MovieChat Forums > I Remember Mama (1948) Discussion > Where on Castro Street...?

Where on Castro Street...?


The movie is set on Larkin Street (though filmed in part on Rhode Island Street on Potrero Hill). But in the original book "I Remember Mama," the family starts off living on Castro Street before moving to Oakland and then back into San Francisco, where they lived on Steiner Street.

Does anyone know the address on Castro Street where Kathryn Anderson (who wrote under the name Kathryn Forbes) and her family lived? I've been searching and searching, but can only find references without a specific address. I live on Castro Street and am curious if I live near where they did.

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Next to the gay bathhouse

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http://www.sfgayhistory.com/?p=1355

As it turns out, they never lived on Castro Street, and only briefly lived in the neighborhood.
[...]
The 1907 directory showed the family living at 134 Hancock Street, their first presence in the Castro area – then known as Finn Town or Little Scandinavia. Kathryn Anderson was born March 20, 1908. The directory that year shows them living at 132 Hancock, a unit in a duplex in a building next door to the previous address. It’s unknown whether the directory transcribed one of their addresses incorrectly, whether the city changed street numbers, or whether the family did indeed move next door.

By 1909, the family was living at 22 Diamond Street (a building that apparently no longer exists). This was their last residence in what can properly be categorized as today’s Castro District or what was then Little Scandinavia.


Various homes in San Francisco where Kathryn Anderson’s family lived. The red indicates homes before Kathryn’s birth. The blue ones indicate places where Kathryn lived with her family.
Lower Haight and the Western Addition
By 1910, they lived at 460 Scott Street. The 1910 census lists Lee Anderson as the head of household there with his wife Della, his children Ellis R. and Kathryn C., his mother Anna, his father-in-law, Frank Jesser, and nine other people listed as boarders. Curiously, Annie Jesser is not listed as living there, though she lived for nearly two more decades. Perhaps she and Frank temporarily separated? Perhaps she had to care for another relative elsewhere?

From 1911 to 1912, the Crocker-Langley directories show the family lived at 758 Haight Street

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