Before the fourplex

Definition B of your CC&Rs names McKeon Construction as the Declarant, and the company that built this place reached El Cajon under George McKeon. His father had been building in San Francisco under the same name since 1940.

Christopher Dennis McKeon never set foot in this subdivision. What arrived here was his son, and the trade he had taught him.

The butcher

He was born in San Francisco in 1893 and raised in the Mission District, where his parents — Thomas and Lenore McKeon, both Irish immigrants — kept a retail meat and butcher shop at 2160 Mission Street. He and his older brother worked in it through the 1920s. His 1918 draft registration and the 1930 census both give his occupation as butcher; the 1920 census, for one year, has him down as a silk wholesaler. He went to Sacred Heart High School.

In 1927 he started building instead — a carpenter putting up working-class housing out by McLaren Park.

He was not unusual in that. The Sunset District, the neighborhood he and his contemporaries filled in, was built largely by men who had been doing something else. The city’s survey of them records that McKeon and Claude Lindsay had been butchers, that Henry Doelger sold tamales, and that Ray Galli had been a bookkeeper. Several had no more than a grammar-school education. Most were native San Franciscans, and most lived in the tracts they built.

Happy Homes

By September 1936 he had bought the Happy Homes Building Company — the firm he had been working for. San Francisco’s register of Sunset District builders gives that business a second name in the same entry: “McKeon Happy Homes (aka McKeon Construction Co.)”, owner Chris McKeon, active 1940 to 1966.

That is the name on the first page of your CC&Rs, in use in San Francisco thirteen years before his son’s company turns up in Sacramento.

His own tract was Rivera Heights, centered on 29th Avenue at Rivera Street and sold from 1936. He lived at 2163 29th Avenue for the one year he was building and selling it, and his settled Sunset address was 346 Santiago Street, where he stayed from 1932 to 1948. The offices moved with the work — 2194 30th Avenue, then 948 Taraval Street, then 550 Taraval Street from 1944 through 1955, which is still standing.

What he was selling, he sold in the language of the period. The houses were advertised as “miniature chalets of France of the days of the monarchy.”

Who the houses were for

The part of this that reaches us is not the chalets. It is the arithmetic underneath them.

In December 1940, as a director of the Associated Home Builders of San Francisco, McKeon cited a study finding that 85% of the families buying new homes in San Francisco had incomes of less than $2,000 a year. The survey’s picture of who was living in the Sunset agrees with him: men working as salesmen, clerks, policemen and firemen, on an average of about $2,000 a year, and nearly 40% of the women in paid work outside the home.

Thirty years later his son’s company described its own buyer to a trade magazine: 38 years old, making $10,700 a year, and “half of our buyers are single, and the majority of these are women.” A different decade and a different product, sold to the same household — the one just inside the edge of what buying costs.

Nobody has to draw a line between those two descriptions for them to sit next to each other.

The instrument

Something else came down the same line, and it is the thing this site exists to explain.

A tract was sold with restrictions attached to the land. The survey describes the shift: where an older deed restriction bound a single parcel, the covenants that spread in the 1920s “applied to the entire established neighborhood and extended into perpetuity.” That is the species of instrument your Declaration is — covenants that run with the land and bind whoever buys next.

In the city he built in, that instrument was widely used for segregation. Covenants preventing the sale of property to “African-Americans, Asians, Jews, and other specified non-Caucasian groups” spread through San Francisco in the 1920s, and by the late 1930s racially restrictive deeds were standard practice among Sunset District builders. The survey says the practice “casts a pall on the work of builders of that era.”

It then names the builders whose deeds it checked and found clean, and his is the first of the two: “Not all builders placed racially restrictive deeds in the late 1930s. A review of select deeds indicate that Chris McKeon’s 1936 ‘Rivera Heights’ tract centered on 29th Avenue at Rivera Street contained no such restrictions.”

That is the survey’s own finding, about the name now on the first page of your Declaration.

Two fights

In 1943, as secretary of the Associated Home Builders, McKeon led a proposal to change how the Sunset District met the street: corner houses built to the property line, then staggering back to a nine-foot setback at the center of the block — a “crescent” frontage. Builders supported it. Residents strongly resisted it, and the Board of Supervisors narrowly rejected it.

By 1948 he had moved his family out of the Sunset to 405 St. Francis Boulevard, in St. Francis Wood. When an extension of Highway One was proposed through it, he organized the West of Twin Peaks Freeway Fighters and headed the Mayor’s Citizens Committee on Freeways, opposing freeway construction in San Francisco and San Mateo Counties.

He sat on the State Contractor License Board for twenty-four years, and on the board of directors of the Golden Gate Bridge.

What came down

He died at home in St. Francis Wood in the late 1960s, having built something like 15,000 houses and apartment units around the Bay. By then his son was running a company that the Associated Press would shortly call the 32nd largest homebuilder in the country.

Quite what passed from the father to the son is not settled on paper. Whether the Sacramento business was the same corporation as the San Francisco one, or a second of the same family name, is not answered by anything on record here.

Two accounts say plainly that the son founded his own. George’s obituary has him establishing McKeon Construction in Sacramento in 1953, and so does the historian of the American condominium, Matthew Gordon Lasner, who calls him a “San Francisco real estate scion”. Against them sit the 1981 notice of the company’s sale, which has the firm “founded in 1934 by Chris McKeon”; the San Francisco directories carrying the name from 1940; and a Sacramento paper in March 1961 still calling Chris McKeon the head of the firm. The record does not reconcile, and this page will not pretend that it does.

The rest is method. Build the same unit many times over, leave out whatever can be left out, sell it to the household that could not otherwise buy, and record a set of restrictions against the land so the arrangement outlives the sale. The first three are why this place looks the way it does. The fourth is the document in your closing packet.