Most drivers moving through the Van Nesscorridor today — threading between elongated Muni buses and car dealerships, past apartment buildings, churches and restaurants — have no particular reason to look at the corner of Clay Street and imagine what used to stand there. There is no plaque, no monument, nothing prompting the imagination.
Yet for a brief moment at the turn of the 19th century, this was the address of one of the most elaborate private homes built in San Francisco: the Van Ness Avenue mansion of Claus Spreckels, a German immigrant who turned sugar into one of the great American fortunes of the era.
The majority of San Franciscans today who know the Spreckels name likely either associate it with a lake in Golden Gate Park or a different house altogether — the white beaux arts palace on Lafayette Park in Pacific Heights, with its storied hedge that shields the manse from the street like a fortress wall…