Rose Ann Harris is a neighborhood legend. Her bungalow on Paris Street, which runs parallel to Mission Street in the Excelsior District, has been her home since 1989 — she was moving in when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck, and there’s a story for that, of course — and her garden serves as an informal community center.
Populated with statuettes, a riot of plants and flowers, fountains, knick-knacks, and until recently, a 50-foot tall century plant, the garden is open all the time. Generations of families have trick-or-treated there on Halloween, Harris’s favorite holiday.
With Christmas upon us, the decorations have switched from orange and black to red and green. A bulletin board on the front fence hosts neighborhood notes and messages; a canopied porch swing invites passers-by to take a load off.
“Anything that makes me happy, I’m going to try,” she says. “I like to keep negative energy from coming around me.”
Don’t be fooled by the energy talk or the pendant of Bastet, the Egyptian cat goddess, around her neck. Harris, 85, is no new ager, never was a rock and roller, and definitely wasn’t a hippie back in the day, even though she has been part of neighborhood work to restore the amphitheater in nearby McLaren Park and name it after some neighborhood kid who played a little guitar.
She says she had a ticket for the Beatles at the Cow Palace but gave it away. Harris prefers big band music, and has the vinyl to prove it, along with 8-tracks, cassettes, and an AM/FM radio. “No CDs or ‘DDs,’” she says.
San Francisco gave her a lifetime achievement award in 2015 for her neighborhood service. The local Sunday Streets this year included the first Rose Ann Harris Pet Parade. And before he passed away, Mayor Ed Lee declared her birthday to be “Rose Ann Harris Day,” which lets her do “anything I damn well please” on that day, she says, including running down the street in her birthday suit.
The celebration has been a long time coming. Harris was born at SF General in 1935 to parents who were, in her words, a bunch of drunks. (Irish father plus Finnish mother: “Mickey Finn,” she says.)
They would go on benders, and she was shuttled in and out of foster homes, separated from her siblings. “I was a bit rambunctious,” Harris says. “I didn’t like following rules, and my siblings were meeker and milder.”
At a foster home outside Healdsburg, Harris stamped her foot and announced, ‘I’m going to raise hell one notch higher today!’
Cats were her solace. She would find feral cats and befriend them. “When I started thinking ‘Woe is me,’ I’d usually have a cat to cry into. They knew I wouldn’t hurt them.” (Hence the reverence for Bastet, as well as her house and garden filled with paintings, statues, and other feline objects.)
One time, while living at the Lytton Springs orphanage near Healdsburg, she wasn’t allowed to go to town to see The Wizard of Oz with the rest of the kids. She stamped her foot and announced, “I’m going to raise hell one notch higher today!”
That meant leading some kids out into the hills, getting lost, making a fire with their shirts to stay warm, sleeping overnight in the cold, and finding their way back in the morning.
For all that, she was sent back to San Francisco. At one point she ended up at the city’s then-new Juvenile Justice Center at 375 Woodside Drive (or as it’s often known, “Juvy”) watching a girl give birth in the same holding area. When she learned she might end up in reform school down south in Ventura (“that was really hardcore”) she tried to escape out a window and got stuck.
Released back to her parents, it remained a rough go. She and her siblings were told never to answer the door: “All I remember is that the ‘remedial man’ might come,” she says, and take their furniture away. When her parents would start drinking, she would sneak down the fire escape and go to her aunt’s house on Duboce Street (Harris pronounces it “Doo-BOICE”).
‘I’d never even made a milkshake’
At Mission High, she went on the “4/4 Plan,” splitting the day between school and work. She found a job at Metropolitan Life Insurance, which also provided meals. Later she lied about her experience to secure a job as a waitress at Zim’s — the first one, on Market Street. (“I’d never even made a milkshake.”)
She was a waitress the rest of her working life: at the original Mel’s Drive-In on South Van Ness, Playland at the Beach, and for 27 years, P.J.’s Oyster Bed on Irving Street, until the owner shut down without warning in 2008, leaving food to rot and his staff hung out to dry. Harris says he still owes her $5,000.
Despite the fractured upbringing, she says her mother tried to do the right thing. “But sometimes when the booze is in, the brains are out,” Harris adds.
Her father never married her mother and kept her “barefoot and pregnant.” In desperation, her mother gave away their youngest sibling, Barbara. Decades later, when Barbara tracked the family down, her mother first refused to meet her, out of shame, says Harris. But they finally reconciled.
Keeping negative energy at bay seems to be working. Harris volunteers incessantly. “She doesn’t go to bed,” says her neighbor Ethel, 86, who dropped by during our visit. (Ethel, who declined to give her last name, was born around the corner.)
Harris is currently trying to persuade officials to turn an auto repair shop into a permanent community space in what’s known as the Persia Triangle, where Ocean Avenue, Persia Avenue, and Mission Street meet.
There are always plans afoot for McLaren Park, such as a playground renovation. And, while she says she wants new housing in the neighborhood, Harris goes to community meetings to push developers of a new, 200-unit development on Ocean to “compromise” by setting the six-story building back from the street.
She’s fortunate her own place is still standing. When she moved in, her nephew was pulling down old cupboards from the wall. The earth began to rumble; she thought he was tearing the house down. When the electricity cut out, he went to his car to tune in the World Series. Game three, San Francisco Giants vs. Oakland A’s, was about to begin. “He came back and said, ‘The bridge fell down and things are on fire!’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Amid the cats and garden decorations and neighborhood adoration, Harris admits feeling a bit beleaguered by nearby development, by the city trying to move people out of their cars and onto buses and bicycles, and by technology in general. “Society is making it hard for me to exist,” says Harris. “If I were young I’d have to get a computer. I can’t punch a button because I have a rotary phone. When they lose me on the line, I have to go through the entire rigamarole again.”
But contemplating her garden, she changes her tone. “Some of the things I have are unique,” she says. “Everyone who wants to look can come in.”
Harris has a final word before the visit ends: “Think of yourself as a pebble, and here’s a pond. Anything you do will have a ripple effect.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Harris’s name and used a “Pet Parade” image that also misspelled her name. We apologize for the error.