Miraloma Park Mudslide 1942
Historical Essay
by Woody LaBounty
Originally published at San Francisco Story, February 5, 2025
| After a rainy winter in 1942, a major mudslide ripped down the southeastern slope of Mt. Davidson and knocked one house off its foundation and killed Mrs. Dora Kammer. The 700 block of Foerster Street was buried, trapping residents in their homes until they were rescued. |
Foerster Street mudslide, February 1942.
Photo: courtesy OpenSFHistory.org wnp27.5611
I usually think of Dora Kammer the first week of February. Or when the rains come hard in the city. It’s the first week of February and an “atmospheric river” has hit town, so I have scuttled my plans for this week’s San Francisco Story to give Ms. Kammer and her brother-in-law, Thomas Hall, some space to be remembered.
Shifting Earth
In the 1920s, when Foerster Street was widened and repaved to handle traffic winding around Mount Davidson, the front door of John Mickelson’s house at 625 Foerster Street ended up 25 feet above the new sidewalk.
625 Foerster Street, propped up and waiting to be moved up a block and across the street.
Photo: Bill Eaton photo, San Francisco Examiner, February 24, 1936
This wasn’t an uncommon situation during the city’s extension and creation of streets over its many hills. Pioneer residences accessible by footpaths or crude lanes would often be left dangling high above, or sometimes in a deep well below, the new official street grade.
Mickelson, a carpenter, filled in the gap with concrete forms and an addition. A few years later, during a particularly heavy rainy season in February 1936, the house slowly slid onto the sidewalk atop a pile of mud. Mickelson was able to save his condemned home and relocate it one block away and across the street at 750 Foerster Street.
750 Foerster, formally 625 Foerster, in the 1940s.
Photo: Department of Public Works
If Mickelson thought himself personally unlucky with his home, he likely reconsidered when he saw how his neighbors across the street fared six years later.
View south on Foerster Street on February 6, 1942.
Photo: Department of Public Works photograph, A-7114. OpenSFHistory/wnp26.176
Sea of Ooze
Extended relatives of John Mickelson lived nearby on what appeared on maps as Kenyon Avenue, but was little more than a wiggly unpaved path roughly along part of the path of Los Palmos Drive today. Dora Kammer, a cook, and her brother-in-law, Thomas Hill, a steamfitter, lived together in a small home at the street’s only address, 375 Kenyon Avenue.
1938 view of the 700 block of Foerster Street. The houses boxed in red would face disaster on February 6, 1942.
Photo: David Rumsey Map Collection
Up the hill to the west, contractors for house-building outfits were busily moving earth around for lines of new homes filling the new winding Mount Davidson streets. On February 6, 1942, after two weeks of storms, mud from a Bella Vista Way embankment broke loose, roared down the hillside “in a lava-like sea of ooze,” to Foerster Street.
View north on mud-filled Foerster Street from Teresita Boulevard. The shed-addition at left was sheared off a house three blocks uphill.
Photo: OpenSFHistory/wnp27.7189
The mud reached a cluster of houses around Kenyon Avenue first. Dora Kammer was in the kitchen preparing a meal, but Thomas Hill heard what was coming for them. A thundering rumble before uprooted eucalyptus trees crushed the house, which almost completely flipped as an avalanche of mud poured through the walls. Timbers pinned Hill and ripped into one of his legs while pushing him out a window of the sliding house. His last sight of Dora was her face vanishing under the sea of mud.
Firemen and neighbors search through wreckage of 375 Foerster Street for Dora Kammer.
Photo: San Francisco Examiner, February 6, 1942.
The almost-capsized house precariously settled in the back and side yard of 785 Foester, which was swamped by mud, but managed to stay standing. The earth kept slowly moving, slowly sliding down Foerster, as rescuers arrived and pulled Hill out of the wreckage.
A neighboring house had been clipped by the mud. One bay was ripped free and deposited a couple of blocks away.
View south at mud-filled Foerster Street, February 6, 1942.
Photo: Department of Public Works, A-7119, OpenSFHistory/wnp26.179
The Bujacich and Taylor houses on the east side of Foerster were shoved into the street; marvelously, no one was injured.
775 and 777 Foerster Street were knocked into the middle of the roadway. A woman and her five-year-old were able to walk out of the near building unhurt.
Photo: courtesy OpenSFHistory.org wnp26.181
View south on Foerster Street, February 6, 1942. While swamped by mud from the slide, 785 Foerster at center survived and remains standing in 2025.
Photo: OpenSFHistory/wnp27.7188
Thomas Hill died from his injuries two days after the slide. It was five days before they were able to recover Dora Kammer’s body from the muck and debris. She died at 62 years old. Never married. No kids, it seems. Her sister, Sophia, Thomas Hill’s wife, had passed away three years earlier.
Amy O’Hair, the stellar historian of the Sunnyside neighborhood, wrote in detail about the slide in 2023. Read her article for a close analysis of the cause and path of the slide, each house and family affected, and the extended relationships between the neighbors. Lots more photos too.
By 1951, the area was stabilized and this church at 234 Teresita Blvd. characterized the new neighborhood.
Photo: courtesy OpenSFHistory.org wnp58.098
With World War II raging, the city and the neighborhood moved on quickly from the disaster. There were bigger tragedies.
Feels like today. We’ve entered the era of daily disasters, many climate related. Last month’s Los Angeles fires may have set the stage for mudslides this month.
It’s easy to get numb, but I don't want to be numb. To stay human, keep my empathy, continue to feel and try to make things better, I try to focus on individuals.
So, sad as it is, I put myself in Dora Kammer’s kitchen now and then. The first week of February. Or when the rains come hard in the city.