William Westerfeld House
place in California listed on National Register of Historic Places
The William Westerfeld House, also known as the "Russian Embassy", is a historic building located at 1198 Fulton Street (at Scott St.) in San Francisco, California, United States, across the street from the northwest corner of Alamo Square. Constructed for German-born confectioner William Westerfeld in 1889, the home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is San Francisco Landmark Number 135.
History
William Westerfeld, a German-born confectioner, arrived in San Francisco in the 1870s. By the 1880s, he had established a chain of bakeries. He hired local architect Henry Geilfuss to design for his family of six a 28-room mansion with an adjoining rose garden and carriage house. The house was constructed in 1889 at a cost of $9,985 (equivalent to $357,800 in 2025).
When Westerfeld died in 1895, the home was sold to John Mahony, of Mahony Brothers, noted for building the St. Francis Hotel and the Palace Hotel after the 1906 earthquake. Mahony replaced the rose garden with flats to meet the city's dire need for housing.
In 1928, a group of Czarist Russians bought the home.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8020221. Authority coordinates are 37.777, -122.436. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1198, 1889, 2025 and 1895.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Westerfeld House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.