Portola Greenhouses

You are approaching a two-acre city block at seven-seventy Woolsey Street, where skeletal wooden frames and jagged shards of glass emerge from the tall grass. This site, known locally as the Rose Factory, contains the last remnants of nineteen family-owned nursery blocks that once defined the Portola neighborhood. In the nineteen-twenties, Italian and Maltese immigrant families built these eighteen hothouses to cultivate the majority of the flowers sold in San Francisco.