrades. Donate here: https://www.slovenianhall.org/donations-2026

📷 1: Slovenian Hall, 2026.
📷 2: Anton Judnich’s saloon at 591 Vermont St, 1908. Anton is center in the white apron; his wife Ursula is at far left with their sons Tony and Frank. “San Francisco’s Potrero Hill” by Peter Linenthal & Abigail Johnston
📷 3: Entrance to Slovenian Hall, 2026.

Watch Navihanke Sassy Gals play a polka medley at Slovenian Hall:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6S3pMzs0nDQ

10/16/2026

🎞️ Potrero Hill has been featured in many films and television shows, namely because it gives filmmakers the primary thing they want from San Francisco (hills!) along with a classic view of the city skyline and relatively uncrowded streets.

“Bullitt” (1968) made excellent use of the hill in its iconic car chase sequence. 1974’s “The Conversation” heavily used both the interior and exterior of the beautiful brick warehouse at 1616 16th Street, the location of Gene Hackman’s workshop. Karl Malden’s veteran SFPD officer in the 1970s TV series “The Streets of San Francisco” lived at 768 De Haro. In 1990’s “Pacific Heights,” the Victorian home that’s supposed to be in...Pacific Heights...is actually the corner of Texas and 19th Streets in Potrero. Keanu Reeves falls in love with Charlize Theron in “Sweet November” (2001) while living in her Potrero Hill apartment at 298 Missouri Street (current home of the Potrero Hill Archives Project). Paul Rudd lived next door, above Christopher’s Books, in 2018’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp.”

That’s just to name a few! What other movies and TV shows have you seen Potrero Hill in?

📷 1: 20th and Kansas Streets, “Bullitt” (1968).
📷 2: Potrero Hill seen from 16th and Rhode Island Streets, “The Conversation” (1974).
📷 3: 19th and Texas Streets, “Pacific Heights” (1990).
📷 4: 18 Street between Missouri and Texas, “Sweet November” (2001).

10/15/2026

For over a century, the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House (known as the Nabe) has served the most vulnerable members of the Potrero Hill community. The organization began largely to aid recently-arrived Molokan immigrants (see our post from Tuesday!) and was initially operated by the Synodical Society of California Home Missions, a Presbyterian women’s group. The Nabe’s landmark building at 953 De Haro Street opened in 1922. Designed by famed California architect Julia Morgan, the arts and crafts style wood-shingled building has expanded over the years to include a gym and a kindergarten.

What began as English classes and a place to host Molokan community events expanded over the decades to serve other communities, children, families, and seniors through day care, youth programs, a summer camp, dramatics and music, counseling, a library, and more.

In 1972, Enola Maxwell became the executive director and the first African American to serve on the Nabe’s staff. The building was run down and the neighborhood was changing; Maxwell revitalized the Nabe by expanding its programs and the communities it served (and getting the building landmarked). A powerful and beloved community leader and activist, Maxwell served as director until her death in 2003. Her grandson Edward Hatter serves as the current director.

The Nabe’s after-school programs are one of the beneficiaries of this Saturday’s Potrero Hill Festival. Go out and support the community!

📷 1: Plan for the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House. “San Francisco’s Potrero Hill” by Peter Linenthal & Abigail Johnston
📷 2: The Nabe, 2025.
📷 3: Sewing class at the Nabe, with mostly Russian students,1935. “San Francisco’s Potrero Hill”
📷 4: Enola Maxwell (center) with grandson Edward Hatter and daughter Barbara Dundy, c.2001. “San Francisco’s Potrero Hill”

10/14/2026

🍻These empty bottles are waiting to be filled again🍻

⚓🍺 We can't talk about legacy businesses in Potrero Hill without mentioning Anchor Brewing Company, whose eye-catching 1930s-era facilities at 1705 Mariposa Street currently lay dormant awaiting its next chapter.

Anchor traces its history to 1896, when German brewer Ernst F. Baruth and his son-in-law, Otto Schinkel Jr., purchased an old brewery at 1431 Pacific Avenue from Gottlieb Brekle and renamed it Anchor (the spot had been serving b**r in different iterations since the mid-1850s). No one knows why Baruth and Schinkel chose the name Anchor except, perhaps, for its indirect but powerful allusion to the booming Port of San Francisco.

When Stanford graduate Fritz Maytag saved the struggling local brewery from bankruptcy in the 1960s, he reformulated the b**r’s ingredients so that Anchor became the first in the US to brew without adjuncts or fillers since Prohibition: this dark amber "steam" b**r, also bottled by Maytag for the first time, inspired much of the modern-day craft b**r movement.

Anchor is on the long road to restarting the brewery after surviving another near-death experience, and we believe that this legacy business will be back in the neighborhood. We look forward to enjoying an Anchor at a future Giants opener!

📷 1: Anchor Brewing Co. Building, 2026.
📷 2: Anchor Brewing b**r bottles,2013.
📷 3: Anchor Brewing facilities, 2013.

10/13/2026

In 1906, refugees from burned-out sections of San Francisco weren’t the only newcomers to Potrero Hill. That year, Eastern Slavic religious dissidents from villages near the Russian/Turkish border completed a more than two-year journey to start new lives in the neighborhood.

Multiple “Spiritual Christians” sects had split from the Russian Orthodox Church on different and various points, but acceptance of dairy consumption on religious fast days was the source of “Molokans” (dairy-eaters), a catch-all name given to nonconformists by mainstream adherents of the faith.

In North America, Molokan became an accepted and even adopted name for the few thousand emigrants who had escaped persecution and discrimination in Czarist Russia for religious freedom. Potrero Hill became an epicenter of this community in the United States.

Before decades of slow assimilation and dispersion, the Molokans of Potrero Hill were a tight-knit group united by faith and language. In the words of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Carl Nolte, their community at the top of the hill was “almost an island on an island.”

The First Russian Christian Molokan Church (constructed 1932) still hosts services at 841 Carolina Street and should be considered a historic resource for its important association with this community.

📷1: In 1914, Molokans Aleck and Emma Karetoff lived at 877 Rhode Island St, which had a barn for their horse, chickens, and ducks. “San Francisco’s Potrero Hill” by Peter Linenthal & Abigail Johnston
📷2: “The Molokan Church” and “A Molokan Funeral,” 1941, by Pauline Vinson. “Hilltop Russians in San Francisco” by William Saroyan
📷3: 950 De Haro St, where Fedor Ivanovich hosted religious services in his home, before the Molokan church was constructed at 841 Carolina St.
📷4: Molokan weddings included street processions from the bride’s house to the church, like this one at 22nd and Carolina St, 1987. San Francisco Chronicle
📷5: First Russian Christian Molokan Church, 841 Carolina, 2026.

10/12/2026

10/12/2026

Potrero Hill was spared from the fires following the 1906 earthquake, but the massive dislocation of San Francisco residents and waves of new workers arriving to rebuild the city shook up the hill as much as the April 18th temblor.

The neighborhood quickly experienced a boom in both population and buildings. In 1905, Potrero Hill had 400 residential buildings between Vermont Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, Mariposa Street, and 22nd Street. By 1914, that number had more than doubled to 941. Men and women burned out from Greek, Slovenian, Italian, and Scandinavian enclaves in the South of Market, North Beach, and Mission District neighborhoods now added to the mix of Irish, Scottish, Polish, Swedish, and American-born living on the hill. Tomorrow, as Potrero Hill month continues, we will look at a particularly distinctive cultural group who made the hill their home in the year of the earthquake.

📷 1: View of fires to the north, from Arkansas and 20th Streets, April 18, 1906. / wnp15.193
📷 2: Side-by-side comparison of building density from the 1905 and 1914 Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps.
📷 3: Hilda’s Saloon at 17th and Connecticut Streets, today the Connecticut Yankee, was built by the Salvotti family the year after the 1906 earthquake. “San Francisco’s Potrero Hill” by Peter Linenthal & Abigail Johnston

10/09/2026

Where can you see a Hamm's brewery model, Seals Stadium seats, and a patient chair and x-ray machine from a 1930s-era Potrero Hill dentist? That would be the Pier 70 Time Machine, a 4,000 square foot Potrero Hill and Dogpatch history museum inside the restored Building 15.

🦷 The chair and Ritter x-ray machine were brought to the museum from the Potrero Hill home of Dr. Jean Pierre Cantou, who practiced at 1515 19th St. (at Connecticut) in the 1930s. The Ritter machine was created in the 1920s and was the most efficient piece of dental equipment available at the time; it greatly facilitated the use of x-rays in dentistry and improved diagnosis of dental problems. In addition to having one of these innovative machines, Dr. Cantou served the Potrero district as Vice Chairman of the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Commission during WWII; the Time Machine displays photos of his service.

Dr. Cantou is just one of the prominent local Hill dwellers remembered at the museum, and we can't wait to tour the space with Special City members later this month. Stay tuned for more on when the museum will be open more widely!

📷 1: Dr. Cantou's patient chair and x-ray machine on display at the Pier 70 Time Machine
📷 2: Ritter x-ray machine
📷 3: Dr. Cantou with the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Commission

10/08/2026

Many who worked in shipyards, factories, and processing plants along San Francisco’s Central Waterfront in the 19th century made their homes near and on Potrero Hill. The single Irish-, German-, and American-born laborers at Union Iron Works, the Potrero Gas Works, Tubbs Cordage, the California Sugar Refinery, and Arctic Oil Works could board at rooming houses along 3rd Street and in the Dogpatch neighborhood, while most families lived in one- and two-story cottages and flat-buildings on the hill. Fires following the great 1906 earthquake were stopped short of Potrero Hill, but refugee camps were established to house waterfront workers who had lived in burned-out areas. Some of the relief “shacks” at the 20th Street and Pennsylvania Ave camp were moved to Potrero Hill lots and still stand today.

📷 1: View of busy intersection at 3rd Street (then Kentucky) & 20th Street, May 1906. / wnp26.644
📷 2: 19th century Stick-Eastlake style houses on 500 block of Connecticut Street, 2026.
📷 3: Refugee Camp 10, 20th and Pennsylvania Ave, 1906, by Charles Weidner. SF History Center, San Francisco Public Library, AAC-3120

10/07/2026

Today on the Legacy Business Registry, Goat Hill Pizza has been serving its unique sourdough crust in San Francisco for over 50 years. 🍕 🐐

This neighborhood pizzeria was opened by five friends—Joel and Loris Lipski, Karen Clark, Ruthann Dickinson, and Philip De Andrade—in 1975 at 300 Connecticut Street. At the time, sit-down restaurants were not common in the area, and the business quickly became an informal gathering place for friends and family.

Riffing on an old nickname for Potrero Hill (see our post from last Friday!), the founders named the business Goat Hill Pizza to honor the neighborhood’s history as a hilly pastureland. During Goat Hill’s early years, the business’s mascot, Goat Hilda de Anchovy, roamed the backyard behind its Connecticut Street location. Her image can still be seen today on the restaurant’s signage, interior decorations, and pizza boxes.

An unusual piece of neighborhood history is also preserved outside this original location; around 1920, some of the last goats in Potrero Hill escaped their pasture while cement was being poured for the sidewalks on Wisconsin Street, leaving their hoofprints memorialized in the walkway. When the street was being dug up for repairs, the hoofprints were rescued and embedded in the sidewalk outside Goat Hill.

What's your favorite Goat Hill order? 🍕🥗

📷 1-2: Goat Hill Pizza
📷 3: Photo of Goat Hilda de Anchovy on display at Pier 70 Time Machine