David and Adele would take their dog, Bandit, on his daily walks at the Alamo Square Park in San Francisco. On the east side of the park stood the row of iconic San Francisco Victorian homes known as “The Painted Ladies.”
“Wouldn’t you love to live in one of those Painted Ladies?” Adele asked David one beautiful spring morning.
“No way,” David said. “We’d have no privacy at all. People would be standing in the park across the street snapping photos of our home. And I heard that the people who live there are constantly having to deal with tourists knocking at their doors and wanting to have a tour of their homes.”
“Still,” Adele said, “These homes are beautiful, they are in a great location, with the park across the street and stunning, panoramic views of the city from the rear. How could you not want to live in one of them?”
“It’s an unrealistic and impractical fantasy of yours that we can’t come close to being able to afford,” David said. “Now let’s head home and get some breakfast. Bandit and I are starved.”
As David and Adele were sitting at their small kitchen table eating breakfast, David said, “Isn’t this interesting?”
“Isn’t what interesting?” Adele asked her husband.
David held up that day’s edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. The headline read:
Iconic Painted Ladies to be Razed to Make Room for Luxury Hi-Rise Condos
Written for Roger Shipp’s Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner. Photo credit: MorgueFile March2020 file000508086684.
This, That, and the Other 
WHAT???????? They are iconic. that would be like removing the Golden Gate Bridge!!!!
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Don’t worry. It’s fiction. They’re not razing the Painted Ladies for condos. 😉
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Phew!!!!!!! That’s a relief!
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NO! Run, don’t walk, to the City’s Historical Landmark Commission, or whatever it is called, and demand that the Painted Ladies be designated historical in such a way that that cannot happen! I’m glad this is fiction — it must not happen! It’s a shame, though, that people are so self-oriented that they must disturb the people who live in those homes for curiosity’s sake!
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I agree with appreciating history.
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Yeah, that’s pretty rude.
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That too.
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I have a (small) collection of cookie jars that look like those houses, that my dad painted. (He painted real houses sometimes, too, in his spare time.)
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Ha! Ironic indeed
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Were those homes used in exterior shots in the TV series Full House and Fuller House?
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Not those specifically, but San Francisco has quite a few “painted lady” Victorian homes. I used to live around the corner from the one used for the exterior shots on those shows.
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They’re so beautiful! I was glad to read your post was just fiction. There is a lot of demolition of old stately homes situated on large blocks here in my council, making way for ugly multi-dwelling apartment buildings. You know, resembling a huge grey box! It’s devastating.
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As Joni Mitchell sang,
“They took all the trees
Put them in a tree museum …
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot …
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
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Yep, I think of that song every time I drive past the new dwellings.
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Tell me it ain’t true!
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It ain’t true. I made it up to suit my flash fiction piece. Well, at least it ain’t true YET!
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I”m so relieved to hear you made that up. The destruction of lovely old buildings to be replaced by ugly new ones is a pet hate of mine and my blood was already starting to boil by the time I got to the end of the story.
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I would hope that those beautiful PaInted Ladies will stand for a long, long time.
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It could very easily happen and would be a shame…glad it’s just fiction.
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