ERIC JOHNSON: If your house was a museum, why would people go there? Maybe you were rich or powerful or a great artist, or maybe you were in the right place at the right time.

WOODY LABOUNTY: They were really just upper-middle-class merchants kind of moving up in the world.

ERIC: That is Woody LaBounty. He's the CEO of San Francisco Heritage. He's talking about William and Bertha Haas and their family, the original inhabitants of the Haas-Lilienthal house.

WOODY: There's this idea that the Haas family was incredibly wealthy or diplomats when they were really just part of San Francisco's sort of middle-class society.

ERIC: The house was built in the 1880s in San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighborhood. And at the time, this beautiful Queen Anne Victorian was not remotely the nicest house in the neighborhood.

WOODY: Van Ness Avenue was a showplace, a boulevard of upper-middle-class houses and some very large, elaborate houses. And so if you want to be kind of near that center of power, that locus of power, you might build your house a block over or a block up.

ERIC: So why can people visit the Haas-Lilienthal house and not those larger houses? If you know your SF history, you can probably guess the answer: The 1906 earthquake and the ensuing fires.

WOODY: Huge maelstroms over three days burned the core of the city and a lot of the surrounding neighborhoods. So the Haas family are in their house on Franklin Street. They see this giant fire coming towards them, heading west, and it was only really stopped at Van Ness Avenue because it was such a wide boulevard. The Army and the National Guard also dynamited a number of these large impressive houses to try to create the firebreak.

ERIC: If those other houses were still here, maybe we would tour them instead. But sometimes you remember that history is only about what gets left behind.

This is Call 'Em Like Museum, a podcast about how museums work and why we love them. I'm Eric Johnson. Today on the podcast, what can one house teach us about the history of San Francisco? Why and how do old houses get preserved for future generations? And why, in this gorgeous home, is Woody's favorite room the bathroom? Woody LaBounty from SF Heritage will answer all of that and more right after this.

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What does SF Heritage do?

WOODY: San Francisco Heritage — or SF Heritage — is ... We have our mission. It's been about 50 years we've been a nonprofit, and we're focused on preserving and enhancing San Francisco's architectural and cultural identity.

ERIC: There's a lot of beautiful houses all over the city. I assume ... Do you focus on a specific era or a specific type of building? How could you possibly begin to tackle that sort of goal, that mission?

WOODY: Yeah, it's not only beauty, either. It's about historical significance or places that are culturally important to people. I always say we try to preserve the places that are special in San Francisco because people can get caught up in architectural details or is this person important enough? But really it's like, do San Franciscans feel like this is special and deserves attention? And that's what we're interested in.

ERIC: Before we get into the specifics of Haas-Lilienthal, I want to talk about your relationship with museums. What does the word "museum" mean to you generally?

WOODY: I mean, now it's very popular to talk about third spaces, but I think of a museum as a third space, a place that's not work, that's not home, where you are going to get some sort of cultural enrichment. That is a very broad umbrella term, but I do feel like I want to learn something, I want to feel something. And that is essentially, I feel, that all museums, [that's] the job they have to do: Do I learn something? Do I feel something?

ERIC: And what was your first memory of going to a museum?

WOODY: I think it might've been the de Young or the Legion of Honor. I grew up here in San Francisco and those are the two big museums we have here in addition to MoMA. When I went to the de Young, they had cannons and tapestries. It was almost like grandma's attic or an antique store in some ways. Museums are a lot more focused these days on what their scope is and what they bring into their collection. But back then it was a little bit of history, a little bit of art, a little bit of culture, and I just was very attracted to that flea market feeling of museums back then.

ERIC: Yeah. What specifically appealed to you about that flea market feeling? Do you remember how that made you feel as a kid to see this old stuff?

WOODY: Definitely. To me it was like, you didn't know what was going to happen around the corner. And I think that is a great thing museums should be striving for is that sense of surprise. So you go in a lot of museums now, you'll see white walls and very similar type of art, big piece of art on a white wall. But at the de Young, it was more like a rummage sale feeling. You walked around and you would see this medieval tapestry and then you'd turn the corner and there'd be a cannon and then you'd turn another corner and there'd be an oil painting from a French Impressionist. And so I loved that sense of surprise, that it seemed like a never-ending place that was going to have something to excite me around every corner.

ERIC: Is that a feeling you are still chasing to this day? When you go to a museum, are you looking for that serendipity and surprise?

WOODY: Yeah, I don't know if I go in with an agenda. I try to be very open, but that's usually ... The museums I like give me that.

ERIC: So yeah, let's talk about the Haas-Lilienthal House. This is a building that is owned by SF Heritage, is that right?

WOODY: That is right.

ERIC: And also your office.

WOODY: That's right.

ERIC: Which is extremely cool. If anyone has been to the Haas-Lilienthal House, they know how cool it is because it is a beautiful building. Talk about the neighborhood that it's in and what makes it "special," to use your word from before.

WOODY: It's an 1886 Queen Anne Victorian. It was originally a residence for an upper-middle-class family. Some people will say, oh, it's a mansion, but we don't have grounds or stables. It fits in a basic city lot in San Francisco, but it's got a turret, it's got so much architectural detail going on. And I think what surprises people is it's on a very busy street now. It's on Franklin Street, which is kind of like a three-lane, one-way highway. So people will be rushing their way to the Golden Gate Bridge or the Marina and they look over and they see this piece of 19th-century architectural beauty just pop up out of a row of apartment buildings. It's on the edge of Pacific Heights, and when it was built in the 1880s, it was a very fashionable place for upper-middle-class merchants and small-scale capitalists to live.

And now, like I said, it's right off 101. It's very much on a busy road. So it offers its own sense of surprise before you even go in.

ERIC: Absolutely. So I got a chance to take a tour of the house with your colleague Carrie, and she was telling me that before the great earthquake and fire in 1906, which did tremendous damage to San Francisco, this neighborhood was almost exclusively or maybe exclusively wealthy and upper-middle-class families. Is that right?

WOODY: That's right.

ERIC: And then the earthquake changed everything.

WOODY: For sure. All along Van Ness Avenue, where late in the 20th century car dealers moved in and we have a lot of tall buildings that are condos and senior homes and places like that. Before that, Van Ness Avenue was a showplace, a boulevard of upper-middle-class houses and some very large elaborate houses. People like Claus Spreckels — you'll see the name "Spreckels" all over town — he was one of the richest men in the United States at the time. He had a house on Van Ness. And so if you want to be near that center of power, that locus of power, you might build your house a block over or a block up. You may not get Van Ness Avenue, but that's what the Haases did. They lived essentially one block off that row, kind of millionaire's row.

ERIC: Right. And as I understand it, after the earthquake, there were huge fires across the city. Could you explain what happened to the houses on Van Ness?

WOODY: So the earthquake of April 18th kicks off these fires, and the fires grow into these huge maelstroms, over three days [they] burn the core of the city and a lot of the surrounding neighborhoods. So the Haas family are in their house on Franklin Street. They see this giant fire coming towards them, heading west, and it was only really stopped at Van Ness Avenue because it was such a wide boulevard. But they saw the houses of their work colleagues and their friends and even their relatives get incinerated, and the fire was only stopped a block away from their house. So it's a significant survivor from one of San Francisco's most important events.

ERIC: Yeah. And can you talk about what specifically happened to the houses on Van Ness? When you say it was stopped at Van Ness, what needed to happen there?

WOODY: Well, it was a little of both. Fire got to some of them, but the Army and the National Guard also dynamited a number of these large, impressive houses to try to create the firebreak. There was a lot of talk. Only about a block and a half down, block over and a half a block down, houses were dynamited. So it was maybe only just a matter of hours before the Haas-Lilienthal house would've maybe met a similar fate.

ERIC: Yeah. I mean, it's one of the crazy things whenever you study any kind of history is just the luck involved. Who was writing stuff down, whose house was destroyed by a natural disaster, by an invading army or what have you. We have an incomplete picture of the past, but this is why organizations like SF Heritage are so important is because you are using this house to tell the story of the past, to tell San Francisco history kind of in microcosm. When you were growing up in San Francisco, did you know the house was there? Did you know anything about the Haas-Lilienthal House?

WOODY: I don't think I did. Generations of school children have gone on field trips to the Haas-Lilienthal House since the early '70s. I wasn't one of them, so I kind of missed out on that treat, but we have had people who have kids of their own, maybe even getting close to having grandkids of their own who got to go through a field trip and learn about the past through the Haas-Lilienthal House.

ERIC: Yeah. So what was your introduction to the house? When did you first go there?

WOODY: I was a young adult and I got interested in history personally and I had heard they had an archive up in the attic. So I did a little research and reached out and did a little building research in the attic. And this would've been, I don't know, 30, 40 years ago almost now.

ERIC: What was the research like? What were you researching at the time? Do you remember?

WOODY: I was very interested in the west side of San Francisco. There wasn't a lot of history on the Richmond district, Sunset district. So that was my field of interest. And so I wanted to see what they had, and they did have some material, so it was kind of fun.

ERIC: So for people who haven't had a chance to go yet to Haas-Lilienthal, I was wondering if you could do a little mind palace, a little woo-woo exercise with me here. Just imagine that we are walking through the front door of the house. Could you describe for people what are they going to see? What are they going to hear?

WOODY: Sure. So before you even get to the front door, Eric, you've got to walk up some impressive granite steps, so it already gives you this feeling you're elevating from the sidewalk, that you're going into someplace important. And then there's these massive storm doors that are wooden doors, pocket doors like you might see separating two rooms in a flat, but these are giant pocket doors. And essentially they kept the weather out, but they also kept away salesmen and they signaled to the community when the Haases were accepting callers. And when they were closed, the family just sort of wanted to be left alone. So they were a nice sort of flag to people walking up and down the street. Once you go in there, there's a small vestibule, which is very elegant and has a mosaic stone floor, elevated ceiling. And then you get to the front door, and once you walk in the front door, there's this amazing entry parlor, not giant, but it's got golden oak wood all over.

It's got a staircase that you're looking right at. So if Mrs. Haas wanted to make an entrance walking down those stairs, she'd be very much like Scarlet O'Hara. It's not the size and scale of that, of "Gone With the Wind," but definitely it's like an entrance staircase. There's an amazing built-in lamp right at the bottom of the staircase that has multiple globes. You have a chandelier above you and you see portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Haas just to the right on the wall above you. So even today, visitors walk in, they feel like they're walking into the house just as it would've been more than 100 years ago. It feels lived in. There's furniture there. There's a grandfather clock brought from Bavaria that Mr. Haas has in the corner. There's a rug. You just kind of feel like, oh, they live here still. And I'm walking into sometime around 1910 maybe.

ERIC: Now you've alluded to Mrs. Haas entertaining guests. Explain what that actually meant. What did this mean in the society at the time if Mrs. Haas was entertaining visitors? Why were they coming to see her and what was she doing for them?

WOODY: Well, at the time, Mr. Haas was a very well-to-do wholesale grocer. That was essentially his job. So he would entertain people, for sure, who would come have dinner. Mrs. Haas, for her time in the era, she would greet friends, relatives, perhaps be doing charity work and meeting people of that kind. It's very set up like you imagine in the Victorian era in that, after you're in the hall, if you look just to the left, there is a formal parlor. It's like a living room, but it's the kind of living room where the family doesn't really use that room. It's more for greeting guests. And inside there you have furniture, a fireplace, but you have this amazing molded cornice all around the top, very high ceilings. And the cornice has three different kinds of courses. So you'll have banded laurel. These are like reliefs, like plaster reliefs.

You'll have little dentils, which look like little teeth, going across. And you have egg and dart. These are all very classical motifs to show that this is a fancy room for company. Many people who would come to see the Haases for whatever reason may never get past that room. [laugh] It's a place to meet the guests. What's nice about the house and what I always like to emphasize is the architectural thoughtfulness that went into it. So that parlor there connects via pocket doors to two more rooms that are lined up all on the south side of the building. So these are the public rooms. It's where you get the most sunlight. They have beautiful windows. You can look out at the garden that's there. The whole south side of the building is set up for public viewing, public admiration, public intercourse. And then the north side are more like the service areas.

You have staircases, you have bedrooms tucked away that the public wouldn't get to. So there's a lot of architectural thoughtfulness in this house.

ERIC: Yeah. So where you place the rooms, how you decorated them, all of these small decisions really mattered in terms of the business of being a family of this status in San Francisco at the time. One thing I loved — and this is from the upstairs part of the tour that I took — is the bathrooms. I was not expecting to be so fascinated by the way they did the bathrooms. Can you talk about the exposed pipes and why are the pipes in the bathrooms exposed?

WOODY: Yeah. Well, there's a couple of things. In the 1880s and 1890s, like people who are well off today, they want to show off that they have the most technologically advanced stuff in their house. So one thing that you do when you go through the house is ... Electricity was still fairly new. People piped in gas for a lot of their needs, but the Haases kind of hedged their bets. They had gas that provided a certain mood, but they had electricity piped in too. So you have these chandeliers that are both gas and electric. And then you go upstairs to the bathrooms. It's my favorite room in the house is the main bathroom, I got to say. People say, "Oh, you have this beautiful house." It's like, "Yeah, my favorite room is the bathroom." First of all, bathrooms change all the time. Every new owner changes the bathroom, but this one essentially dates from the 1890s.

And yes, you see all the exposed pipes to show that you have this very glamorous shower, which looks a bit like a torture device because it has all these little spikes where I think the water comes out. You have very well-labeled handles, a little shampoo reservoir that attaches to the main taps in the shower and says "shampoo." You have a gas jet, which is there to heat hair-curling devices and those sort of things. You have a bidet, you have a dressing table built into the bathroom. So the whole thing is to show off: "We have the latest, the greatest, and no expense is being spared on this bathroom."

ERIC: Absolutely. Yeah. It's such a funny detail going to the house and the fact that this was an intentional choice, that it was part of the posturing or part of the showing off to visitors.

WOODY: And visitors wouldn't see the bathroom upstairs, but you have to kind of show off to yourself at times too. And the people who are working on the house for you want to make sure you understand that they are giving you the latest and the greatest.

ERIC: One question I've been asking a lot of folks who work in museums is how you want visitors to feel when they enter the space. And a lot of them are working in newer purpose-built buildings where they have a lot more control over the shape of it and the way things are laid out. Can you talk about, though, the feeling that you are trying to evoke within the constraints of having a historic house? What do you want people to be thinking about and feeling as they work their way through the Haas-Lilienthal House?

WOODY: We have a couple of different audiences. That's the other thing. It's not one audience. So a great deal of the adult public visitors that come are from out of San Francisco. They're even from other countries. They know San Francisco's known for its Victorian architecture and they want to get inside one. What we give them, which I think they like, is not just the details and a little bit of the history, but they're basically seeing a house that has never been bought or sold. It was built for this family. It was given to our nonprofit. And so it's in a state that feels very close to what it was like when the family lived there. And that's a little unusual because even if you had a house you wanted to show off architecturally, people change it over time. People come in, they bring their own taste, they bring their own sense of what the place should look like.

But this is one family that had it the whole time and they mostly kept it the way it was when it was built, with some changes. So it's a time capsule. So people come for that. For the kids who come through on the field trips, I always say what we're basically teaching them is there was a past, because these third graders have no sense of time, really. And to think there was no electricity or that they didn't have games or computers or any of those things. To see how kids lived life then, what they had to do, what they wore, all those — what they sat in, even — it's all part of, wow, there was a time before me. And I think that's a valuable lesson to give a third grader because it just opens up a whole world for them.

ERIC: Do you have school groups coming through every week? Is that a major part of the attendance? What's the makeup of who comes through the Haas-Lilienthal House every week?

WOODY: Every week it's usually people from the public who come through on our tours, which are on Wednesdays and Saturdays. During the school year, the teachers fight to get spots. It's got to be the most popular field trip in the public school system. So those teachers have been doing it for years. They know it's usually Tuesdays, Wednesdays, they come in in the morning. So that's only during the school year. But what we'd really like to do, and I think this is something you're going to find with all museums you talk to, is how do we reach different audiences and what is the message we want to get across? So like I said, people come to see a house because they want to learn that there's history, but we have our own nonprofit and our own mission. Is there a way we can get our reason for existing out through the museum experience? And that's something we're still working on.

ERIC: Oh, what's the answer to the question so far? What have you found that works in growing the audience for your mission?

WOODY: Well, getting people in the house for different reasons because you could do a tour and go, oh, this is nice, but you probably wouldn't come back. You've seen it once. So finding ways to get people to come for game nights or for lectures or for concerts or for sort of immersive theater, these are the kind of ways we can use the house to get people out and appreciating what we have and appreciating the past and our work, but without having to feel like they're being on a guided tour every time.

ERIC: Right. And one of the initiatives you've been doing is a haunted house, if I'm not mistaken.

WOODY: Yes, which is definitely difficult to pull off, by the way.

ERIC: You're working with the Gregg Angelo Museum on the design. What goes into turning Haas-Lilienthal into a haunted house? What has to happen? How does that even work?

WOODY: Well, we have a big advantage in that people just associate 19th-century architecture with ghosts and haunted houses.

ERIC: [laugh]

WOODY: It's kind of unfair, but that's just a 20th-century prejudice, right? So we look like a haunted house if it's kind of dark and you put a few cobwebs up. But for us, it's tricky because it is a museum. We want to protect it. We don't want it to be damaged, but we want people to have a good time and people going to haunted houses usually are a little excitable. So we have to try to figure out how to manage that. And also to properly let them have a good time but represent that we have a serious mission and story we're trying to tell too. It's a balance, and I don't know if we've figured it out yet, but we hope people have a good time no matter what.

ERIC: Yeah. I bet. I was talking with Laura Fies from the USS Hornet and she turned me around on the idea of ghost tours and themed haunted entertainment — edutainment — for this stuff because she was saying, "Look, I just want people to get in and get close to the history and learn. Why they show up in the first place is not important to me. Once they're in the building, then they're mine. Then I can direct their attention."

WOODY: That's right. And also, some people are going to get it. They're going to want to come back and they're going to want to learn more. And the people who don't, well, we hope they had a good time and that they at least felt like they were somehow attached to what we do, even if they just came to a haunted house.

ERIC: And in the room that you have made up as a children's playroom, there's some old toys that are genuinely creepy year-round. So if you are missing the haunts, if you miss it this year, you can just go to that room and be spooked.

WOODY: Yeah. People often ask us about ghosts.

ERIC: Really?

WOODY: And I don't think there's any ghosts. I have not seen one. Maybe I'm not receptive, though, but people often think about it. Yeah.

ERIC: Have you ever worked with a TV show or anyone like "Ghost Hunters" coming through and trying to measure the ghosts?

WOODY: We have. I don't think they found anything. So that's why we're not on TV.

ERIC: There you go. There you go. Hey, if you're enjoying the episode, then make sure to follow the podcast in whatever app you're using right now. It's free and it makes sure that new episodes will show up automatically. If you're on YouTube, then hit subscribe there too. Thank you so much. On this podcast, we believe that everyone's experience with museums is deeply personal, and that's why we want to hear your museum stories. If you've got one, and I bet you do, please submit it at our website, likemuseum.com. Just go to the website likemuseum.com and click "submit a museum story" at the top of the page. It might just make it into a future episode. Thanks.

Historical preservation is a really hot topic here in San Francisco, decades and decades of feuding over how much should be preserved, can we knock down some houses to build newer housing? It's a city which has a severe housing shortage. Where does SF Heritage fit into the debate? Are you politically involved in things like that?

WOODY: Oh, all the time. I'll preface this by saying any sort of land use discussion has been part of San Francisco history from its beginning. It's a fairly small place just in size. It's surrounded by water on three sides, and land is extremely valuable and always has been. So everybody fights over every postage stamp of San Francisco earth. So if you're going to do anything with land use, you're going to get caught in a lot of discussion with people. San Francisco Heritage has always had the attitude, and we've always practiced this, of there's a solution here, that we can have ... We can preserve the special places and find ways to accommodate what San Francisco needs to do to adapt and grow, welcome new people. In the '70s, it was a lot about office space and a lot about economic vitality of financial services and getting those sort of things happening.

And then now it's more about housing. It has been for the last 20 years. But the answer is still the same, which is there are special places we want to make sure we don't lose. What is the way we figure out as a society and as a government, as local government, to keep those places, make sure they're economically vital and interesting, but adaptable to whatever the needs are? Often people try to put this into you're either like a YIMBY or a NIMBY, right? You're either yes in my backyard or no.

ERIC: Right.

WOODY: Most people actually don't fall in those two things. It's always "it depends" and where is it and what's the neighborhood's priority and what does the owner want to do? And how historic is it? And what part of it is the part that's special? Because sometimes you have a historic building but what makes it historic is not every square inch of it. You can add housing sometimes. So our job as a nonprofit is really to try to find accommodation, try to save these special places so they're here for all the new people we want to live here and the next generations, but make sure San Francisco's a healthy economic place and that it's a culturally vibrant place.

ERIC: Right. A few years ago I was in Greece and all over Greece there are these areas where you can be in what looks like a total ordinary modern-built store, but then a section of the floor will be carved out and it'd be glass instead of plaster or whatever. And if you look down through the glass, you'll see an archeological dig site where basically they built this store on top of some spot where something of historical significance was found.

WOODY: Wow.

ERIC: Is that sort of compromise, is that something that you would entertain, that you would encourage from SF Heritage's vantage point? Having modern buildings but retaining some historical elements?

WOODY: Well, a lot of people who have a lot of education and experience have thought about all this. And so there are enough people in the planning department and people who work at firms for these developers who know how to find ways to keep the past visible and get that feeling for it even while buildings change. We have a lot of examples that are happening right now. There is 100 McAllister, there's a tower that was an office building, now it's being turned into housing. But what makes it special is its exterior, the facade of it, the way it looks from the street, not necessarily what it's used for inside. So that's the sort of decision you make and there's ways you can get historic tax credits and other things to incentivize that. But there's usually a solution. I think what we always have to do is ... It's a case by case basis and it's a point in time.

Like I said, we used to have to be like, it's all about offices. Now it's all about housing, but now it's starting to be about offices again a little bit with the AI boom.

ERIC: Exactly.

WOODY: So you can only work with what you've got at the time. And our job is to try to bring that history and elevate the important places so that we can make smart decisions.

ERIC: Yeah. I mean, everyone else is thinking on a quarterly timescale and you're thinking in hundreds of years. It's pretty different.

WOODY: At least 20 or 30. [laugh] So yeah.

ERIC: Yeah. I guess the question that people have been wrestling with for all this time, this is not unique to SF Heritage, not unique to you, but I think the real question at the heart of this is, is it that the buildings are special? Is it that the stories that happen inside the buildings are special? Where do you draw the line of what that specialness derives from? Does that seem right to you?

WOODY: Yeah, and it depends. Some buildings, it's about the architectural design or the integrity of the past that's visible in the architecture. And other times it's a place where something important happened. And even then, say it's like the old "George Washington slept here." For the San Francisco version, there are places like Harvey Milk's camera store. This is an important place in world history. So the building, is the building architecturally significant as a building design? Not necessarily, but how do you convey that feeling of what Harvey Milk's camera store looked like when Harvey Milk was there and when he was making history? And so those are the sort of decisions, like I say, that people in the planning department, people who work for developers, historians, can all come together and decide, can you add something to this? Yes. What part has to stay to convey that feeling that people come from around the world and want to see Harvey Milk's camera store?

So it depends on the building, and it's not always about architecture. It's often about history and it's often about culture. There are many incredibly interesting diverse groups of people in San Francisco from Japantown to Chinatown to the Mission. And some places are just special to that culture and you try to figure out, draw out, what makes this special? Is it what's in there? Is it what it looks like? Is it the role it serves? And that's how you make these determinations.

ERIC: Absolutely. Yeah. So you started working at SF Heritage in 2020, is that right?

WOODY: 2019.

ERIC: 2019. What do you wish you had known when you first took the job that you know now?

WOODY: That Covid was coming?

ERIC: Well, other than that. [laugh] That's cheating.

WOODY: That did change a lot of things.

ERIC: For sure. Yeah.

WOODY: But to answer your question, I guess the housing debate or the feeling that there is a divide between people who want more housing and this nebulous community who doesn't, which it's kind of hard to pin that down, is only sort of intensified. And it surprises me because I started to feel like we were reaching a plateau on that. And it's interesting now because of the new AI boom, we're going back to this sort of office thing. So I guess I feel like what I would've liked to have known is that we have to be ahead on talking about housing and preservation from day one and almost every day because it's never let up.

ERIC: And what about the Haas-Lilienthal House specifically? Is there something that you wish you had known about the house, either working there or just about what needs to happen there to keep it going?

WOODY: I think for us, it's the same. I mean, I had this question from day one and I have it today is how do you pull off taking what was essentially a residence and make it into a space that is very welcoming to the public in all sorts of ways? And then you try to tie in how can you get your mission involved in all those activities? And I got to say, we're still experimenting, but the nice thing is when you have a house that's as cool as the Haas-Lilienthal House, every experiment is a lot of fun and teaches you something.

ERIC: We talked a little bit before about that you're trying to grow the audience, trying to reach new people for SF Heritage's mission and goals. Is there anything that you want to do with the house specifically that you've not been able to do yet? Is there something in terms of either a renovation or expanding the tour or anything like that? Any goals you have for what you want the house to be to people in the future?

WOODY: I'm giving you my secrets.

ERIC: Oh, please.

WOODY: Are you okay with that? Okay.

Don't hold me to this because these are my dreams, but I really feel like, like I said, people come to the house and they do the tour and I want to give them a reason to come back and I want it to be open to the community so it's used by the community. So one thought is, we have an apartment in the very top, in the attic. It's not really set up to be an Airbnb. It's a little bit more like inside, you're kind of inside our offices, but it is a separate apartment. My dream is to have an artist-in-residence program. You live up there in the Haas Lilienthal House for a month or two. There's a room you can do your art if you're a visual artist or you could be any kind of artist, but I'd like to use a room that right now is not part of the tour and just include it on the tour as sort of a rotating gallery.

And I think that would put us into a little different category of museum, but I think it would make us seem more relevant every day because you can have all sorts of very interesting artists living there, interpreting the past or whatever they're doing, and displaying their work for the audiences that come through. So I think that is something we're exploring and I think would be just a very cool take on what has been a tour we've had for 40 years.

ERIC: Yeah, that's a fabulous idea. I hope you do it. Yeah.

WOODY: Got to work out some kinks, raise some money, but I'd love to get some great artists in there.

ERIC: What's the best thing you've heard a visitor say who comes to visit the house?

WOODY: Well, a lot of people say it's the best thing they've done in San Francisco, and I'm always like, "What part of town have you been in?" Because I feel like there's a lot of things that are really better. [laugh] But that's really high praise. I do feel like you were looking for something and you found it here. But I think the other thing I often get, mostly from San Franciscans who visit, is, "I never knew this was here and I wish I'd known about it before." So the house is very cool. And so if you haven't been to it, come take a tour, get a feel for it. And if you want to interact with us more, let's talk because we want to do cool things with it.

ERIC: Absolutely. Yeah. You mentioned earlier, you're talking about the Haas family and their place in society. And Lilienthal, correct me if I'm wrong, one of the Haas children married a Lilienthal and it was just another prominent family in San Francisco. Have you ever had anyone come to visit the house who has history with any of the families that have lived there or have married into children from there?

WOODY: Sometimes. We're still in touch with descendants of the Haas family and the Lilienthal family.

ERIC: Wow. Wow. Are they still in San Francisco?

WOODY: Some of them are still in San Francisco.

ERIC: Oh my gosh.

WOODY: Yeah. Yeah. So they're still attached, and every Christmas Eve, family members come and have Christmas dinner at the house. And it was actually part of the agreement in giving the house to San Francisco Heritage that they reserve the right to have Christmas Eve dinner at the house.

ERIC: That is so wonderful.

WOODY: Yeah, they're still attached.

ERIC: So they tell all of you, because your offices are in the house, so they tell all of you, not that you want to work on Christmas Eve anyway, but they say, "Okay, clear out. This house is exclusively ours for one night only."

WOODY: They're much nicer than that. They bring everything in, they do all the work, they clean everything up, and they're gone. They're just like little elves that came in the night. But they definitely very much appreciate being connected to their family past.

ERIC: How big is the family reunion happening on Christmas Eve? Must be a lot of people by now.

WOODY: I'm always invited and I usually have my own thing going, but there's probably 30 or 40 people at a time.

ERIC: Wow. Wow.

WOODY: Yeah, they have a great time.

ERIC: What's a small detail in the house that you appreciate, most people wouldn't notice, but that you know is there, every time you see it?

WOODY: That most people wouldn't notice?

ERIC: Yeah, something small. So not the grandfather clock in the foyer, something that's a very minute detail, but that is really special to you.

WOODY: I don't know if it's really special, but there's a dinner bell that is in the ... Did you see the dinner bell when you went?

ERIC: Remind me, where is it?

WOODY: It's kind of a small little thing. You walk into the entry hall and at the end of the hall before you get into the kitchen area, there's a little bell on the wall, and I always forget it's there and then I remember. It's just this little bell that they would use to call everybody, because the one thing about this house, it's not a mansion, but it's big. And so they had two different kinds of intercom systems over the years. And if you go into certain rooms, you'll see a little button on the wall. So if you go look, that's a little detail. The first intercom system, you pressed a button and in the kitchen there was a box with little openings and a flag would pop up to tell you which room the button was pressed in.

ERIC: Wow.

WOODY: So Mrs. Haas could be upstairs and she's like, "Oh, I don't know where that is." She'd press that button in the kitchen where there was usually somebody. They said, "Oh, she needs help." She'd go up. Later they had more of an intercom system, but that bell just kind of is like, "It's time for dinner. Oh, you actually have to ring a bell. This house is so big."

ERIC: You don't need multiple flags. You just need one bell.

WOODY: One big bell.

ERIC: It means one thing.

WOODY: Yeah. So look for all the little signaling devices that are kind of strewn and hidden through the house next time you go.

ERIC: Do those devices still work? Have you tried them?

WOODY: I think they're disconnected, most of them, but I'd really like to get the flag one working, which was called an annunciator.

ERIC: Annunciator.

WOODY: Yes, I guess it announced. Annunced.

ERIC: Makes me think of, in "Downton Abbey," where they want to ring for the servants and so they ring the bell and you can see the string moving downstairs. It rings another bell downstairs. They know which room needs attention.

WOODY: Similar to that. There's also a list of duties that Mrs. Lilienthal, the daughter of the Haas's, had. And so that's mimeographed up on the wall in the butler's pantry, and that's kind of fun to read. What would your job be if you were working in this house? So there's little details like that that I think when you're on the tour you miss, you have to kind of pause and look for them.

ERIC: What other museums or historic institutions have inspired you? What have you borrowed from in terms of running things at Haas-Lilienthal House?

WOODY: We're a house museum, which is a certain kind of museum, and they're usually, here's a famous person or a painter lived here. I'm always interested in how they decide what they display and what they don't. Is the fact that a person owned an end table and they're the famous person that we have to have the end table there even if it's kind of ordinary, or is the point more to learn more about the person, not necessarily what they put their coffee down on? When I go to other house museums, I'm often thinking that way because where we could make changes and where I think about it often is we have some impressive furniture. Some of it was from the family and some of it just sort of came into the organization's life at some point.

And so it might be time to do a good review of what does every room say to each person who comes in? When I was in New York a couple years ago, I went to the Thomas [Cole] House — Thomas [Cole] was a very well-known painter and designer — I felt they did a great job of figuring out what every room told you. It was something about him or something about what he did or something about who he knew. You can have a house that's just like, oh, people live here, but then it'd be great if you could get a message through to the people who visit in every room. And so trying to figure out how to do that and which rooms work best for that story, not just the Haas-Lilienthal family or San Francisco history, but what San Francisco Heritage does and what our priorities are.

ERIC: Right. When your space is limited, you want to make the most of everything you put on display or every room you take people into. I remember in the kitchen you have, in one of the cabinets, you have a bunch of vintage foods and drinks and things like that from when the Haases lived there.

WOODY: Yeah, the coffee cans, one of the daughters married into the MJB Coffee Company, and so we have MJB cans, but it talks about the big industries that were San Francisco-based at the time and the family at the same time. And for the kids, yeah, it's like this is what food came in. This is what it looked like, which kind of blows their minds. We have a big ice tong. Kids just think that everything comes in a package. So talking about how people prepared food is a big thing for them.

ERIC: I remember, I think it's in the basement, the laundry room, how they had to press clothes is shocking.

WOODY: Yeah, they have a little brick stove essentially that's coal fed with a metal top and you would put the irons on top of it, heat the iron, do your ironing. When it cooled off, you'd put it back on this hot plate essentially and grab another hot iron to use. It's giant and it's very impressive and I've never seen another one.

ERIC: What do people get wrong about the Haas-Lilienthal House?

WOODY: I think they feel that the people who lived there are more like the Downton Abbey people. They're incredibly rich. They are these world-straddling capitalists or something, or royalty, and they were really just upper-middle-class merchants moving up in the world. The people who we would compare them to today may not live in a house like that because people don't usually open up their houses to show off like they did back then, or just to their friends and family maybe. I think that there's this idea that the Haas family was incredibly wealthy or diplomats when they were really just part of San Francisco's sort of middle-class society.

ERIC: Were they living within their means for the time? Do we know about their financial situation?

WOODY: Yeah. They traveled, they went to Europe, but they went to Europe once, twice. It wasn't like they were ... They were working people. Mr. Haas had a business and he worked every day, and the daughter Alice, who married Sam Lilienthal, also worked in liquor wholesale. So they were working people and not, I guess, what people think of [as] these rich people who have this outsized influence on politics or society. They were really working people in a house that we today see as very grand.

ERIC: Yeah. What is an experience at a museum that has stuck with you, the most impactful time you've had visiting a museum? We talked about your early visits to the places like the de Young as a kid, but at any point in your life, do you have a museum story or something that moved you or blew your mind or something like that?

WOODY: I'll tell you my favorite museum.

ERIC: Please.

WOODY: It really has nothing to do with what we do at the Haas-Lilenthal House. It's not so much about history. It's the Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain.

And so you have a guy like Salvador Dali, this artist who is a little different than most people, and he makes his own museum. So it is a work of art as a museum. I mean, it has ... Talk about every room and every corner giving you a surprise. He didn't just have a bunch of rooms and walls where he put up art. Every room is a piece of art. So you feel like you're in a Dali painting as you walk around. The scale shifts to gigantic women that are the size of a house to the smallest little details on a sculpture that you have to really almost pick out with a return visit. So just the look of that museum and the sense of surprise and enchantment that I got from that museum has stuck with me.

ERIC: It all comes back to that feeling of surprise.

WOODY: Surprise, and did I get a feeling or did I learn something? And it definitely, I'm still feeling it. I get little goosebumps thinking about it. So go to the Dali Museum in Figueres, Spain.

ERIC: I will. I'll add that to my extremely long list of museums I want to go to. Last question for you, and this is the hardest question of the whole interview. When you find yourself in a museum gift shop, what do you buy?

WOODY: I usually buy a book. I'm very boring that way. I often have looked for things that were utilitarian. This is going to sound funny because you think you go into a museum gift shop, you want something beautiful or sort of special, but I usually try to find something like coasters because that way the little piece of the museum and the visit and the art I saw or whatever it was kind of stays with me in my daily life. So at work, I have a coaster and it's from the Van Gogh Museum, and I've got a little Van Gogh on a coaster, and it feels kind of kitschy in a way, but it also makes me feel like, oh yeah, I was a little part of Van Gogh's life at that museum and here it is at my desk.

ERIC: I might have those exact same coasters, just a chance.

WOODY: They've held up really well. They've held up really well.

ERIC: Well, anyway, that's a great museum. Haas-Lilienthal House is a great visit. Woody, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

WOODY: My pleasure. Any time.

ERIC: Thanks again to Woody LaBounty for coming on the podcast. The Haas-Lilienthal House is open every Wednesday and Saturday. For more info about their docent-led tours or their Halloween experience, check the links in the show notes.

Now that you're done with this episode, please sign up for our email newsletter at likemuseum.com. When you do, you'll be entered into our gift shop giveaway and one lucky subscriber will receive these playing cards featuring historic buildings of San Francisco, direct from the Haas-Lilienthal House gift shop.

Call 'Em Like Museum is hosted and edited by me, Eric Johnson. It's produced out of my podcast agency in San Francisco, Lightning Pod. Our marketing specialist is Julia Wilde, artwork by Rhe Civitello. Special thanks this week to Kerri Young. Thank you for listening to this episode and I will see you at the museum.