For forty-three years, Sunnyside's southernmost street touched a jail. The Sunnyside History Project's "Sunnyside/Jailside" documents that the Ingleside Jail's high wooden fences met Havelock Street at the neighborhood's southern edge, close enough that when escape alarms sounded, children on Foerster Street knew to run home.
The compound held 300 to 400 inmates behind a 16-foot board fence that storms regularly knocked flat. After a deadly 1930 fire at Ohio's wooden state penitentiary killed 322 inmates, San Francisco condemned its own wood-built jail as a firetrap. Prisoners were transferred to a new facility in San Bruno on September 13, 1934, according to SF Sheriff's Department records, and the buildings came down.
Two years later, the cleared site went to a college that had no campus. San Francisco Junior College, founded in 1935, had been holding classes at twenty-three scattered locations across the city, its students riding streetcars between sessions. The Board of Education approved a 56-acre building plan in 1937. Timothy Pflueger designed Science Hall for the campus's highest point: four stories, 489 feet long, completed in 1940. From Havelock Street today, looking south, the roofline on the ridge is Pflueger's building, set on the same graded ground where the jail compound stood. Sunnyside's southern boundary has not moved in over a century. What it touches has changed completely.
The site's institutional life
- 1854 — City buys 100-acre "House of Refuge Lot" for $15,000
- 1859 — Industrial School opens; 60 boys, 5 girls admitted in first year
- 1876 — House of Correction receives its first prisoner, September 4
- 1891 — Sunnyside subdivision platted next door; Behrend Joost's debut ad runs April 26
- 1906 — Facility renamed Ingleside Jail in newspaper usage
- 1930 — Ohio prison fire triggers national scrutiny of wooden jails
- 1934 — Inmates transferred to San Bruno; jail demolished
- 1935 — San Francisco Junior College founded; no campus, nicknamed "Trolley Car College"
- 1940 — Science Hall opens on the former jail site
Sources: Sunnyside History Project; SF Sheriff's Dept. history; CCSF institutional history