Nob Hill was then a treeless waste, bleak and windswept, but its high eastern shoulder dominated the growing town. In the early '70s, it required vision and faith to foresee the future of the hill. Only a few small houses had yet been built on its crest, and for an excellent reason. San Francisco's uncompromising streets veered up its steepest sides at grades so abrupt that two horses had difficulty pulling a carriage up the sandy inclines. That streetcars would ever scale the height had until very recently been regarded as fantastic, and rumors that Stanford and Hopkins planned to build mansions there aroused reasonable doubts of their sanity. But a local manufacturer or wire rope named Hillidie had for several years been tinkering with a device intended to grip and release a moving cable buried in a trench beneath one of the slanting streets. By 1874 the invention had been proved practical to a degree and the partners' sixty thousand dollars worth of "vertical real estate" promptly became a conservative investment. Comstock millionaires joined those of the railroad, and the late '70s saw a dozen mansions taking shape on the hill.

Not to be outdone, Crocker also acquired a site on the hill, a block west of his partners and on ground a shade more elevated. His property was gradually extended until he possessed, except for one small lot, the entire block surrounded by California, Taylor, Sacramento, and Jones streets. The exception noted was owned by one Yung a local undertaker, who persistently refused to sell. Crocker's efforts to oust the stubborn householder and thus round out his holdings later became something of a public issue.

Crocker's feud with Yung waxed warmer, for the undertaker continued to refuse successively higher offers for his land. In exasperation Crocker took a drastic step. Dray-loads of lumber one day appeared on the hill and a gang of carpenters set to work surrounding the Yung dwelling with a wall forty feet high. The matter, of course, attracted city-wide attention and throngs daily climber Nob Hill to stare at the "spite fence."

Lost Histories of San Francisco by Hilton Obenzinger, 1993, Fictional History

That's when the fence went up. One day wagons and carpenters and other workingmen showed up, and they began hammering away until an immense plain wooden fence towered over us from all three sides of Crocker's property. We could only see the sky when we craned our necks out the window and twisted our faces up. We could not believe it, nor could we believe the audacity of the man, the arrogance and lack of sentiment. A man so fabulously rich could not strike a fair bargain, so he resorted to such an incredible, unthinkable act against an entire family. How gloomy our house became, how sad. All we could see out our windows was the blank wood of the rich man's fury. The flowers in our garden all died, and our lawn turned brown, while inside the house everything felt perpetually damp.

They called it the Crocker's "spite fence" or "Crocker's crime," and my father was painted in the press as the common man violated by a bloated bear. The fence became notorious, a Barnum attraction, and people came because they loved to be shocked into loathing the railroad magnate.

Then came the trouble of 1877. There was a depression. Workingmen all over the country were hungry, unemployed, living in the streets. Then came what they call the July days. Soon mobs were burning down every single city in the country. San Francisco didn't escape the turmoil. There were about four days and nights of riots and fires here.