DESCRIPTION
It is located in the southern part of the city, with City College
of San Francisco to the south, Glen Park to the north, and Interstate
280 to the east. Parks inside of the neighborhood include the Sunnyside
Playground, Dorothy Erskine Park and the Sunnyside Conservatory. It was
developed by Behrend Joost, for whom one of the streets in the
neighborhood is named.
TRANSPORTATION
The Glen Park BART station is located in the eastern corner of the
neighborhood, and is served by Muni lines J, 23, 26, 44 and 52. Muni
lines 36 and 43 run through the western part of the neighborhood.
HISTORY
In the late 1880s San Franciscan Behrend Joost signed a contract to
provide dredging services for a canal-cutting venture in Panama. The
attempt failed (a successful Panama Canal wouldn't come until 1914),
but Joost got out with a lot of money for his work before the
enterprise collapsed.
German-born, Joost had come to San Francisco as a teenager and
had been a grocer, hardware salesman and small-scale real estate
investor before starting the California Dredging Company. He put his
new fortune to work by investing in real estate west of Glen Canyon.
Development plans in western San Francisco had to be tied to efficient
transportation to and from downtown, so Joost and his co-investors made
sure they had both sides covered by starting the city's first
interurban electric streetcar line. The "San Francisco and San Mateo
Railway" had its grand opening on April 27, 1892 and its route
conveniently ran past Joost's major land investment, "Sunnyside".
The Sunnyside subdivision abutted Adolph Sutro's vast forest on
the west, the city's jail on the south and a ridgeline on the north,
beyond which lay the pastoral Glen Park canyon. Despite the comparative
wilderness, Joost's company went to great pains to point out that
Sunnyside was "NOT in the sand dunes," and was indeed the "creme de la
creme of San Francisco subdivisions". When Joost's "Sunny Side Land
Company" bought the land from Leland Stanford the surrounding area was
mostly vegetable fields. Surveyed in January 1890, the plat map for
Sunnyside was filed with the Recorder's office in April 1891. An
alphabetical order to the street names progressed east to west, from
Acadia to Hamburg (which sadly was changed to Ridgewood in later
years), while the north-south were named for individuals (including
Joost himself). At the corner of today's Monterey Boulevard and
Circular Way stood the powerhouse for Joost's electric railway (see
image). In July 1891 came the first lot sale and by the end of December
thirty-two more had been made. 3
But sales went slowly and the railway, beset by safety and other
issues, ended up being a money loser. Joost eventually sold out his
interests, and by 1900, less than 5% of Sunnyside's 2,250 lots had been
built on. Sunnyside's best know landmark arose in the early 1900s, when
W.A. Merralls built San Francisco's "other conservatory" (the one not
in Golden Gate Park) just north of today's Monterey Avenue between
Baden and Congo. The Sunnyside Conservatory is city landmark #78 and
owned by the Recreation and Park Department, but has had plenty of ups
and downs through the years. Dedicated neighbors have been working hard
to get it restored. The housing shortage created by the 1906 earthquake
and fire gave Sunnyside a boost in population and interest. Real estate
salesmen predicted that the neighborhood would "within a short time be
one of the most densely populated additions of the city." Schools and
new streetcar lines, including the "10 Sunnyside", came with the new
homes going up. Eventually the city's various building booms caught up
to the sparsely settled neighborhood. The razing of Sutro's forest for
Westwood Park and Westwood Highlands opened up a path west as
"Sunnyside Boulevard" merged into Monterey Boulevard. The old Ingleside
Jail became City College and the various vegetable fields faded under
concrete and homes. New streetcar lines, including the 10 Sunnyside
reached the neighborhood. The small Victorian cottages were joined by
stucco homes of the 1930s and utilitarian duplexes of the 1950s and
60s. The Sunnyside still feels like a working-class neighborhood
despite acting as a gateway to the tonier enclaves to the west, such
St. Francis Wood and Sherwood Forest. Perhaps because of the
topography, and the dead-end streets created by City College and
Interstate 280, Sunnyside has always had an isolated feeling---next to
everything, but not a part of it.
Glen Park / Sunnyside
Glen Park's prosaic name stems from the dramatic canyon park at its
heart. Nestled up against the east face of Twin Peaks, it's a cheerful
hillside neighborhood with narrow streets and turn-of-the-century homes
that often sit high above curbside. Sunnyside sits just to the
southwest above and below Monterey Boulevard as it heads out to the
Westwood neighborhoods. This corner of San Francisco offers a wide
range of housing stretches of arts and crafts bungalows on streets like
Hearst and Staples along with contemporary view homes and the
occasional Victorian on the streets above Monterey. Glen Park's
architecture is predominantly Victorian although it boasts some
dramatic newer construction with arresting architecture above and below
Laidley Street on its east side.
