Postcard Row Holds Its Pose: The Painted Ladies of Alamo Square
The Victorian houses on Steiner Street have been photographed a million times. The neighborhood around them — Alamo Square — keeps living its own, quieter life.
Stand in Alamo Square at the top of the hill and the view assembles itself like a photograph that has already been taken a million times: a row of ornate Victorian houses along Steiner Street — the Painted Ladies — with the downtown skyline rising behind them, old San Francisco in front, new San Francisco behind.
The houses date to the city's great Victorian building boom, and their survival is partly luck and partly stubbornness. This corner of the Western Addition kept its nineteenth-century fabric through eras of redevelopment that erased whole blocks elsewhere, and 'Postcard Row' became the visual shorthand for residential San Francisco: bay windows, gingerbread trim, paint in colors the original builders might have found alarming and delightful in equal measure.
The square itself is the neighborhood's front yard. Alamo Square Park, maintained by the city's Recreation and Park Department, draws dog walkers at dawn, families on the playground by midday and a steady rotation of tour buses at the viewpoint — visitors photographing the houses, locals barely looking up, both sharing the same hill with practiced ease.
What the postcard leaves out is the texture: the tennis courts, the century-old trees, the surrounding blocks of Victorians and Edwardians in every state of restoration, and neighbors who have watched the view become world-famous from their front steps.
Come on a clear November morning, when the marine layer burns off and the skyline goes sharp behind the gables. The Ladies hold their pose. They have had a great deal of practice.
