Frida Kahlo’s San Francisco Apartment Building For Sale

A Telegraph Hill apartment building with ties to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera is hitting the market for the first time in decades.

The 11-unit property at 36-52 Calhoun Terrace is asking $8 million, the San Francisco Standard reported. Built into a sheer cliff in 1938, the Art Moderne building is fully leased and occupies a site that likely couldn’t be replicated today because of modern seismic standards, construction costs and permitting hurdles.

The building’s unlikely origin story dates back decades before it was constructed. The cliffside perch was created after politically connected quarry operators George and Harry Gray illegally blasted Telegraph Hill in the early 1900s, sending boulders crashing onto neighboring homes. The quarry eventually fell into bankruptcy after George Gray was fatally shot in 1914 by a quarry worker who was owed back wages and facing eviction. Developers Ian and Rose Hoeffler turned the site into the hillside apartment complex in 1938.

“They literally don’t build things like they used to,” San Francisco Planning Department chief of staff Dan Sider told the Standard of the building. “But also, people don’t die on construction sites nearly as often as they used to.”

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were among the building’s earliest tenants. The couple lived in one of the apartments while Rivera completed his “Pan American Unity” mural for the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition. They were divorced before reuniting in San Francisco and remarrying at City Hall later that year in 1940. They moved out after Rivera finished the commission. A decade later, the apartment building had a turn in the spotlight as a filming location for the 1952 noir thriller “The Sniper.”

The units themselves top out at about 950 square feet, with residents in lower units having to climb multiple flights of stairs to reach the street level. The building’s quirks haven’t dampened demand from tenants, as it is fully occupied with no tenants predating 2020 — unsurprising given San Francisco’s rapidly tightening market amid growing housing demand and shrinking supply.

— Chris Malone Méndez