Fear of your neighbors and other nearby predators never goes out of style: As bestas, nominated for 17 Goya Awards and inspired by true events, deals with exactly this topic. But there is another case, earlier and more distant, in which this fear has been translated into an architectural delirium.
The story begins with Nicholas Yung, a man who stood in the way of magnate Charles Crocker’s real estate plans in 1876. Born in Germany, Yung had immigrated to the United States in 1848 in search of opportunities. And found her. After years of effort and hard work, he has amassed enough fortune to start one of those businesses that always have a future in the city of San Francisco: a funeral home. Thanks to her, he and his wife Roseta were able to move to a small plot at the top of the hill on California Street (at the intersection with Powell Street), where they built a small house with a garden, which also had an enviable view. , with the Golden Gate to the north, San Francisco Bay to the east, and the city to the south.
Engraving by Charles Crocker c.1880. Kean Collection (Getty Images)
This area was so attractive that soon other wealthy people would also be interested in it. Charles Crocker (1822-1888), one of the Big Four investors in the railroad giant Central Pacific Railroad, had made his fortune in cheap foreign labor when trains were set to become America’s next big industry. After that, he and his partners thought that this hill was a good place to build the most exclusive homes in San Francisco because of its panoramic views, tranquility, proximity to the financial city, and the connection they hoped to have with the city installing a cable car . Former Republican Gov. Leland Stanford moved there, as did Mark Hopkins, Jr., another railroad businessman. Right next to the Yung. The neighborhood became known as Nob Hill, which translates to “the hill of the rich” (nob means “rich and distinguished person” in Anglo-Saxon slang).
For the installation of all these palatial homes, Crocker and his partners had not encountered much opposition from the former residents, but in the northeast corner of his own block, the businessman, who had acquired 12 out of 13 lots, had an unexpected enemy. Yung’s house was ridiculous compared to the gigantic buildings that were springing up all around it. Because of this, his prospects were not so good at first. Nor did Crocker, as a tycoon and manager of an exclusive neighborhood, like it when a working-class family disturbed the incomparable environment before him. He offered Yung $3,000 (more than $83,000 current dollars including inflation) so that he would go like his former neighbors. But it wasn’t going to be that easy. And it’s not like Yung was any anti-gentrification activist: He just heard Crocker paid someone else a whopping $25,000 for the land on his house, so he wanted a better deal.
Excerpt from ‘The San Francisco Chronicle’ after the death of Charles Crocker.THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
The negotiations gradually solidified. Crocker rose first to $6,000 and later to $9,000, but the lucrative precedent that may have been rumor or true had persuaded the undertaker to stand his ground. According to newspapers at the time, Yung announced that he would settle for – in the broadest sense of the word – $12,000.
The figure was affordable for Charles Crocker, but not for his pride. Angered that a humble immigrant was gaining his pulse, the tycoon raised his tone: he gave instructions to his workers that the debris, which came from the dynamite they set off to level the hill, should be channeled to the Yung house . That didn’t work, and Crocker escalated hostilities and spent $3,000 (the amount he didn’t want to add to his last offer) to install a 40-foot-tall wooden fence covering the family home.
remember death
Putting up a fence solely to annoy a neighbor (which has its own term in English, defiant fence or trostmauer, something like “wall of conempt”) is currently a criminal offense, but not in California from the 19th century, for Unfortunately for Nicholas Yung and his family, who have had to adjust to living in the dark without the view or the fresh air of their dream home, bought long ago.
The crazy assembly became a real tourist attraction thanks to the cable car, just as Yung’s Numantine resistance, which had no trouble winning over public opinion, achieved the status of a symbol of the struggle between the common man and the insatiable capitalist machine. The San Francisco Chronicle went so far as to call the wall a “crime” and a “monument to evil.”
From the pages of the same diary, Yung took the gauntlet and challenged his wealthy neighbor to build a higher wall: his plan was to place a flag with skulls and bones on top of his house, next to a huge coffin. , as an advertisement for his funeral home and also as a reminder of the death that scared off the millionaires in the neighborhood. There is no record of Yung carrying out his threat, but in 1880 he heeded the warning of life’s impermanence and died.
But that was by no means the end of the story: Roseta, his widow and accomplice in this unworldly struggle, had no desire to sell either. Charles Crocker would die eight years later, with his wishes unfulfilled. Ms. Yung also turned down offers from a Chinese laundry and an advertising company. Unfortunately, despite her appeals to the city council, she would not live to see the wall removed either, as there were no specific laws. After his death in 1902, The San Francisco Chronicle wrote of the Crocker estate for “keeping the testimony of malice” to the millionaire and upholding his “legacy of hate” rather than tearing it down.
However, the children of the marriage quickly hit it off with the Crocker family and sold the land for an undisclosed sum. The Wall of Contempt fell in 1905…as did all new real estate falling a year later, with the famous San Francisco earthquake, measuring between 7.5 and 8 on the Richter scale and killing at least 10,000. After the fateful event, the space was donated to charity and Grace Cathedral Episcopal Church currently stands on it. The temple is known, among other things, to have hosted one of Martin Luther King’s speeches, a religious concert by Duke Ellington, or to have served as a backdrop for films such as Bullitt (1968), La plot (1975), Bicentennial Man (1999) , My Name Is Harvey Milk (2008) or Venom: There Will Be Killing (2022).
you will fear your neighbor
Beginning in 1956, the state of California enacted a law permanently banning the erection of walls of contempt; That is, with no greater function than taking views from a neighbor to disturb them, in line with most states in the country, which limit them to a maximum of 6 feet (1.83 meters). This wasn’t an impediment worth the redundancy for other citizens to explore creative ways to annoy others. In California, too, the courts had to step in to rule that planting tall trees at the edge of a property was considered another form of wall of contempt after a California resident responded to reform a neighbor had made to his house to to be able to see the mountain.
In 2008, a Utah farmer erected three old cars vertically as a fence between his cattle station and neighbors who had complained about flies and dust but didn’t agree to the fence being installed (paid halfway) because they’d like to see it Garden, the horses and the cattle. The farmer dubbed his work Redneck Stonehenge, a nod to the UK’s famous megalithic monument and conservative Southerners (rednecks), although he explained that he just wanted to remind the area’s new residents that this was the landscape and the cars they wouldn’t stay there permanently.
History shows that walls of contempt can also be erected for oneself: This is how the Irishman Robert Rochfort, Count von Belvedere, taught that in the 18th century not to see the huge villa that his brother George (who is suspected to make matters worse, having slept with his wife) had built in front of his house.
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