Historical Homes
When Jim Siegel was just eight years old, he saw his first episode of The Addams Family, and fell in love during the opening sequence. Not with the “creepy” and “kooky” characters shown snapping their fingers in a staccato cadence, but with the gothic Victorian house pictured in the first frame. Siegel, watching in his parents’ suburban ranch house, was infected.
“I was obsessed with that show and the house,” he says. “I think it was because the family and their home were quirky and different. Even back then, I knew I was gay, and I felt different from everyone around me — maybe I identified with it.”
He was still a boy when he saw the Westerfeld House, a Stick Italian Villa in Alamo Square, from the window of his parents’ car. “To me, it looked like the Addams Family house,” he says.
As a teenager living in Haight-Ashbury, his fascination with the place turned into something like fate during an LSD trip. “I saw myself owning this house, and it all came together for me how I would do it,” he says. The drug-induced vision turned into a real estate development career.
The plan to acquire the house involved buying other Victorian buildings and fixing them up. It may sound like a somewhat logical thing to do in San Francisco 2016, but in 1976 it was a crazy When Jim Siegel was only eight years old, he saw his first episode of The Addams Family and fell in love during the opening sequence. Not with the “spooky” and “cheeky” characters shown snapping their fingers in a staccato cadence, but with the gothic Victorian house depicted in the first frame. Siegel, who was watching in his parents’ suburban ranch house, was smitten.
“I was obsessed with that show and the house,” he says. “I think it was because the family and their home were odd and different. Even then I knew I was gay, and I felt different from everyone around me – maybe I identified with that.”
He was still a boy when he saw the Westerfeld House, an Italianate villa in Alamo Square, from the window of his parents’ car. “To me, it looked like the Addams Family house,” he says.
As a teenager living in Haight-Ashbury, his fascination with the place turned into something akin to fate during an LSD trip. “I saw myself owning this house, and it made sense to me how to do it,” he says. The drug-induced vision turned into a career in real estate development.
The plan to acquire the house involved buying other Victorian buildings and fixing them up. It may sound like a somewhat logical thing to do in San Francisco in 2016, but in 1976 it was a crazy idea. “Very few people appreciated Victorians in those days,” he says. “They were falling apart in what were then tough parts of the city. The city was tearing them down blocks at a time, making way for new development.” (Siegel had a friend who worked for San Francisco Victoriana—a now-closed purveyor of historically accurate casting—and together they would go into demolition sites and clear doorknobs, doors, trim, mantles, and whatever else they could haul away. The beginning of Siegel’s enormous collection of architectural salvage, and it plays a role later in history.)idea. “Very few people valued Victorians at that time,” he says. “They were mostly crumbling in what were then rough parts of town. The city was tearing them down blocks at a time, making way for new developments.” (Siegel had a friend who worked for San Francisco Victoriana— a now closed supplier of historically accurate molding — and together they would go into demolition sites and scavenge doorknobs, doors, trim, mantels, and anything else they could drag away. It was the start of Siegel’s huge collection of architectural salvage, and it plays a part later in the story.)
