Six Victorian houses known as the Painted Ladies rise in front of you, framed against the downtown skyline in the park with San Francisco's most photographed view. The six houses on Steiner Street at the eastern edge of Alamo Square are Queen Anne and Italianate Victorians built between 1892 and 1896, part of the 48,000 Victorian and Edwardian houses that were built in San Francisco in the decades before the 1906 earthquake. The houses survived because the fire that consumed most of the city stopped before reaching this neighborhood, which sits far enough west that the wind shifted and the firebreaks held.
For much of the mid-twentieth century, Victorian houses were considered obsolete and unfashionable, and many were painted over in drab colors or demolished. The Painted Ladies movement began in the 1960s when a colorist named Butch Kardum began painting Victorian houses in contrasting, historically inspired colors that highlighted their ornate detail. The trend caught on, and by the 1980s the gingerbread Victorians in their multicolor livery had become the defining image of residential San Francisco.
The Alamo Square row became famous nationally when it appeared as the establishing shot in the television show Full House. The park fills with picnickers on sunny weekends; the view of the houses against the downtown skyline is unchanged.