Mark Leuthold emerging wraith-like from the sulphurous miasma, having snapped a selfie on the edge of the caldera of the Mt. Aso volcano.
Woody LaBounty was our Guest Speaker at our Spring General Meeting last May
By Carl Nolte, Contributor Feb 7, 2026
Woody LaBounty loves San Francisco and is fascinated to watch as the city changes. He wants the past to be part of the future.
LaBounty is president and CEO of San Francisco Heritage, a nonprofit group founded 50 years ago, in a time when the city bulldozed hundreds of Victorian houses in the Western Addition and transformed the neighborhood in the name of urban change and redevelopment.
The city has changed even more since then, and more change is in the works. “The city is going to change,” LaBounty says. “We want to be able to manage the change.”
His organization wants to keep the best of the city, its stories, its look, its character. “San Francisco is too important to be just anywhere,” LaBounty says. The city, he says, has a look to it, a style, too, even in its far corners. “If I could be blindfolded and put down anywhere, even way out in Visitacion Valley, I’d immediately know I was in San Francisco.’’
LaBounty is hardly impartial. “It is the greatest place on earth,” he wrote.
Speaking up for the buildings, stories and neighborhoods that make up S.F.’s fabric
Greg
Quick and Dirty
Woody LaBounty loves San Francisco and is fascinated to watch as the city changes. He wants the past to be part of the future.
LaBounty is president and CEO of San Francisco Heritage, a nonprofit group founded 50 years ago, in a time when the city bulldozed hundreds of Victorian houses in the Western Addition and transformed the neighborhood in the name of urban change and redevelopment.
The city has changed even more since then, and more change is in the works. “The city is going to change,” LaBounty says. “We want to be able to manage the change.”
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His organization wants to keep the best of the city, its stories, its look, its character. “San Francisco is too important to be just anywhere,” LaBounty says. The city, he says, has a look to it, a style, too, even in its far corners. “If I could be blindfolded and put down anywhere, even way out in Visitacion Valley, I’d immediately know I was in San Francisco.’’
LaBounty is hardly impartial. “It is the greatest place on earth,” he wrote.
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San Francisco needs no introduction, but LaBounty could use one. He’s been a historian, a storyteller, a neighborhood organizer, an entertainer, even a clown in the circus. He even has a trademark look — he’s tall and he always wears a fedora, like a younger version of your grandfather.
His real name is Stephen and he traces his San Francisco roots back to an ancestor who sailed through the Golden Gate on July 9, 1850. LaBounty is a French Canadian name, and “Woody” is a nickname he picked up in school. “Woody LaBounty also sounds like some kind of alias,” he wrote once.
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He has a real San Francisco story: His parents met at the Donut Bowl at 10th Avenue and Geary, married and moved to Santa Rosa, where Stephen was born. The family’s business venture there failed, and they moved back to San Francisco, living in a basement apartment in the Richmond District. Woody remembers his childhood as a kind of golden age: it was a diverse neighborhood, the kind of San Francisco mix that marks the city. “We had lots of kids and we all played in the street. One Chinese family had nine kids and an Irish family had 10 kids,” LaBounty said.
He went to Star of the Sea grammar school and Sacred Heart High, and then UC Berkeley. College was not a success. He lasted only one year before he flunked out.
He’d been kind of an entertainer, a cut-up, a juggler in high school, and after college his sense of adventure and travel kicked in. He ran off and joined the circus. He was with the Pickle Family Circus for a number of years, traveled all over the country, even to Japan. He performed at birthday parties, special events, street fairs. He even learned to eat fire. There were some valuable lessons: how to tell a story, how to hold an audience, and how to listen to other stories.
After some time, he decided to get what he called “a real job’’ and signed on with a business firm in North Carolina. The job was good, but he missed San Francisco terribly. He had a wife and a baby daughter by then, but the couple agreed they wanted the girl to grow up as a San Franciscan. So they took a chance and moved home.
With the help of friends and some luck, he helped found the Western Neighborhoods Project, an initiative to tell the story of the west side of the city from the time when it was a wasteland of sand dunes.
He helped save dozens of 1906 earthquake refugee cottages and posted online a collection of 50,000 images of the western half of San Francisco. He was executive director of the Western Neighborhoods Project for nearly 20 years.
He joined the staff of San Francisco Heritage in 2019 and became president and CEO in 2023. S.F. Heritage has a long history of success, speaking up for the buildings, stories and neighborhoods that make up the fabric of the city. The nonprofit has cataloged historic buildings, helped with legislation to protect cultural districts and legacy business, everything from the Li Po bar in Chinatown to the colorful Tommy’s Joynt hof brau on Van Ness Avenue.
The site of the former McRoskey Mattress factory at Market and Gough streets is undergoing demolition to pave way for a housing complex.
Stephen Lam/S.F. Chronicle
But not everything worth saving has been saved. LaBounty sat in the classic 1886 Haas-Lilienthal mansion on Franklin Street last week to mourn the destruction of the McRoskey Mattress Co. building at Market and Gough streets.
“It’s being torn down as we speak,” LaBounty said. The building was the grand headquarters of a business founded by the McRoskey brothers in 1899. A mattress is something that every home needs, and the company made and sold hand-made, high-end mattresses. “Beloved by generations of San Franciscans,’’ the company describes itself. “A proud part of San Francisco’s fabric.”
A grand three-story headquarters was built on Market Street in 1925 with a showroom and a factory; it had a glass front featuring all the small decorative touches of 1920s San Francisco, handsome by any standard. “It’s a building with the story of a different time,” LaBounty said. Times changed. The company built a new retail showroom on Alameda Street in the design district last year. The factory moved to Fresno.
Now the old Market Street façade is covered in mesh netting, like a shroud, as machines chew away at the rear of the building.
It’s being replaced by a 17-story tower, apartments and space for the city’s artistic community. LaBounty has mixed feelings. “It’s a good project,’’ he said of the plan. It’s one of the stories of San Francisco’s heritage, only this one is bittersweet.
Feb 7, 2026