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Labor Day    

7 September 2026

Before anyone gets the notion to rename Labor Day in this era where nothing is sacred, we thought we'd revisit the plans of some ancestors who built their own house in San Francisco.

Tool Cabinet. Original decorative lock and keys.

We have a copy of the specifications filed with the city on Aug. 26, 1912, not long after the Earthquake and Fire of 1906, you'll note. That part of our family arrived in April 1906, in fact. But by 1912, they were ready to build.

They built a three-story house with two-flats and a basement on 19th Avenue just south of Geary and across the street from a playground. It's still standing.

Designed by Mario Bacigalupi and built by Giovanni Bacigalupi and Giuseppe Garbarino, the cost of construction in 1912 was estimated to be $3,500.

Specifications. Detail of plans filed with the city.

As a child, we visited our great-grandmother who lived in the third-floor flat. The street door led to a very long staircase that wound back on itself to the rooms of the flat. Two bedrooms in the front, a bathroom with a gravity-fed toilet, and the kitchen and living room in the back. You ate at a big table in the kitchen.

And if you wandered out to the panty beyond that, you could see the scary wooden staircase that led down three stories to the garden.

We only went into the garden from the basement where all the tools were stored in a workroom with a locked plywood cabinet.

When the house was sold, that cabinet was moved to the basement of our family home. And when our family home was sold, we moved that cabinet to our own basement.

It speaks to us of the labor that actually built what had only been a dream. For us, it is a sort of treasure chest still holding the most valuable things in the world. The tools with which dreams are made into reality.

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