William Haas emigrated from Bavaria to San Francisco in the 1860s and built a successful wholesale grocery business. In 1886, he commissioned architect Peter R. Schmidt to design a family home at 2007 Franklin Street. Schmidt delivered a Queen Anne Victorian with a distinctive corner tower, elaborate wooden ornamentation, and the generous scale that characterized homes of the city's prosperous merchant class. The house featured a third-floor ballroom, a formal parlor with pocket doors, and the kind of decorative woodwork -- spindles, brackets, gable ornaments -- that made Queen Anne architecture the most visually exuberant style of the era. William and Bertha Haas raised their children there, and the house remained in the family for nearly a century.

The Haas family's connection to San Francisco deepened through marriage. Their daughter Alice married Samuel Lilienthal, joining two prominent Jewish-American families. The house passed through the generations, accumulating furnishings, photographs, and personal objects that documented how a prosperous San Francisco family lived across the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Unlike most surviving Victorians in the city, which have been subdivided into apartments or stripped of their original interiors, the Haas-Lilienthal House retained its original room configurations and much of its original furniture, making it an unusually complete domestic record.

In 1972, the family donated the house to San Francisco Heritage, a preservation organization, which opened it as a museum. Visitors can tour the house with docents who explain how the rooms were used, what the furnishings reveal about the family's tastes and social position, and how the house survived the 1906 catastrophe when so many of its neighbors did not. The house is a San Francisco Designated Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its survival is partly a matter of geography -- the Franklin Street location was at the edge of the fire's advance -- and partly a matter of luck. Standing on the sidewalk looking up at the tower and the ornamental woodwork, you are seeing something that most of San Francisco lost: an intact piece of the city that existed before the earthquake remade everything.