San Francisco has always prided itself on being a city of freaks, misfits, and iconoclasts. But somewhere between the luxury condo boom and the $18 toast era, we started bulldozing the very landmarks that made this place interesting.

Case in point: the Black House at 6114 California Street in the Richmond District — the original headquarters of Anton LaVey's Church of Satan. Founded in 1966, the Victorian was painted entirely black, hosted bizarre rituals, and became one of the most notorious addresses in American counterculture history. It was demolished in 2001. Today, it's just another forgettable lot in a city increasingly full of them.

Now look — we're not here to lionize Satanism (pun very much intended). But there's something worth examining in how San Francisco treats its own history. We'll fight tooth and nail to landmark-protect a laundromat if it delays a housing project, but an actual piece of genuinely unique cultural history? Gone without a second thought.

The neighborhood stories alone are worth preserving. One local who grew up nearby recalled, "Anton used to walk his lion around the block. Halloween was for real there." Another former resident remembered spying from a neighboring balcony: "Everything was boarded up, it smelled like burning sage or some sort of herb, and people would only come after midnight. There was a rumor he had a pet tiger but I never seen it."

And here's a delicious detail — one SF resident noted that the local phone numbers in the area all carried the prefix 415-666. You truly cannot make this city up.

San Francisco sits on a goldmine of bizarre history — from the CIA's MKUltra LSD experiments on Chestnut Street to dozens of other notorious addresses scattered across the city. But we're terrible at actually honoring that history in any meaningful way. Our preservation politics are driven by NIMBYism and process, not by any genuine interest in what makes neighborhoods unique.

The Black House is gone. The weirdness is fading. And what are we left with? A city that talks endlessly about its identity while systematically erasing it. The devil, as always, is in the details — and we stopped paying attention to those a long time ago.