This story aired in the May 20, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
If you’ve seen some of the ads in the BART stations lately, or San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s posts on Instagram, you may notice an emphasis on safety and security in the city. But if you go back in time, there's physical evidence that this rhetoric isn’t new. You can find it in neighborhoods all over the Bay.
Take the Sunset district, on San Francisco's westside, where almost every house has a heavy iron gate. But how did those gates got there? And what they might be keeping out?
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: I've lived in the Sunset for most of my life. My house is a pretty common style—boxy and squat, sitting over a garage.
Sound of N Judah streetcar passing.
REPORTER: The buildings here never get taller. The N Judah goes by at regular intervals. The fog rolls in around 5 o’clock every day. If you look at photos of the neighborhood from the twenties, way back when it was built—it looks pretty much the same. The same rows of the same square houses.
But there’s something missing from those photos…The curly wrought iron gate on nearly every house in the Sunset, including mine.
Sound of Rae's gate slamming shut.
REPORTER: Those gates weren’t installed with the houses. I wanted to find out how they got there.
Automated announcement on the N Judah: "La Playa."
REPORTER: First, I had to find out how anything got there. For most of history, the Sunset was just sand dunes that rolled from Arguello Boulevard to the waves.
WOODY LABOUNTY: It was just not a place that people were going to be wanting to live in. It was just cold and foggy and sandy.
Sounds of Ocean Beach.
REPORTER: That’s Woody LaBounty. He’s a longtime Sunset resident and our resident Sunset expert. He said, only after the 1906 earthquake…
WOODY: ...when you suddenly have more than 200,000 people burned out and displaced from their homes, that, um, real movement to developing the west side of town happens.
REPORTER: Developers like Henry Doelger, the Gellert brothers and Ray Galli, they built up the Sunset, Richmond, Excelsior and Daly city between the twenties and forties. It's given these areas a reputation for being kind of cookie-cutter.
WOODY: In the twenties everybody starts getting a car. Um, I think like license, uh, applications like quadrupled in the late 1910s after the war.
REPORTER: Suddenly, builders had to fit a garage into the narrow lot of a mass-produced, middle-class house. So they devised the tunnel entrance—a sheltered doorway to an internal staircase. And that’s where many homeowners would put a gate years later.
I went wandering through the avenues to see if anyone could tell me why.
Sound of N Judah passing. Sound of the avenues.
REPORTER: I met Ralph Lane on 35th Avenue. But he grew up a couple blocks away. He moved to the sunset with his family in 1962 at the age of one.
He shows me a picture taken in 1967, outside the house he grew up in. It didn’t have a gate.
RALPH LANE: So, John Son, and that's me on the left.
REPORTER: It’s him as a little boy, sandwiched between two friends.
RALPH: And John, um, had only been here maybe a year, he's wearing a tag around his neck with his address—
REPORTER: —So that his neighbors could bring him home if he got lost. It's a memory he shares with other long-term residents I talked to: a diverse, tight-knit community where knowing one another was security.
RALPH: We lost that. And that's why you put up a gate. There is no gate stronger than my 48 community members knowing me, you know?
REPORTER: Ralph thinks things changed when we started buying stuff instead of borrowing it from next door.
RALPH: Everybody's got the gym equipment and everybody's got the home office equipment and everybody's got the culinary…appliances. They fill up your closet. They mean you don't have to leave your house and you don't have to rely on your neighbors.
REPORTER: And we hide it all behind the gate.
RALPH: I mean, the gate keeps you in as well as other people out.
REPORTER: Keeping other people out—that was the rhetoric that made the Sunset a pretty much all-white enclave until the sixties and seventies. Reforms won by civil rights movements gave many immigrants the chance to buy here. Like Elaine Louie’s family.
ELAINE LOUIE: They purchased the house in 1965, and that was the house that they, um, brought me to when I was born. I was born at St. Francis Hospital off of, um, Bush Street.
REPORTER: Elaine grew up smack in the middle of the Sunset, right off the N Judah line. TRACK15 Her parents had immigrated from Hong Kong less than ten years before. Her dad worked as a butcher, her mom was a seamstress and she’d come home late.
ELAINE: And then she'd have to walk up these stairs, which led up to the main door and there was an alcove. And in that alcove, um, what happened was there was someone waiting for her, and so they just stole her purse. Shortly afterwards we got a gate, a really pretty cast iron gate that we painted a sparkling silver color.
REPORTER: So that’s why Elaine’s family put up a gate. But for most of their neighbors, who this probably didn’t happen to, the fear that someone could be waiting in their tunnel entrance was mounting.
The workforce was growing. Fewer people were home during the day to look out. And when they got home late at night, they turned on the news.
ARCHIVAL NEWS—LYNDON B. JOHNSON: The fact of the matter, however, is that law and order have broken down in Detroit, Michigan.
ARCHIVAL NEWS—CBS REPORTER: Los Angeles remains hot, quiet, tense, and dangerous, and 28 people are dead.
ARCHIVAL NEWS: Do you know where your children are?
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “War on Crime.” White people fled for the newly subsidized suburbs.
REPORTER: In the Sunset, not quite suburban, not quite urban, people put up gates.
Gates slamming. Slam. Slam. Slam.
REPORTER: Elaine’s mom still lives in that house, and still has that sparkling gate. When Ralph moved back to the Sunset in the eighties, he took his gate down. But most people I talked to felt like taking down their gates would make them more vulnerable.
“Public safety” was the language of the mayor’s campaign in 2024.
DANIEL LURIE: We have lost control of our streets. We need to get that sense of control back.
REPORTER: The fear hasn’t gone away, but the Sunset is changing.
ELAINE: I mean, the people who can afford to live, at least buy there, are very different from my family.
Sounds of an angle grinder on steel.
KATIE WAKEMAN: A lot of these people are…buying these homes or whatever, and then they're looking at these homes they spend over a million dollars on and going, there's jail bars, you know, on my house, why the hell is that there.
REPORTER: Katie Wakeman builds and installs custom gates all over San Francisco. I met up with Katie at her workshop in Santa Rosa. The small garage is crowded with funky trinkets and rusty machines.
KATIE: Ready, Freddy?
REPORTER: Yup.
Sound of Katie welding.
KATIE: I'm building little frames that I am, uh, I'm using to put glass into which I'll later solder or whatever. So this is just an angle grinder on steel.
REPORTER: Her gates are not the kind that Elaine’s mom put up, or the ones that you can see on every block just walking around the Sunset. They’re meant to draw people in.
Sound of Katie hammering out a curve on a metal bar using a vice.
REPORTER: They’re impossibly curved into peacocks, California poppies, the Golden Gate Bridge.
I ask her why she thinks people first installed the gates she’s replacing.
KATIE: I'm assuming, you know, with my, it's kind of like with my stuff, like I put one in and everybody in the neighborhood goes, Well, maybe I want one of those, you know.
REPORTER: Woody LaBounty reminds me that for some people, a heavy gate still isn’t enough.
WOODY: It's the same today with Nest cameras and all these cameras everybody has. It's just the idea of trying to protect yourself against crime that takes hold of people's imagination.
REPORTER: That fear isn’t unshakable. Ralph Lane remembers the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, and the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, and how he saw the Sunset come together for the most vulnerable in the community.
RALPH: There are plenty of headlines and eager politicians and other interests to take us away from that humanity. But good luck to 'em. It will always, always come back to who we are.
Ambient sound from Rae's street.
REPORTER: I have a gate in front of my apartment. Mostly, it just makes life harder for the guys delivering my neighbor’s DoorDash.
Sound of Rae's front door opening, gate opening, gate slamming against the handrail.
REPORTER: But when the sun comes out, I prop it open. I can let my old cat sit on the warm stairs,
Sound of Rae's cat purring.
REPORTER: ...and say hi to passing neighbors.
Sound of Rae's neighbor exchanging a greeting.
REPORTER: And for that hour or so, I’m really part of the Sunset.
You can learn more about the history of the Sunset at the Western Neighborhoods Project, OutsideLands.org. You can find Katie’s gates at SheWeldsSF.com.
