Leavenworth

This is the house I grew up in on Leavenworth Street in San Francisco.  I found this great picture today and I liked it because if you look at the woman climbing up the hill, you can get an idea of how steep the street is.

Also, there were no trees on the street when I lived there, and there was no diagonal parking; you had to park parallel and my father would not let me get a driver's license until I could parallel park with a standard transmission on the hill.  

Where there is a garage door used to be the basement and there was just a normal door.  My father did a lot of work in that basement, which technically went with the landlord's apartment and my father had a smaller basement, but the two connected and the landlord never used his basement.  They must have done extensive work to turn this into a garage because it was a deep basement with steep stairs from the street down to the floor.

I don't know what it's like now, but we had the downstairs flat.  My sister and I shared the room to the right of the door.  It was designed as a dining room, but we used it as a bedroom. I was terrified of the dark and my father insisted that our door be closed at night, so I would pull the curtain aside so the light from the street would fall on my face.  My mother didn't want people walking down the hill knowing we were there.  Now I see there are bars on the window...we should have had that done!.  We had a teeny closet that my cousin locked me in once.  I had claustrophobia and I can still feel how terrified I was to be locked in that closet!

The two windows to the left of the door were to my parents' bedroom and the windows over the garage are bay windows in the living room.  There was a seat in front of the windows, like this

(from the internet)

We had great fun sitting on the seat watching cars trying to drive up the hill, especially on rainy days!  There was a TV in the middle to lean against.

In addition to the 2 bedrooms there was a living room/dining room, one bathroom (bath, no shower), a kitchen with a pantry and a back porch.  

I've checked the property out and have seen what it looks like now and I can't even imagine what it's like because none of the rooms look the same.  I actually wrote to the occupants awhile ago, but never received an answer.

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My mother with baby Jeri

in what was my childhood bedroom

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