William Westerfeld was a successful confectioner who wanted a house that reflected his prosperity. The result was an exuberant Victorian that drew on Queen Anne and Stick-Eastlake styles, with the signature turret, elaborate woodwork, and a prominent corner location across from the northwest corner of Alamo Square. The house was designed to be noticed, and it succeeds. While the famous Painted Ladies on the east side of Alamo Square get the photographs and the postcards, the Westerfeld House across the street commands attention through sheer architectural audacity -- a candy maker's fantasy translated into wood, glass, and plaster.

After Westerfeld's time, the house served as a meeting place for San Francisco's Russian community, earning its nickname as the Russian Embassy. In the 1960s and 1970s, the house became associated with the counterculture movement that transformed the adjacent Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The turret, the dark Victorian woodwork, and the house's slightly ominous presence made it a natural gathering place for the psychedelic scene. The house's various incarnations -- confectioner's residence, immigrant social club, counterculture landmark -- track the successive waves of population and culture that have washed through the Western Addition over more than a century.

Alamo Square, directly across the street, offers the most famous postcard view in San Francisco: the row of Victorian houses (the Painted Ladies) with the downtown skyline behind them. The Westerfeld House appears in that view if you turn around. It is the house behind the photographer, the one that watches the watchers. Its turret provides views across the city that William Westerfeld surely enjoyed -- the Bay, the downtown buildings that were rising in his era, the green rectangle of Golden Gate Park to the west. The house has been privately owned and not open to the public, preserving its mystery. It remains the most dramatic single residential building in a city famous for dramatic residential buildings.