The Painted Ladies, San Francisco

The Painted Ladies on Steiner and Hayes Street in San Francisco are a row of Queen Anne era Victorian houses, painted in multiple colors to draw attention to their element of design. The Painted Ladies appear very frequently in photographs of the city and are a huge tourist attraction. From 1850 to 1900, 48,000 houses in the range of styles that we now call "Victorian" were built to accommodate the city's escalating population. Many of these houses were lost in the great fire that followed the 1906 earthquake, and others were torn down over the years to make way for new development.