Nestled between two apartment buildings and a cluster of Vietnamese businesses on Ellis Street is an unexpected sight in the ultra-urban Tenderloin: A tiny brick house, with a front yard.
City records show 606 Ellis St. is the only standing single-family house in the neighborhood. Unassuming and almost invisible from the street behind a graffitied privacy fence, both the house and the man in it have lived the ultimate San Francisco story of booms and busts, oddity and tragedy.
The house was built in 1907, right after the earthquake. Its current owner, Robo Gerson, 50, bought it in 2022. When he saw it and realized how rare it was, his heart was set: “I need that kind of weird,” he says.
Gerson got the 3-bedroom, 2-bath, 1,600-square foot building “for a song,” he said; about $1.2 million. The Japanese businessman he bought it from, Takahiro Oki, had furnished the basement with Alcatraz-themed jail cells and rented it out for tourists’ amusement.
But Oki, who bought the Tenderloin house for $810,000 in 2013, racked up complaints for hosting short-term rentals out of it. A 2017 complaint to the Planning Department mentions “potentially unsafe Alacrataz [sic] themed ‘jail cells’ as individual ‘rooms.’” In 2019, Oki tried to sell the home for $1.88 million, with jail cells featured in the real estate listing. His agent said at the time that Alcatraz, and purportedly the basement gimmick, were a popular draw for Japanese tourists. Still, Oki removed the jail setup sometime before ultimately selling it.
The home has been the site of other complaints. Records show that new owners in 2004 cemented over the front yard and felled a decades-old Norfolk Island pine tree, famous for being, like the house, a rarity in the Tenderloin. Columnist Herb Caen had reportedly written fondly of “the tree in the Tenderloin.” According to a November 2007 issue of Central City Extra, the tree’s demise was the reason that the Department of Public Works now requires permits to cut down “significant” trees, even on private property.
Those same owners listed the home for sale in 2007, suggesting to buyers they could build up the more-than-2,000-square-foot lot. There were no takers.
Gerson said he believes real-estate speculators don’t want to deal with hurdles to demolish the house and develop the property. Families who can afford a house typically choose to live in a more suburban setting.
Like those before him, Gerson has begun to leave his mark on the place he moved to a few years after his wife died a premature death in 2017. An architect, he’s taken down walls and transformed the house into a bright, curated studio. An eclectic art collection hangs on exposed brick; until recently, Gerson sat on the ArtSpan nonprofit board. A bar complete with a glass rinser spans the entire back wall, and a large-format camera stands on a tripod. The basement has become a separate apartment for visitors. The astroturfed yard, which he calls a “redneck paradise,” features a chicken coop, vintage cars and bicycles, and loose engine parts on the ground.
“I grew up poor … if I had something and it broke, I had to fix it,” said Gerson. Between his cars or his scooters or his bicycles, he says he is always fixing something. “Half of the fun is when something breaks.”
He is especially partial to old Volkswagens, perhaps in part because his father, Bobby Boles, began what became the popular Haight-Ashbury shoe shop Boot Hook out of a Volkswagen van.
Gerson grew up bouncing between his parents’ legendary San Francisco businesses: The Palms Cafe, a music venue that hosted the likes of Huey Lewis, The Tubes, and Big Joe Turner; and the Boot Hook, which his father opened with Peggy Caserta, Janis Joplin’s ex and another Haight Street icon.
“They were just rolling in it, but also rolling in drugs,” Gerson said of his parents. “And then it all just went sideways.”
Gerson ended up bouncing around between family members who stepped in to raise him while his parents were absent and struggling with addiction.
His father jumped to his death off the Golden Gate Bridge when Gerson was 15, an event he now appreciates as “romantic;” his father had long struggled with alcoholism and, later, a traumatic brain injury. A decade later, Gerson was towing a newly purchased Volkswagen Beetle through the Tenderloin when he saw his estranged mother cross the street in front of him. She was clearly on something; he suspects heroin.
“Not terribly dissimilar from me being in this house amongst all this roughness,” Gerson acknowledged, as his aging gray cat, Taco, wandered from room to room. “Like, here I am on top of the world. And there’s my mom just being a street walker … it was very sobering.”
The artsy, counterculture elements Gerson grew up with rubbed off on him, he said. But he was also lucky to have had good role models and a strong family support network that kept him determined to find success.
“Bad Habits, please try to avoid,” reads a large piece with a patchwork of scenarios, hanging among his art collection. “Life will be better if you try- try- try…”
Living in a single-family house with a yard and two cars in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in San Francisco may seem like a contradiction. But Gerson says he is a YIMBY. Ultimately, he hopes to knock down the house and develop the land to match the apartments that look down into his yard. He thinks of it as his retirement plan.
In the meantime, he will work on the house for a bit longer: A curtain to separate his bedroom, a closet, and a place to keep his records are coming next.
“I’m a city kid,” Gerson says when asked what keeps him here. “I love it here. I love everything about it.”
Wow! What a gem of a story about an eccentric survivor living in plain sight. Too bad about Norfie the tree. Thank you for writing and publishing this story Eleni and Mission Local.
Great story! I always wondered about that house.
Always wondered what this place is all about. Thanks for filling in the details.
Can we talk about that incredible bathroom? Who is Rachel Znerold? That booby bathroom is everything!!
Awwwww Thank you to the person who loved my booby bathroom! You can see more boobies on my website http://www.rachelzart.com. ❤️❤️❤️
And there was a big, beautiful redwood or fir tree in the front yard which the owner or somebody chopped down. It was the tree that grew in the Tenderloin.
It was a Norfolk Island Pine……. they grow to be 150 to 200 feet tall in the wild landscape. It was a beauty. A pox on the wicked jerks who cut it down.
Don’t forget 611 Jones St between Geary and Post! single family from 1908, got it entitled as 8-story but engineering and economics didn’t pan out, so still just room for one family. Sold June 2022 $1.7M.
Hey there!
It’s close, but that’s not what we would consider the Tenderloin.
JE
How pretentious do you have to be to act like you grew up poor. This man grew up with the father and mother who owned businesses in San Francisco and has the balls to say that he grew up poor? And then he sees his mother on the street and does nothing about it? Just comments that oh wow look at my mother living on the street while I’m on the top of the world, what a great guy. And then finally he plans to destroy the only historic house in the tenderloin eventually to make an apartment complex? Man this is a really poor guy ain’t it.
Yes, if your parents weren’t around growing up then you grew up poor. Don’t care how much money the parents had.
Single-family homes don’t belong anywhere within a 10 minute walk of heavy rail. Let’s hope this home eventually becomes the apartment building it should be; we need housing for people, not cars.
Oh wow, you really do see the silver lining in every story, don’t you?
As for the house, I hope it sells to a good soul. I would think that the off-street parking, for what looks like maybe 4 cars, could be worth more than the house.
Yimbys will be Yimbys.