This poster hangs prominently in our home, visible to your left after you enter the front door, as you take off your shoes. It’s a newspaper ad that ran in the San Francisco Call in March 1913 to stoke sales of the yet-to-be-built Forest Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, where we now live.

The ad—one of a series of at least ten published by the Newell-Murdoch company—touted the virtues of the new neighborhood, including its proximity to downtown, the return on investment, and the fresh air and sunshine. Many were implicitly or explicitly directed to “the man” who provided for his family (“Where do your wife and children live?” asks one). All contained the typical flowery language of real estate developers. And they all referenced “restricted residence.”

At the end of June, I wrote about the difficulty Willie Mays had when he was buying a house in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood of San Francisco, in the late ’50s; in it, I said:

He later bought another home, this time in Forest Hill, the neighborhood I currently live in, where the neighbors seemed less racist.

We love Forest Hill. We’ve lived here for about eighteen months now. It’s walkable, easily accessible by public transportation, and quiet. It’s a five minute stroll down the hill to West Portal, which has a cute “downtown strip” filled with lovely shops and restaurants.

It’s a great area; and while it may have been more welcoming of Black residents in the 1960s compared to Sherwood Forest, like much of San Francisco—and America—when it comes to housing discrimination, it has a racist past.

When we moved into the neighborhood, the homeowners’ association provided a packet sharing some of the history of the area. Part of Adolph Sutro’s vast estate, it was originally a large forest on a hill—talk about your creative naming! The forest was mostly leveled and converted to a residential planned community in the early 1900s.

Learning that Willie Mays lived here—helping to integrate the area in the ’60s—piqued my curiosity. I found the Forest Hill page on OutsideLands.org. Not much about Willie, but this caught my eye:

Forest Hill followed the example of other residence parks, imposing strict requirements on everything from building design to the racial identity of its residents. (Read a typical flyer.)

“Racial identity of its residents,” eh? I knew what that meant. I’ve seen enough homeowner CC&Rs—Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions—which needed to have discriminatory language struck because it no longer comported with modern sensibilities.

This was different.

The “typical flyer” mentioned by Outside Lands was a textual recreation of the newspaper ad at the top. It starts with the expected flowery language: Forest Hill as an Investment, distinctive exclusiveness, the finest place in San Francisco to live, and so on.

Then, in the fifth paragraph, things turned.

So shocked was I by the language in the ad, I refused to believe it could be real. There was no image, no link that might lend it credence.

I needed to find a copy, and see it in context for myself.

For all the issues modern search engines have, one undeniably great thing is they make it easy to find the proverbial needle in a vast internet haystack. Twenty years ago my eyes would be bleary from spending my afternoons scrolling through microfiche in a stuffy library. Instead, I was able to plug in the remarkably specific phrases and almost immediately pulled up the scanned newsprint.

There was the ad, taking up three quarters of the broadsheet. I stared at it on my screen, reading the copy, slack-jawed. At the bottom of the center column above the fold, were these words:

There are restrictions that safeguard the person of taste and refinement who seeks exclusiveness. There are no Mongols, Africans or “shack builders” allowed in Forest Hill. When a man selects a homesite in this tract it is done with the positive assurance that there will be nothing disagreeable to mar the serenity of the most fastidious.

I was gobsmacked.

I am Black (or “African”); my wife, Chinese (“Mongol”). I’m not exactly sure who “shack builders” was meant to impugn , but I’m confident it’s a slur against some immigrant community. (The Irish contractors who remodeled our home believe it meant their people.)

What shocked me about this ad wasn’t the language, which I understand was commonplace in everyday life in the early 1900s—jarring to read, but not shocking.

No, what truly shocked me was to see those words in an ad. In a newspaper. Published for all to see. It’s not coded. There’s no “dog whistle.” It’s perhaps a bit less direct than “only persons of the White or Caucasian race” but it’s pretty damn close.

Some people may shy away from this racist history, ignoring it in the hope that it recedes into the mists of time.

Not me. Forgetting means repeating. We keep this in a prominent place in the home we would’ve been denied buying a century ago as a striking reminder to us and everyone who visits that history is neither static nor abstract. Living in this house, displaying this ad, it reinforces the truth that ideas and ideologies shift. Change may happen slowly, but change does happen.

I’m remembering our past so I can imagine our future.

See this ad and others in the series in full context. I found ten of them; there may be more. All links except the final one are from the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America. The last one is from Newspapers.com.

• Country Life in the Center of San Francisco
• View from one of the homesites
• Forest Hill as an Investment
• Nature is calling your children to Forest Hill
• Where do your wife and children live?
• Do you know what Unearned Increment means?
• The Home is the Cradle of Humanity
• When is a man’s property worth more than his good name?
• A Look into the future
• Houses planned by M. Fisher