The Sunnyside History Project's most substantial published treatment of Behrend Joost and the Sunnyside Land Company appears in Amy O'Hair's "Built on Beer: The Streets of Sunnyside and San Francisco Brewery Profits," which documents how the streets in the Sunnyside subdivision received the names of investors whose connection to the neighborhood was purely financial. Brewery owners and business partners supplied capital; their names went onto street signs on blocks they never planned to inhabit. (The street-naming story and the renaming that followed were covered in this publication's first issue, in "The Names Joost Gave the Streets.") The man who organized those investors, purchased two hundred acres from James P. McCarthy, and recorded the subdivision plan was not an absentee financier. He was a retired grocer whose defining commercial habit was owning the ground under his own business.
Amt Lehe to the Mission Toll Road
Behrend Joost was born in Amt Lehe, in the Kingdom of Hanover, to Martin Joost and Anna Dorothea Borchers Joost. His birth year appears as both 1841 and 1845 in surviving records. Leigh H. Irvine's 1903 biographical sketch, published while Joost was still alive, places his departure from Germany at age fifteen and his arrival in San Francisco on April 1, 1857, by way of Panama. He worked for his brother Tonjes, saved a thousand dollars in two years, and opened a grocery store on the old Mission toll road shortly before Christmas 1859.
Irvine notes that Joost routinely purchased the property where his stores operated. A grocer who owns his building is already a real estate investor; the only question is scale. By the time Joost left the grocery trade in 1887, citing what Irvine describes as a distaste for the liquor feature of the business, he had accumulated enough property and capital to enter hardware with his brother Fabian and, soon after, to begin organizing land companies.
FoundSF's Mae Silver identifies Joost's involvement with at least a dozen land, homestead, and development entities across San Francisco's southern and western districts: the Pacific Homestead Association, the Clarendon Heights Land Company, the Potrero Land and Water Company, and others. The pattern repeated. Acquire undeveloped land beyond the city's built-up edge. Provide or promise transit access. File a subdivision map, which is the legal instrument that divides a large parcel into individually saleable lots. Sell. The Sunnyside Land Company, incorporated in 1891 with a capital stock of one million dollars, was the largest of these ventures.
Twenty-Five Feet
On April 26, 1891, an advertisement for the "Sunny Side" Land Company appeared in San Francisco newspapers. It promised two hundred acres on a "magnificent slope" that was "not in the sand hills," divided into forty-eight blocks and two thousand two hundred and fifty lots. Every lot came with two guarantees: clear title and the electric road.
The electric road was the San Francisco and San Mateo Electric Railway, which Joost incorporated to serve the subdivision. Its first run and the Powerhouse that powered it were covered in this publication's first issue, in "The Path That Held." The streetcar line eventually folded. The grid did not.
The subdivision map was recorded in the Recorder's Office in Map Books A and B, pages 140–143. Current assessor records and the 1975 landmark case report for the Sunnyside Conservatory at 236 Monterey Boulevard show a pattern of 25-foot frontages across the subdivision. Depths vary, roughly 100 feet on some blocks, deeper on others, but the narrow frontage holds consistently enough to read as a founding constraint. The Conservatory parcel itself originally consisted of seven adjacent 25-foot lots, totaling 175 feet of frontage. Current assessor records for residential parcels on Flood Avenue and Foerster Street show the same 25-foot width.
Twenty-five feet is a particular kind of decision. Wide enough for a single-family cottage with narrow side yards. Too narrow for the broad Victorians of the Western Addition or the generous setbacks of St. Francis Wood. It keeps per-lot costs low enough to reach buyers of modest means, and the paired guarantee of the electric road tells you who those buyers were: working families who needed rail access to downtown employment, people purchasing buildable ground rather than scenic estates. The 25-foot lot was a physical constraint and a demographic one simultaneously. It selected, generation after generation, for households of moderate income willing to live close to their neighbors. The relative economic modesty that still distinguishes Sunnyside from the planned enclaves to its west and south was encoded in the lot width from the first filing.
The Western Neighborhoods Project describes the early Sunnyside houses as "small Victorian cottages," later joined by stucco houses of the 1920s and 1930s and utilitarian duplexes of the 1950s and 1960s. Each generation of builders worked within the same 25-foot constraint. The lot width never determined what any individual house would look like. It determined the range of what was possible, and that range has held for 135 years.
The Grid That Waited
The first lot sale came in July 1891. Thirty-two more followed by December. Then sales slowed. By 1900, less than 5 percent of Sunnyside's 2,250 lots had been built on. The neighborhood filled substantially only after the 1906 earthquake and fire drove displaced families south; it filled out during the 1920s building boom that gave the district much of its present-day housing stock.
Joost died on September 24, 1917, and is buried at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma. By then the Sunnyside Land Company had accomplished its work, which was never to build a neighborhood but to plat the template that decades of builders and buyers would fill according to their own needs and means. The company sold lots. The neighborhood built itself.
You can verify this on any residential block between Monterey Boulevard and Joost Avenue. Twenty-five feet, twenty-five feet, twenty-five feet. A 1905 cottage next to a 1926 stucco bungalow next to a 1955 duplex. The houses differ in every way that houses can differ. The lot width holds. With it holds the scale, the density, and the particular character of modest houses set close together on a hillside, each one built on ground a retired grocer from Hanover measured out and sold.