This is a long spur. It takes you east into the Alamo Square area, technically outside the Haight, but the building is too important to skip.
The Westerfeld House is a 28-room Gothic Victorian built in 1889 by architect Henry Geilfuss for William Westerfeld, an affluent German baker and confectioner who ran a bakery at 1035 Market Street. The construction cost was $9,985, with an adjoining rose garden and carriage house. Westerfeld lived there for only a few years.
The house’s later history is one of the strangest of any building in San Francisco. From the 1890s to the 1920s it was owned by Irish contractor John J. Mahony and his family. In the late 1920s Russian émigrés bought it and converted the ballroom into a social club called “Dark Eyes.” The house earned the local nickname “The Russian Embassy.”
In 1965, Charles Fracchia bought the building. He never moved in. The Calliope Company, a fifty-member counterculture collective, moved in instead. From 1966 to 1967, underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger lived in the tower and shot scenes of Invocation of My Demon Brother here, with a soundtrack by Mick Jagger and an appearance by Bobby Beausoleil (later a Manson Family member, currently incarcerated). Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco on April 30, 1966, was a frequent presence and kept a young African lion cub in the tower. By 1968 the Family Dog (the concert promotion collective behind the Avalon Ballroom) had moved in.
Almost every counterculture thread in San Francisco from 1965 to 1968 passed through this single building. It is now privately owned and beautifully restored. The current owner, Jim Siegel, has restored the carriage house and opens the building occasionally for tours during preservation events. Private residence. Exterior viewing only.