City College of San Francisco / Spring 2006

     Jane Cryan, the woman who helped save San Francisco’s 28 surviving 1906 earthquake shacks, will soon need a home of her own. The “Cottage Lady” is getting evicted.

     Cryan began her quest to save the city’s 100-year-old structures in the early ’80s. At the time, the City College of San Francisco student needed a place where she could play her grand piano. She was ready to give up the search when she found a small cottage for rent on 24th Avenue and Lincoln Way. On July 23, 1982 she moved into the small cottage and found her calling.

     She soon fell in love with her new home.

     “To have a little hut with some land around it was Nirvana,” she said. “It’s a miniature version of the American dream — I could stand in the parlor and look all the way back to the garden. There were windows everywhere, 20 some windows in that tiny little 500-square-foot cottage.”

     But the windows were falling out, the garden was overrun with weeds and the rest of the house lay in waste from years of neglect.

     “I was 40 years old when I moved in … I had never picked up a saw,” Cryan said. But the small scale of the shack made repair and construction projects seem less intimidating. She began spending all of her spare time and money on her new found love. If the cottage needed repair, she learned how to do it. Meanwhile, the piano sat neglected in the parlor.

     When the interior was done, Cryan turned her attention to the outside of the small house. She began nursing the garden back to health. She scraped years of paint off the outside walls and replaced it with a fire-engine red coat. She painted the trim and small picket fence white, and placed three cement gnomes in the garden. She persuaded the tenant in the back cottage to paint his house red as well. Her “Little Red Houses” soon began attracting attention.

     People walking by would stop to admire them. They even became a stop for local tour buses.

     In the fall of ’82, a neighbor told Cryan that her little home was a historical building.

     She spent the rest of the year trying to learn everything she could about the cottage. The search led her to the 200,000 people left homeless by the 1906 earthquake and fire. The Little Red House was part of a program to shelter 20,000 homeless refugees.

     In the months following the earthquake, the San Francisco Relief Corporation built 5,610 earthquake shacks, which were set up at 11 camps in parks throughout the city —Lobos Square, Potrero, Franklin Square, Camp Lake, Jefferson Square, Hamilton Square, Washington Square, Precita Park, Columbia Square, Camp Richmond and Mission Park. Families paid $2 rent per month, which was held in trust for future use. The program was set up to help people who had never owned a home.

     Starting in 1907, many of the homeless cashed in their trust account and purchased a shack. A total of 5,343 shacks were hauled away to be used as starter homes. Sometimes three or more shacks were cobbled together to create a small home, as was the case for Cryan’s Little Red House.

     As San Francisco moved from disaster to prosperity, many of the shacks were demolished to make room for larger homes. The shacks were soon forgotten, neglected and headed for extinction.

     Seventy-five years later, Cryan mounted a campaign to save them.

     “We know we are going to have another big one. If we can just keep a couple of the real things (earthquake shacks) hanging around, we will have something to go and pray at when the next big one comes,” she said.

     In 1983, Cryan founded the Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of San Francisco Refugee Shacks. The purpose was to get together with other past and present residents of refugee shacks.

     “I thought we could get together and have tea,” Cryan said.

     All that changed when she came home in August 1983 and found a for-sale sign on her home. She soon found out the Little Red House was scheduled for demolition.

     “In the ’80s, the only reason somebody would buy a lot with cottages on it would be to take them down and put up a multi-unit building,” Cryan said.

     To save the shacks, she set out to have them declared official San Francisco landmarks. It wasn’t easy. During her struggle to save the shacks, she said it was the spirit of the shacks themselves that inspired her to push on.

     “I didn’t know about all the layers of politics in the city,” she said. “I didn’t know anybody. Government officials were surprised that I won. The battle I waged was akin to David and Goliath. I always felt like Goliath because I had the might and spirit of all those folk, 20,000 of them, who repaired their lives while living in the shacks. They’re the ones who saved the shacks, not me.”

     The more Cryan learned about the shacks, the more she appreciated their value. She dedicated her time and energy to finding and saving as many as she could. As word spread of her effort, she began receiving calls and letters from local historians and earthquake survivors. More volunteers joined the shack society.

     She showed up at a hearing with the San Francisco Landmarks Preservation Board with a tub full of research papers and a prepared speech.

     On Aug. 12, 1984, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors awarded the Little Red Houses landmark status. They were the first earthquake shacks designated landmarks.

     But the victory did not come without sacrifice.

     “[The board of supervisors] stipulated that I had to remove myself from the cottage as a concession to the property owner, whose life had been modified by my efforts,” Cryan said. “I was living under a sentence of eviction. It took everything out of me, it was very difficult to continue with the shack project.”

     Once again, though the shacks needed a champion.

     The two “Goldie Shacks” in the Richmond District were scheduled for demolition. Because of Cryan’s efforts, though, the shacks escaped the wrecking ball. The U.S. Army moved them to the Presidio, and restored them to their original condition, where they still stand at the corner of Lincoln Boulevard and Funston Avenue.

     A second victory brought more attention to the shack society. The “Goldie Shacks” were presented to the public on the 80th anniversary of the earthquake and fire. Then Mayor Dianne Feinstein declared the day “Earthquake and Fire Refugee Cottage Day in San Francisco.”

     “When I surveyed the city in the early and mid ’80s, I found upward of 70 shack sites,” Cryan said. Many owners were fearful about owning a historical building. “They definitely were demolished in great numbers in the ’80s and ’90s.”

     As her reputation spread, Cryan started receiving requests to give talks and slide presentations.

     The Randall Museum of San Francisco scheduled Cryan to give two talks on the earthquake shacks. The talks were so popular the museum decided to build an earthquake shack replica, but the project ran out of money. Cryan asked the local carpenters’ union for help. Two carpenters from the same union that built the original shacks knocked out the replica in less than a day. The union donated all materials and labor.

     In 1989, Cryan got a call from UC Berkeley architecture student Sergio Amunategui, who she worked with on a thesis about family housing.

     Amunategui designed a home made of 22 earthquake shacks. He also built a scale model of the home. Ironically, the model was destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

     As her research grew, Cryan decided to write a book. She ended up writing two — “Hope Chest: a History of One of the Most Magnificent Charities of All Time” (finished in 1993), and “Hope Chest: The True Story of San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake Refugee Shacks” (completed in 1998). Although she has not found a publisher for the books, they are available at the San Francisco Public Library.

     After 17 years, Cryan said it was time to let go.

     “I had been so closely identified with the shacks. People talked about the shacks and they would mention my name,” she said. “I realized that it couldn’t keep on being that way. Otherwise the whole subject would die when I did.”

     In February of 1999, she dissolved the Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of San Francisco Refugee Shacks.

     “I couldn’t do it anymore. I was 57. I had morphed into temp work so I had time to write, fight city hall and do lectures,” Cryan said. “I had to let go … and hoped someone would pick it up.”

     She waited four years. In August of 2003 she got a call from Woody La Bounty of the Western Neighborhoods Project. La Bounty was trying to save four earthquake shacks on Kirkham Street and 47th Avenue from destruction.

     In the ’80s, Cryan had identified the four “Kirkies” as earthquake shacks. The tenant at that time begged Cryan not to propose the shacks for landmark status. He was afraid the landlord would tear them down if he found out they were historical buildings. Cryan honored his wish, but two decades later the Kirkies were scheduled for demolition.

     La Bounty negotiated with the owners to save the cottages. He also managed to find a temporary home for four of them behind the San Francisco Zoo.

     In March 2005, the shacks were moved to their temporary new home. Volunteers have restored one of them right down to its park-bench green paint.

     “[The shack project] represents hope,” La Bounty said. “If something like this should happen again, and it will, this will help us not lose hope.”

     On a cool day in March 2006, Cryan visited the four “Kirkies.”
The sight of the restored green shacks brought her to tears. “I almost had
to get out my handkerchief,” she said.

     The site was a mini version of the original refugee camps. Adults in there 30s and 40s had gathered around the shacks in conversation. Children and dogs romped through the grass while lunch cooked on an outdoor grill.

     Cryan smiled as she looked around. “When I started, all the responses were from people in their 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. And now look — the next generation has fallen in love with this history.”

     Cryan now sits on the sidelines. “I’m no longer active, I’m just a consultant,” she said.

     Ironically, the “Shack Lady” has never owned a home of her own.

     Sometimes she wishes her life had been different.

     “When I came here in 1963, if I had any sense at all, I would have buckled down to a full-time job and bought something,” she said. “Yet when I think of all the wonderful experiences I have had, I couldn’t have gone to City College and learned to play the piano if I had owned a house and couldn’t quit my job. I’d rather play piano than own a house.”

      The Cottage Lady is still fighting landlords and city hall. She is about to be evicted from the in-law unit where she lives on the corner of Lawton Street and 20th Avenue. The 64-year-old unpublished author needs a place to live, play her piano and write. She has saved the earthquake shacks, but now she needs a home of her own.

     Cryan is planning on moving to Oregon where she can afford to buy a small cottage. When she goes she will leave behind a whole new generation who find inspiration in the earthquake shacks.

     Today, there are 28 shacks in existence. Some are landmarks, some are displays, some are homes. After 100 years, they still provide shelter.

E-mail Steve Mowles at slobake@yahoo.com

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