Old San Francisco Historic District

Duane's take

The official marker tells it this way, and I'm just the one bringin' it down the road to you. Now, El Paso is a city that knows how to grow, and sometime in the early twentieth century, a stretch of hilly ground on the north side of town started growin' right along with it. We're talkin' about the Old San Francisco Historic District, and the name alone ought to make you curious.

Most of the structures went up between 1908 and 1923, built of brick, stone, and wood, residential apartment buildings mostly, all sharin' similar architectural elements like they were cut from the same cloth. That kind of consistency doesn't happen by accident. It happens when a city is pushin' outward with purpose, which is exactly what El Paso was doin' during this period of major growth.

Now here's where the story gets a little layered. The name San Francisco. The marker tells us two things worth chewin' on.

First, the hilly terrain of the district bore a likeness to the terrain of San Francisco, California. You look around at those rises and slopes and something about it just echoed a city a thousand miles to the west. Second, and this is the part that reaches back further, the area was developed on what had been the northern side of the El Paso to San Francisco Stage Route during the 1800s.

So the land remembered an old road, a road that once connected this corner of Texas all the way to California, and the neighborhood that grew up beside it carried that memory right into its name. Brick by brick, between 1908 and 1923, a city wrote itself onto the hillside, and the hillside wrote back.

What the marker says

Composed primarily of early twentieth-century residential apartment buildings, this historic neighborhood was developed during a period of major growth in El Paso. Most of the structures were built of brick, stone, or wood between 1908 and 1923 and feature similar architectural elements. The name of the district is taken from the likeness of the hilly terrain to that of San Francisco, California. In addition, the area was developed on what was the northern side of the El Paso - San Francisco Stage Route during the 1800s. (1984)