Henry Doelger (pronounced DOLE-jer) (June 23, 1896,

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

– July 23, 1978) was a San Francisco developer known for the creation of large low-cost housing tracts in San Francisco and

Daly City Daly City () is the second most populous city in San Mateo County, California, United States, with population of 104,901 according to the 2020 census. Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, and immediately south of San Francisco (sharing its ...

Biography

Doelger was born behind his parents' bakery in San Francisco. After his father's death when he was 12 years old, Doelger left school in the 8th grade in order to help support his family. Henry Doelger went into business with his two brothers Frank and John Jr, eventually becoming a major real estate developer in San Francisco. During the 1940s, Doelger built large sections of San Francisco's Sunset District, in the same part of the city where he had set up his headquarters since the 1930s. The 1932

art deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unit ...

" Doelger Building" on Judah Street was designated in 2013 as an official landmark by the

City of San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. In 1947, Doelger and his associates started building what is now known as the Westlake district in

. This is one of the earliest examples of a large-tract

suburb A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area, which may include commercial and mixed-use, that is primarily a residential area. A suburb can exist either as part of a larger city/urban area or as a separ ...

and manifestation of

urban sprawl Urban sprawl (also known as suburban sprawl or urban encroachment) is defined as "the spreading of urban developments (such as houses and shopping centers) on undeveloped land near a city." Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted growt ...

Life Magazine ''Life'' was an American magazine published weekly from 1883 to 1972, as an intermittent "special" until 1978, and as a monthly from 1978 until 2000. During its golden age from 1936 to 1972, ''Life'' was a wide-ranging weekly general-interest ma ...

featured photographs of the numerous rows of houses in the 1950s, which were immortalized in the song ''

Little Boxes "Little Boxes" is a song written and composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962, which became a hit for her friend Pete Seeger in 1963, when he released his cover version. The song is a social satire about the development of suburbia, and associa ...

''. Henry Doelger died on July 23, 1978, at the age of 82.

References

Books and articles

* Brechin, Gray. (1990). "Mr. Levitt of the Sunset". '' San Francisco Focus'', June 23, 1990. * Keil, Rob. (2006). '' Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Midcentury Suburb''. Daly City, CA: Advection Media. .

External links

"Visionary's 'ticky-tacky' landmarks"
by Ken Garcia, ''

San Francisco Chronicle The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The pa ...

'', October 15, 2002.
"Praising San Francisco's Champion of Conformity"
by Patricia Leigh Brown, ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', January 29, 2003.
"Profile: Builder Henry Doelger"
by Rob Keil, ''Daly City History Online'' (website), 2005, at the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

(archived February 2, 2005)
"Streetwise: Doelger City"
by Steve LaBounty, ''Western Neighborhoods Project'' (website), November 1999.

by Lorri Ungaretti, ''Encyclopedia of San Francisco'' (website), 2004.
Westlake Resource
American real estate businesspeople Businesspeople from San Francisco 20th-century American businesspeople 1896 births 1979 deaths Sunset District, San Francisco Daly City, California Architecture in the San Francisco Bay Area {{US-business-bio-1890s-stub