Whittier Mansion

This 30-room Romanesque Revival Arizona sandstone mansion is one of the oldest buildings in the neighborhood and one of very few to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire. It was built in 1896 by the celebrated architect Edward R. Swain.
The owner, paint magnate William Franklin Whittier intended it as a gift for his wife, but she was killed in a carriage accident during the construction.

In April 1941 Germany secretly bought the Whittier mansion to serve as a consulate. They needed a new one, because the prior location, at 26 O'Farrell St, got too hot for them. When they attempted to fly the Nazi flag out of the window there a number of WWI veterans scaled the building to tear it down.
The neighbors here were not much happier than those veterans. They sued, but the German diplomats were kicked out of the country before the lawsuit was resolved. It took approximately three months, during which Fritz "Bubbles" Wiedemann, Hitler's former commanding officer and Gestapo chief for the Western hemisphere interviewed spies here.

After WWII the Whittier mansion was home to Mortimer Adler's Institute of Philosophical Research. The work for Adler's The Idea of Freedom https://mesosyn.com/FreedomIdea.pdf was done here.
The last public tenant was the California Historical Society.

Today Whittier Mansion is a private residence. Whatever people tell you it is not actually haunted.

The head of the San Francisco Opera (played by native San Franciscan Raymond Bailey, known as Milburn Drysdale in The Beverly Hillbillies) lives here in The Lineup (1958).