Adolph Sutro is well known as a former Mayor of San Francisco, owner of the Cliff House, and builder of the Sutro Baths. His lesser-known grandson, Adolph G. Sutro, teamed up with one of San Francisco’s most prolific – yet largely unknown — architects, Harold G. Stoner, to bring their own legendary landmarks to the “City by the Bay.”

It was Sutro’s grandson who commissioned Harold Stoner to design the magnificent  medieval mansion that once stood on Mt. Sutro. The original plan (seen below) for what became the City’s highest sited home was featured in a 1930 issue of Architecture and Allied Arts. Two decades after being sold to ABC in 1948, the City deemed it a firetrap and required its demolition as part of the permit to build the giant Sutro Tower there now.

“Stoner specialized in atmospheric make believe,” notes the San Francisco Chronicle’s John King, and was “able to leap from storybook cottages to Spanish castles and give each a romantic air.” Adolph G. Sutro subsequently hired Stoner in 1934 to wave a magic wand and bring the warmth of the South Seas to the City’s windswept and foggy shoreline with a new “Tropic Beach” façade for the entrance to the Sutro baths.

Stoner’s façade (below) over the original Sutro Baths entrance (right) has been referred to as Art Deco or Coney Island inspired. The caption for the picture of it lit at night (below right) boasts, “37,000 watts of electrical power light the new entrance … its modernistic architecture is an outgrowth of the … Chicago World’s Fair, coupled with western ingenuity and enterprise.” Born 1890 in Brighton, England, his design may have been inspired by the twin-towered Palace Pier Pavilion decorating the city’s famous shoreline.

In 1937 an ice rink replaced the Tropic Beach built over the largest pool in Sutro Baths. Tom Bratton, the son of the manager of the Sutro Baths, believes that Stoner was instrumental in designing the steel trusses needed to construct an unobstructed area for the ice rink. An artistic architect, Stoner designed and likely painted the murals initially surrounding the ice rink seen in the picture below. When the Whitneys bought the Baths from Sutro’s grandson in 1952, the arched tops of the towers and murals were removed in their remodel (below right). Stoner’s original arched roof canopy over the entrance and translucent tower panels were still visible, albeit much less attractive. The ice rink remained in operation until the Sutro Baths burned down in 1966. Tom recalls that only Stoner’s steel trusses remained.

Welcome to the Harold G. Stoner blog for news about one of the Bay Area’s most artistic architects. Since my book, Bay Area Beauty: The Artistry of Harold G. Stoner, was completed earlier this year, I continue to discover more about this amazing man. This blog has been created to share what I have found.

Stoner’s Innovative Community-Oriented Site Plan

The on-going effort by Google Books to scan historic journals has recently revealed what may be the earliest magazine article published about Harold G. Stoner. “A Well-Designed Group of Small Houses,” in the December 1922 issue of The Building Review, notes that “a group of three houses [designed by Harold G. Stoner] at Ingleside Terraces in San Francisco, planned to face a common lawn, but with entirely separate rear gardens, has aroused no small amount of interest among builders and home-owners of this region.”

The cottages still located at 160, 170, and 180 Urbano Drive, which follows the original one-mile long course of the historic Ingleside Racetrack, are seen below as they looked in 1922 – before they were surrounded by many more homes.

Urbano Drive 1922

Ingleside Terraces was one of the first residence parks built in what was considered the outsidelands of San Francisco – the area west of the Twin Peaks which city dwellers initially considered to be suburbs as revealed in this article. “A mere house, after all, is not in itself a home – there must be a yard or garden for the children to play in – some trees, shrubs and flowers and a bit of lawn or terrace, else why bother to go out of town! … when one has decided to build, sacrificing apartment-house conveniences and the three-minute walk to business to a thirty-minute trip night and morning, he feels he that he is entitled to a few feet of earth to play upon, and decidedly objects to being crowded on a narrow lot with the next door neighbor within handshaking distance.”

Here Stoner may have first utilized a community-oriented site plan that he would later replicate in nearby Monterey Heights, as seen here along Monterey Boulevard.

“The three lots comprising this plot [on Urbano Drive] are fifty by one hundred feet each and terraced to the street level. The central house is set back about one hundred feet from the street, while the others facing each other present an interesting side-view with southwestern exposure … The plan as here described, of a group of detached houses is especially appealing to friends, acquaintances or members of a family who want to live near, but not with each other, and is an expression of the ‘community’ idea with modifications which is becoming more and more popular in planning suburban dwellings.”

In Balboa Terrace, Stoner reduced the threesome plan to pairs of homes that face each other as seen in this example on San Leandro Way. Stoner not only emphasized community in his site plans, but also in his home designs which he highlighted in one of his advertisements, “Here the feeling of a real home is found and one awaits with an anticipation of pleasure, the invitation of the host to enter.”