| Laurel Heights It Is  We
received dozens of emails in response to the most recent
Daybreak contest. Most answers were correct -- the photo
was indeed of the Laurel Heights campus. Unfortunately,
we only give prizes to the first three contestants to
respond correctly. Barbara Jim-George, Martha Reney and
Bill Bowen will each receive a Daybreak mug.
Currently, approximately
500 UCSF employees occupy the Laurel Heights building.
The population there should reach 1,200 when the
remaining construction is complete in just over one year.
Upon completion, Laurel Heights will accommodate 35 new
departments, with the Center for Social and Behavioral
Policy Studies as the primary tenant. In addition,
various units within the Schools of Medicine and
Pharmacy, the office of the Vice Chancellor for
Administration, and the office of Auxiliary Services have
been assigned space.
Check Daybreak next week
for another chance to win. In the meantime, here's a look
at the rather interesting (and some might say, haunted)
history of Laurel Heights, as borrowed from the UCSF
Journal, April 1985:
UCSF officially became the
owner of the Laurel Heights building, formerly known as
the Fireman's Fund building, at California and Presidio
Streets on February 15, 1985.
This intersection has been
a spark of controversy ever since the 1860s, when Mark
Twain, in a Territorial Enterprise editorial, lambasted
an avaricious undertaker for his practice of charging the
corpse to pass through the toll gate to Laurel Hill
Cemetery.
"If you or I owned
that toll road," Twain wrote, "we would be
satisfied with the revenue from a long funeral
procession." But here, he continued, "If a
corpse starts to Paradise or perdition by their road he
has got to pay his toll or else switch off and take some
other route."
The pastoral 160-acre
Laurel Hill was the 19th century ideal of what a cemetery
should be. UCSF now occupies 10 of those acres. The old
cemetery stretched all the way to Lone Mountain, where
the premium view plots were too expensive for any but the
wealthiest and most prestigious. For in those days --
when a man's station in life followed him into the
afterworld -- Laurel Hill too was tightly fragmented into
socioeconomic and ethnic neighborhoods. There were the
working people's quarters in the less desirable
flatlands, dotted by plain wood markers; the Chinese
burial ground divided by picket fences into company lots;
and a trimly manicured acreage reserved for members of
the city's volunteer fire companies.
It was a popular place for
family outings, Laurel Hill, with its rambling pathways,
grassy valleys and slopes, flowers, woods alive with
warblers, and hidden springs. By 1900, when city
officials halted further burials, 38,000 of San
Francisco's past figures and founders lay in its grounds,
including Hugh H. Toland, one of UCSF's founding fathers.
But the land became too
valuable to remain a mere resting place, situated as it
was between a pulsing young port city and the younger,
still growing residential district of the Richmond. Real
estate developers were offering top prices to city
administrators who, in 1912, evicted all dead from the
premises. The three adjoining cemeteries - the Catholic,
Masonic and Odd Fellows - moved on without a fuss, but
the fight to conserve Laurel Hill's pioneers for
posterity went on for another 30 years.
Finally, in the 1940s, the
movement to create a Pioneer Memorial Park was quelled
for good. All remains were unearthed and removed --
mostly southward to Colma's Cypress Lawns.
Headstones grand and small
were recycled into sculptor's blocks, gutters for Buena
Vista Park and breakwaters along the Marina shores.
After World War II, houses
coated Laurel Hill, except for the four-block corner
parcel at California and Presidio, which city officials
kept for a future high school. When they decided to build
the school elsewhere, they offered the land for sale and
-- not unpredictably -- tried to raise its value by
rezoning it for commercial use.
A new wave of people,
hundreds of recently arrived property owners, fought to
save Laurel Hill and the residential quality of their
neighborhood. In a compromise plan, the corner was given
restricted commercial classification, permitting
occupation by "an office building, medical center,
or similar profession." Fireman's Fund Insurance
Company bought it in 1953 and moved into the building
four years later.
The east windows overlook
the site of the old Laurel Hill toll gate, which Mark
Twain's undertaker watched through the shrubbery one day
as he rubbed his hands in happy anticipation of fresh
profits from the long procession just making its way
through. "I must go and cache this party!" he
said. Then, he "skipped lightly away to offer the
dismal hospitalities of his establishment to the
unconscious visitor in the hearse."
Links to previous contest
answers:
1st appeared 2/20/98
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