We are republishing a piece by the beloved, award-winning columnist and Telegraph Hill Dweller, Gary Kamiya, from his Substack. This piece originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle as part of “Portals of the Past,” his history series. It ran in two parts on December 29, 2018, and January 9, 2019.
By Gary Kamiya
The real story of the fictional “McKittrick Hotel” is even weirder than the cinematic one.
Every year, throngs of people take Vertigo tours in San Francisco, visiting the sites where Alfred Hitchcock shot his 1958 masterpiece. Many buildings, such as the swanky Brocklebank atop Nob Hill and protagonist Scottie’s apartment at 900 Lombard Street, still exist (although the latter has been so heavily remodeled it’s barely recognizable).
But one location, a Victorian mansion whose name in the film is the McKittrick Hotel, has completely vanished. Nothing remains to remind anyone of it.
However, that building did not vanish without a trace. And its story – revealed in full here for the first time – is as bizarre and disquieting as Hitchcock’s story of obsession and identity.
The scene that takes place in the McKittrick Hotel is very weird – so weird that Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto calls it “perhaps the strangest moment in the film.” Madeleine, the mysterious woman played by Kim Novak, has just left the Mission Dolores cemetery, where she has gone to commune over the grave of Carlotta Valdes, a 19th-century ancestor who has supposedly taken possession of her. Madeleine drives away, trailed by protagonist Scottie (James Stewart), who has been hired to keep an eye on her. After visiting the Palace of the Legion of Honor, Madeleine drives across town to a slightly run-down, vaguely creepy Victorian mansion bearing a small sign that reads “McKittrick Hotel.” Madeleine walks into the building. A few moments later, we see her in an upstairs window.
Scottie follows Madeleine into the hotel’s opulent Victorian foyer. Scottie asks the manageress who occupies the corner room on the second floor. She replies that it is a Miss Valdes. Scottie says, “When she comes down, don’t say that I’ve been here.” But as he turns to go, she stops him short by saying, “Oh, but she hasn’t been here today.” She explains that no one could have gone up the stairs without her seeing them, and takes him upstairs to show him Madeleine’s empty room. Looking out the window, Scottie says, “Her car is gone.” The manageress replies, “What car?”
What happened to Madeleine at the McKittrick Hotel is never explained. Did she somehow slip out? Was the whole incident Scottie’s hallucination? Or did Hitchcock simply suspend the laws of reality? We don’t know. The episode is an example of what Hitchcock called an “icebox talk scene,” a narrative conundrum that he slipped into his films to give audiences something to talk about as they rummaged through the refrigerator after the movie.
The master of suspense almost certainly didn’t know the strange history and dismal fate of that creepy mansion. If he had, he might have been inspired to make a thriller about it – perhaps titled, “The House Vanishes.”
The building’s story begins in 1879, when an old-timer named John Conly built an ornate 18-room Victorian mansion on the northwest corner of Eddy and Gough, in the newly-developing Western Addition area. Conly, or “Old John” as he was called, was well known throughout the state. After opening a general store in the Sierra County town of La Porte in the 1860s, he co-founded the bank of Chico and later served as a state senator for Plumas and Butte counties.
But Conley’s sons, John and William, turned out to be ne’er-do-wells. After Old John passed away in 1883, they burned through his entire $400,000 estate. According to an August 5, 1894 story in the San Francisco Chronicle, the two boys habitually wrote large checks on their mother Emma’s bank account, which she was too proud to decline. In December 1893, Emma Conley told a court that she was penniless and that her only possession was a watch her husband had left her.
With no more inheritance to sustain him, John turned to fraud. He was arrested in April 1894 for swindling Mrs. Louisa Love of Berkeley out of $8500, promising her he would invest it in land. After jumping bail, he was reportedly seen “roaming about in the interior.”
The house John Conley grew up in did not remain in his family long after his arrest. In December 1895, the Chronicle reported that the “principal event in the local real estate market this week” was the sale of the “old Captain Connolly” (sic) mansion to a San Francisco businessman named Henry F. Fortmann. (His name also commonly appears as “Fortman”; 19th-century spelling was notoriously erratic.) The 39-year-old Fortmann purchased the building and its 50-vara lot for $42,500 – about $1.5 million today – from the Bank of California, which had apparently repossessed the building from the Conly estate. “The price is considered low by the seller,” the Chronicle reported. “The building is a substantial structure, containing 18 rooms. It will be modernized by its new owner, who will reside in it while waiting for the remainder of the lot to rise in value.”
If the Conly saga was a familiar San Francisco tale of squandered wealth and familial decline, the Fortmann saga was an equally classic immigrant success story. Fortmann’s father was a German named Frederick F. Fortmann, who emigrated with his wife to San Francisco in 1852. That same year he started one of San Francisco’s first breweries, the Pacific Brewery at 4th and Tehama. Soon afterwards he built a homestead near Fifth and Folsom, which at the time was a sandy wasteland on the swampy edge of Mission Bay known as “the wilderness.”
In 1859, the elder Fortmann became a founding member of the German-American Shooting Society, one of the many ethnic-solidarity societies that sprang up in the city’s early days. In 1934, to accompany a story on the group’s 75th anniversary, the Chronicle ran a photograph taken at the group’s very first shoot. The photo shows six rifle-holding German immigrants and a tiny child. One of the men is Frederick Fortmann. The child is his two-year-old son Henry, who had been born in 1857. By the time of the 1934 story, Henry was the group’s oldest member.
After starting the Pacific Brewery, Henry Fortmann joined with other investors in creating a fruit-canning monopoly, then became the president of the Alaska Packers Association, making a fortune in the lucrative salmon canning trade. He held membership in 26 societies and clubs, including the Bohemian, Olympic and Pacific Union Clubs, sat on the committee to bring the Republican Convention to San Francisco, and was generally a pillar of the community. He and his wife, Julia, raised their two daughters, Stella and Emma, in their beautiful mansion on Gough Street. Both daughters were married in the family home.
Julia Fortmann died in 1936. Around 1945, with the once-swanky neighborhood in decline, Henry Fortmann moved out of the house he had bought a half-century earlier and into the ritzy Pacific-Union Club atop Nob Hill. He died in May 1946, aged 89.
The Victorian mansion on Gough Street had seen many plot twists. But its final chapter would prove to be the strangest of all.
By the time Henry Fortmann died, the Western Addition had fallen into decline. A solidly middle-class and upper-middle-class district in the late 19th century, the Western Addition became poorer and more ethnically diverse after the 1906 earthquake. Many of the single-family Victorian homes were divided into apartments. Pearl Harbor resulted in another massive transformation: the forced displacement of the 5,000 Japanese living in Japantown, on the northern side of the neighborhood. Taking their place, and crowding into the dilapidated old wooden Victorians in the district, were more than 12,000 Southern blacks, who had poured into San Francisco to work in wartime shipyards.
The housing stock in Japantown and the rest of the Western Addition was already run down, and the sudden influx of thousands of people exacerbated the situation. The area was marked by severe overcrowding and, after the war, high unemployment – the result of the closure of the shipyards and the refusal of most employers to hire blacks—and crime. But it was also a living neighborhood, the “Harlem of the West,” the vibrant center of San Francisco’s black community. Its main drag, Fillmore, was lined with dozens of black-run restaurants, barber shops, stores and jazz clubs.
City officials, however, saw only the negatives. In 1947, a city report said that only a “clean sweep” could make the Western Addition “a genuinely good place to live.” In 1948, the Board of Supervisors declared the neighborhood a “blighted area” and designated it for redevelopment, for which federal funds from the $1.5 billion 1949 Housing Act were made available.
The newly-created San Francisco Redevelopment Agency was charged with cleaning up the “blight.” For years, it accomplished little. But when a hard-charging executive named Justin Herman was appointed as head of the agency, “urban renewal” – which James Baldwin famously called “Negro removal” – began in earnest.
The full-scale demolition of the Western Addition proceeded. By the time the bulldozers were finished, 2,500 Victorians had been demolished and 883 businesses shuttered. 20,000-30,000 black residents were displaced. There was no plan to rehouse them, and few of them ever returned. It was one of the most disgraceful episodes in the city’s history.
Like its neighborhood, the once-opulent mansion at 1007 Gough Street had fallen on hard times. Some time after Henry Fortmann’s death in 1946, the building was sold. According to the 1951 San Francisco block book, the owner was the Golden Gate Commandery, a local chapter of the Knights Templars fraternal organization. From 1951 to 1953, the building was occupied by a Harold L. Heakin. From mid-1953 to 1956, it was vacant. In 1957, it became a rooming house, listed in the city directory as “residence club-lodgings.”
So when Hitchcock portrayed the mansion as a rooming house called the McKittrick Hotel, everything except its name more or less reflected its current rundown reality. In 1959, the Redevelopment Agency acquired the building and slated it for demolition, along with the 2,500 other Victorians in the redevelopment zone.
The old mansion now entered its surreal twilight. As wrecking companies began bulldozing down the old wooden buildings, the Western Addition became a no-man’s-land, haunted by vandals, scavengers, thrill-seeking teenagers and what were then called “bums” or “hoboes.” Arson was rampant: A 1959 Chronicle story headlined “A race to wreck the Western Addition” noted, “Every time the Redevelopment Agency buys another building in the Western Addition area, a race begins between the wrecker, the kids and the firebugs.” The paper reported that there were 90 fires a year in the 28-block redevelopment area. Redevelopment director Eugene Riordan said it started with kids, who would smash all the windows in vacant buildings. Then there was a race between the wreckers and thieves, who would remove all the plumbing fixtures and cabinets. “Then hoboes come in and often start fires,” Riordan said, adding that “bums” were responsible for night blazes and youths for daytime ones.
On July 23, 1959, the Fortmann mansion fell victim to the flames. “Kids Set Fire to SF Movie Mansion,” the Chronicle reported the next day. “A two-alarm fire raged through the historic old Fortman [sic] mansion at 1407 [sic] Gough Street last night.
The musty, three-story structure, recently featured in the movie ‘Vertigo,’ apparently was set afire by matches. The building had been condemned for the Western Addition redevelopment and had been abandoned for the past two weeks.”
One hundred firemen fought the blaze that broke out at 11 pm, limiting the damage to the upper story and attic. Fire Chief William Murray said that youngsters had ‘roamed at will’ through the old mansion ever since the occupant moved out early this month. He said they apparently set fire to it. Neighbors said the old building had also been used as a backdrop for episodes of the TV police drama “Lineup.”
Three weeks later, on Aug. 12, a spectacular 5-alarm fire destroyed 11 Victorians in the Western Addition. 7 houses on O’Farrell and 4 on Laguna were burned. There was another big fire on Nov. 8.
Sometime in 1959 or 1960, the old house, along with almost all the other Victorians in the redevelopment area, was demolished.
Fittingly, considered that the role the building plays in Hitchcock’s film is that of a place from which Kim Novak’s character Madeleine vanishes into thin air, the exact date it was torn down is unknown. The Redevelopment Agency was dissolved in 2014, and no records of the building’s demolition could be found in its archives. A soccer practice field belonging to Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory school now occupies the site.
The old mansion that once felt the footsteps of politicians and debutantes, magnates and hoboes, is gone forever. But thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, it has a ghostly immortality. To the innumerable ways in which illusion and reality are intertwined in his hypnotic film, one more can be added: The haunted real history of the Fortmann Mansion, aka the McKittrick Hotel.
Link to Gary Kamiya’s Substack https://garykamiya.substack.com/
