Family Sells Marina Home After 84 Years

Family decides to part with home after three generations of ownership.

Some may think of life in San Francisco as a nomadic existence, with residents coming and going. But one family is putting its home on the market for the first time since it was built 84 years ago.

Julie Quigley said she doesn’t know how much her grandparents paid for their home in San Francisco’s Marina district back in 1926, but it’s being sold for nearly $2 million, quite possibly 1,000 times more than its original price tag.

“It was very ordinary,” said Quigley, while explaining how her grandparents felt about the neighborhood, which is now considered very affluent. “I would say it was almost like people going to the suburbs.”

Quigley says the Manfredi family saved for years to buy a house after losing their North Beach home in the 1906 earthquake. The property near the intersection of Jefferson and Baker streets was bare until the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition, when the Palace of Fine Arts was built.

When the Exposition ended, a developer started building houses on the land where the exhibits used to stand, including the one the Manfredis ended up purchasing. The neighborhood was filled with Italian families. Quigley’s grandparents raised chickens and rabbits in the backyard and grew tomatoes and radicchio in the garden.

Quigley said her grandmother used a wood-burning stove until the 1960s and she used to do the neighbors’ laundry to help pay the monthly expenses. The house used to have a view of the water before Marina Boulevard was built and homes were constructed on it.

She says that she saw the area begin to transform from tight-knit immigrant families to a younger generation of American-born residents, from a place where you had to walk miles to catch a bus to one filled with fancy cars. But other than a few cans of paint, her family’s three bedroom, 2 ½ bathroom house remained the same.

The house passed its biggest test in October of 1989. The Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Marina District hard and homes just two blocks away collapsed, but the Manfredi home had “only cosmetic damage.”

Ultimately, Quigley’s aunt, who died in December at the age of 93, was the last of the Manfredi family to live in the home. Quigley and her daughter live in Marin County and made the difficult decision to sell after three generations.

“It was time to say goodbye to the home,” Quigley said. “It was tremendously emotional. Hopefully, we’ll find a family who love it as much as we did.”
 

Contact Us