Alfred E. Clarke Mansion

The Alfred E. Clarke Mansion is a four-story Queen Anne style house at 250 Douglass Street in San Francisco's Eureka Valley, built in 1892 for Alfred Nobby Clarke, an Irish immigrant who arrived in the city as a cabin boy in 1850. Clarke reportedly spent about 100,000 dollars modeling the 45-room house on a French lakeside chateau, and it survived the 1906 earthquake and fires that destroyed many of the city's other Victorian buildings. It later served as a teaching hospital and sanitarium before its conversion in 1909 into the Victor Apartments, said to be the neighborhood's first apartment building. The city designated it San Francisco Landmark No. 80 in 1975.