Carmelita Street house

This image is the most attractive image I could create in what was once one the most beautiful homes in a very nice neighborhood in San Francisco. The home looks over Duboce Park. From the real estate listing it has 9 rooms, 4 fireplaces and is 2,600 square feet. It was built in 1899.

Most every detail, the wallpaper, paint, wood, fixtures, light switches is at least 50 years old, much of it is 107 years old.

We saw this place as an open house, as did many of the people in the neighborhood. It was a beautiful sunny day and we spent perhaps 15 minutes inside, but it was very disturbing.

The problem with the house is, even in the middle of a sunny day, it's a dark place. Somebody will spend a fortune to refurbish this home, the glass in the windows (windows that function cleanly because they only have one layer of very old paint) can be replaced to let in more light, but they are small and face the wrong direction. It will always be a dark place.

The home was filled with clutter and squalor. All of that was removed and it was hastily cleaned. But the smells still owned the place. Each room smelled different. Some of the rooms smelled like old wood, recently scrubbed. Many of the rooms smelled like bird shit or a mixture of cat and giant rat piss. Or like mold, the mold that grows from a small dead animal left behind a radiator to rot away. The kitchens were covered in a thick layer of grease and the fine mist of perhaps a decade or mouse droppings. The bathroom with an old bathtub with thick stains and growths, lit by a bare light bulb, caused half the people who entered to gasp "Silence of the Lambs" - in reference to the brief shot at the end of the film for a second where Jodie Foster discovers the rotting corpse of an old woman in a bathtub. It was that bad.

Everyone had little silver digital cameras and were taking flash shots in the dark bathroom. I couldn't bring myself to do that. The above image is one of the best lit rooms in the house, a living room. I put the camera on a windowsill and was able to get three exposures for this HDR image.

An elderly woman lived here for the past many decades. Her family was the second family to own the house since 1899, people speculated that they owned it since the 1940s, perhaps earlier. For the past unknown years, this woman
lived by herself in the house. She rarely left. Some neighbor tittered that when she could still walk, this neighborhood Miss Havisham was seen walking a cat on a leash. It's unclear how she cooked without killing herself in the kitchen, the stoves were both so old and certainly dangerous.

In the last decade the neighbors spent fortunes purchasing and refurbishing their homes. They wanted her to go, for a combination of reasons: pity for her living condition, because they wanted the decaying house to be taken care of to complete a street filled with beautiful homes, because they secretly dreamed of owning it and refurbishing it themselves.

What was disturbing was this real example of the cliched paradox of being lonely in a crowded city - that in one of the world's richest cities a woman who owned this asset that made her worth more than some 90% of the world's population could be left to live like this. While everyone around her was obsessed with buying, selling and fixing up real estate.

I feel fairly confident in saying the old woman would have experienced more dignity if you pulled her from this house and dragged her down the street by the hair, while the neighbors stood in front of their homes. If you then left her at the worst homeless shelter in the city she would have had a better life and lived longer than inside this awful palace, where she remained until close to the very end.

She has no heirs, the home was being sold in a probate sale. The list price was $990,000.