San Francisco: The Painted Ladies

About 48,000 houses in the Victorian and Edwardian styles were built in San Francisco between 1849 and 1915 (with the change from Victorian to Edwardian occurring on the death of Queen Victoria in 1901), and many were painted in bright colors. As one newspaper critic noted in 1885, ...red, yellow, chocolate, orange, everything that is loud is in the upper stories are not of red or blue... they are painted up into uncouth panels of yellow and brown...[5] While many of the mansions of Nob Hill were destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, thousands of the mass-produced, more modest houses survived in the western and southern neighborhoods of the city.