History of Holy Family Day Home

The Setting

San Francisco is proud of the fact that it is a city that never really was a town. It went from a sleepy village of several hundred huddled in the sand dunes on a magnificent bay to a bustling metropolis of more than 25,000, almost overnight, once gold was found in the low mountains to the east. This growth was quickly compounded by the great silver discoveries in Nevada, the coming of the railroads (all accompanied by enormous immigration from the Far East and Europe) and the post-Civil War migrations of the late 1850’s and 1860’s. Along with this growth, came tremendous social upheavals in the lives of the many citizens of the City.

When Richard and Mary Tobin took young Lizzie Armer into their quiet San Francisco home just after the Civil War, little did they know that she would translate the love, care and devotion she learned from her new family into a religious community dedicated to addressing the myriad of social problems that she observed in her community.

By the early 1870’s, multi-ethnic families and neighborhoods — the same diversity of which San Francisco is so justly proud today — were well-rooted and thriving. But the City was also an amazing agglomeration of wealth and poverty, opportunity and disadvantage. Although gold and growth generated many millionaires, thousands of families struggled to eek out a meager living in a fast-changing and, frequently, unforgiving economy.

A New Religious Order

Moved by the often-troubled lives of her neighbors, Lizzie Armer, now Sister Dolores, founded the Sisters of the Holy Family in 1872. A mendicant (begging) order, the Sisters began to care for the needs of broken families, the lonely, the elderly, the sick, poor and hungry. Mostly, they turned their attention to the difficult lives facing so many children in the booming City. In many families both parents had to work to make ends meet, so children were often left unattended, roaming the streets and alleys in dangerous neighborhoods. By 1878, the Sisters opened their first Day Home to “provide a place where the needs of the child could be attended to while peace of mind and material assistance” could be offered to the beleaguered parents.

By 1906, the Sisters of the Holy Family had pioneered the concept of Kindergarten on the Pacific Coast, importing the idea and accreditation for the teachers from New York. The growing Order of Sisters maintained and staffed three flourishing Day Homes: St. Francis in North Beach, Sacred Heart in the area of the present Civic Center, and the original Holy Family Day Home at 6th and Brannan Streets. These homes cared for children from ages two to seventeen and from all religious and ethnic backgrounds.

The great earthquake of 1906, and subsequent fire, destroyed all of the Day Homes. Undaunted, the Sisters went immediately to several City parks and set up large canvas tents where the work of day care and family support could continue, needed even more during this deeply traumatic time for the citizens of San Francisco.

A “Home Away From Home”

In 1911, Virginia Fair Vanderbilt, the inheritor of great silver wealth from the famed Comstock Lode in Nevada, offered to build a new Day Home on the northeast corner of 16th and Dolores Streets in the neighborhood already known as the Mission. Mrs. Vanderbilt hired the famous architect, Willis Polk, to create a state-of-the-art education facility. The building was designed especially for children, with half steps to accommodate little legs and large windows to let the sunshine pour through. Ground was broken on July 17, 1911 and the new building was dedicated at 11:30 a.m. on February 2, 1912. The building “covered about 60’ by 90’, leaving a large space for yards and gardens about the home. Simplicity, combined with a certain substantial character, is the prevailing note of the entire building”, noted one local newspaper.

The high-ceilinged rooms of the new Holy Family Day Home were soon filled with the sounds of laughter and child’s play. Morning songs and games transformed the small children into birds, bees, fish, and flowers. Through play, art and music, they learned about the world around them and began to feel safe about their place in that world. Most of the children, at first, came from the predominantly Irish Catholic families of the Mission. In addition to caring for young children during the day, the Day Home also welcomed school-age children back during afterschool hours, quite a unique concept in that era.

By the 1920’s, the Community Chest (later the United Way) came into existence and began to partially subsidize the work of the Day Homes. With public funding, the Sisters were no longer totally dependent on begging for food, clothes and school supplies. Still, nearly 110 of the 150 families served were paying no fees at all. A report at the time noted that the Day Homes, “unlike any other day care being established, were the only ones who took children in for need alone and were not interested in merely providing an interesting preschool experience for children”.

By the 1930’s and 1940’s, Doctors, Public Health Nurses and Social Workers were a part of the daily services at the Day Homes. The Sisters continued to staff the nurseries and classrooms, but the services to families were increasingly provided by outside professionals. Lay Advisory Boards began to develop in the 1960’s and 1970’s and there was much more outreach to the community, more home visits, resource materials were published, and more parent involvement was expected at the school.

The ministry of the Sisters of the Holy Family remained responsive and vital to the daily lives of so many San Franciscans. Throughout the economic boom and bust of the late 19th Century, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and two major earthquakes, the Day Home continued to serve children and their families – more than 14,000 of them.

Loma Prieta

As many San Franciscans will recall, it began at 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989. Fans were just settling into their seats at Candlestick Park for the third game of the baseball World Series when the first tremor was felt. A section of the Bay Bridge collapsed. Six people were killed when a brick building in SOMA crumbled to the ground. Power was out for nearly three days. Once again, as in 1906, fires were the real problem. At least 27 of them raged and dozens of apartment buildings were lost in the Marina District. San Francisco alone suffered nearly $3 billion in damages.

For 77 years, that wonderful building that was a “home away from home” for so many children, many of whom attended at a very vulnerable and developmentally significant time in their young lives, had stood proudly across the street from the great Mission San Francisco de Asis. Sixteen seconds after the 1989 earthquake began near Mt. Loma Prieta in Santa Cruz County, it shuddered through the Mission District of San Francisco and our beautiful home was irretrievably damaged. Staff and some of the children moved into a smaller building along 16th Street, but more than 50 children lost their space at the Day Home.

Even as the Day Home maintained its year-round programming, it now needed to develop a wide-ranging fundraising plan that would allow it to tear down the Willis Polk building and design and raise the funds for a new school. In 1992, the Sisters of the Holy Family ceded governing powers to a lay Board of Directors; the first non-religious Executive Director was hired in 1997. Today, all of the staff and teachers are lay persons. Only one Sister from the Order still serves in a social service capacity and maintains the important thread of history for the Day Home. In 2004, Sister Marianne entered her 60th year of service to the children and families of San Francisco.

The Next Century of Service

In 2000, the Day Home was finally able to raze the old, unused building, clearing the lot at the historic corner of 16th and Dolores Streets for construction. In 2003, designs for a new, three-story, 15,404 sq. ft. building were prepared, a Director of Development was hired and the Board was expanded, all in readiness to begin a $7.1 million Capital Campaign in the Fall of 2004. The Day Home broke ground in the Summer of 2005. We watched the children walk up the steps of their new school in Summer of 2007. Our Grand Opening was Saturday October 13, 2007. What a wonderful day it was!

Through all of this, the Day Home has been, and will continue to be, a “home away from home” for many generations of young children and their families. If you are an alumni, click here.