Flashback Friday: The Richmond District… Why Richmond?
Welcome back to Flashback Friday… a series where I share some of my favorite weird, wonderful, and occasionally hidden stories from San Francisco's past. The City has layers, and the fun part is peeling them back when you least expect to find something underneath.
Today I want to talk about the neighborhood where my heart sings. The Richmond District. My Richmond.
I live a few blocks from 12th and Clement, and for most of my life, I never thought twice about the name. Richmond. It's just… the Richmond. You say it and people know exactly where you mean. The fog, Clement Street, the quiet residential blocks that open up to Ocean Beach if you just keep walking west. It's not flashy. It doesn't try to be. It just is.
But here's the thing I didn't know until I went looking: the Richmond wasn't named after Richmond, Virginia. It wasn't named after a person. It was named after a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, by a 23-year-old art dealer who was probably homesick.
His name was George Turner Marsh, and his story is one of those San Francisco originals that makes you remember why this place collects interesting people the way other cities collect parking lots.
George was born outside Melbourne in 1857. When he was 15, his family decided to leave Australia for America, and their route took them through Japan. George was so captivated by what he saw there (the art, the culture, the everything) that he convinced his father to leave him behind in Yokohama. At fifteen. His dad found him a job at a tea import house, and the kid just… stayed.
By the time he rejoined his family in San Francisco a few years later, he had a collection of Japanese art, a head full of ideas, and the kind of entrepreneurial energy that The City has always rewarded. He opened what may have been the first Asian art gallery in the United States, right inside the Palace Hotel on Market Street. G.T. Marsh and Company: Japanese Art Repository. The man was 19.
And then, because San Francisco has always attracted people who build before they're told they're allowed to, George married Lucy Whiteside in 1880 and built a home on the southeast corner of 12th Avenue and Clement Street. This was the outside lands back then. Basically sand dunes with ambition. There was almost nothing out here except wind and whatever you were willing to carry with you.
But George looked at those dunes and saw something familiar. He named his estate "Richmond House" after the suburb of Melbourne where he'd grown up. And slowly, as the neighborhood filled in around him, the name stuck. People started calling the area the Richmond.
That's it. That's where the name came from. A homesick Australian teenager turned art dealer who built a turreted, red-painted, vaguely Asian-influenced mansion on a sand dune and named it after home.
(The house, by the way, was apparently spectacular. Multiple stories, turrets, painted red, with design elements that reflected George's years in Japan. It stood at 12th and Clement until it was torn down in 1922. I would have loved to see it. )
The city tried to rename us in 1917. Neighborhood boosters worried that the new East Bay city of Richmond would cause confusion, so they lobbied the Board of Supervisors to change the name to "Park-Presidio District." It was made official. It was descriptive. It was elegant. And nobody used it. Even the neighborhood newspaper that pushed for the change kept calling itself The Richmond Banner. By the 1930s, everyone had given up pretending, and in 2009 the Board of Supervisors quietly passed an ordinance making "Richmond District" the legal name again.
Some names just belong. You can legislate all you want, but if the neighborhood has already decided what it's called, that's the end of the conversation.
I think about George Turner Marsh sometimes when I'm walking on Clement, especially near 12th. There's no plaque. No marker. Just a corner that most people walk past without a second thought. But that corner is the reason I say "I live in the Richmond" instead of "I live in the Park-Presidio District." And honestly, I'm grateful. Richmond has character. Park-Presidio has… directions.
If you're curious about the deeper history, my friend Woody LaBounty is the absolute gold standard for San Francisco neighborhood stories. His research on George Turner Marsh is where much of this story lives, and everything he writes is worth the read. You can find his work at Western Neighborhoods Project and support his coffee and beer fund at [LINK TBD… Luba to confirm with Woody]. Seriously, fund this man's coffee. The City's history is in good hands because of him.
The City keeps its best stories in the strangest places. Sometimes it's a bar that launched a comedy legend. Sometimes it's a corner where a homesick kid from Melbourne decided to build something beautiful in the sand.
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The Richmond District was named by George Turner Marsh, an Australian immigrant and Asian art dealer who named his 1880s estate after a suburb of Melbourne, Australia.
