Alban Nelson Towne was second vice president and general manager of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon says he built a mansion at the southwest corner of California and Taylor streets on Nob Hill in 1891. The house was mostly Colonial Revival, but its entrance was framed by six white marble Ionic columns. Towne died in 1895, and his widow, Caroline, lived there until the 1906 earthquake and fire.
An icon of 1906
Only the marble porch survived. Wikipedia says that from a certain angle the empty doorway framed the smoldering ruins of City Hall, and photographs by Willard Worden made it an icon of the disaster. The Richmond Review notes that Arnold Genthe also photographed the doorway by moonlight. The paper credits writer Charles K. Field with the phrase “Portals of the Past.”
The move to the park
The portico was reassembled beside Lloyd Lake in Golden Gate Park. The Richmond Review cites the San Francisco Examiner as reporting that it went up “without ceremony” on Aug. 12, 1909. A plaque credits “the kindness of Mrs. A.N. Towne.” The paper says, citing historian Christopher Pollock, that one column fell in a 1957 earthquake. A later San Francisco Arts Commission restoration replaced it and helped protect the portals from earthquakes and rain. Wikipedia notes that the site is mentioned in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) as the place where Kim Novak’s character enters a trance.
Finding it
The Richmond Review says the portals stand on JFK Drive, about 700 feet west of Transverse Drive, across from the east edge of Hellman Hollow. A path circles Lloyd Lake to the doorway.
For other Golden Gate Park landmarks, see our windmills guide and our Conservatory of Flowers story.