The impeccably restored 1865 Sylvester House (opens in new tab) stands as a pale blue surprise on Bayview’s Revere Avenue, its magnificent porch unlike anything else on the street. Yet when Linda Blacketer purchased the 8,000-square-foot home with a friend in 1978, it was on the verge of being condemned. The porch, missing one of its grand Corinthian columns, was sliding off the front of the house.
“It was chaos,” Blacketer’s husband Dan Dodt said. “The house hadn’t been painted in 60 years.”
Dodt met Blacketer, a public health nurse, around the time she began renovating the house. She’d been eager to take on a big project. Soon, they fell in love, and he was living in — and renovating — the house too.
The pair shared a 42-year romance, eventually marrying in 1994. Blacketer died of dementia in 2021. “We went room by room,” Dodt said. “It was painting parties and roommates for years.”
Dodt estimates he and Blacketer spent more than $1 million in renovations and furnishings — an order of magnitude more than the purchase price of $150,000.
The results are stunning: Bradbury & Bradbury wallpaper in a custom colorway created just for the house, with stenciling by famed cycling artist Larry Boyce (opens in new tab); six original and fully operational marble fireplaces relined for wood burning; a 1915 original art nouveau mural by the son of the second owner, Silvio Faggione; and a working 1870s Crawford cast iron stove.
“Conservatively, I’ve cooked 35,000 meals on that stove,” Dodt estimated.
In 2005, the home won an award (opens in new tab) from a preservation group for its faithful restoration. Now Dodt is pursuing recognition from the city to include his wife’s name on the house to honor the work she did to breathe life back into its broken bones, and to the role its restoration played in the neighborhood.
Other updates are less visible but even more important: modern electrical and plumbing systems, seismic upgrades, new roofing. The search for the home’s Victorian furniture at garage sales and auctions across the city led Blacketer to a side business in selling antiques.
“Inevitably, we’d be driving home with something with three legs sticking out the back,” Dodt recalled.
The house, in turn, became a magnet for community. The labor involved in creating such a spectacular as well as historically accurate space meant coming into contact with tons of fascinating characters, many of whom put their stamp on the space. Wallpaperer Peter Bridgeman was there so much, Dodt couldn’t tell if he had arrived early in the morning or spent the night. Everyone had keys.
“I’d say ‘Good morning,’ all fuzzy-eyed,” Dodt said, “and ‘you want a cup of coffee, no problem.’”
Then came all the storied people to enjoy it. These included political figures like Dianne Feinstein, Ed Lee, and Gavin Newsom; scholar Henry Louis Gates and Anna Deavere Smith; and scientists like Carl Djerassi, who invented the birth-control pill. The house has been rented out for films, sheltered editors from Rolling Stone, and hosted the music series “Baroque in the Bayview” in the late 1990s to early aughts, which featured a harpsichord concert and a string trio of symphony players, among others.
The house also sponsored The Blue Fuse, the house band from the Fillmore’s Boom Boom Room. “The organist lived two blocks from here, and we dragged his 400-pound Hammond B3 organ up the stairs to the living room,” Dodt said.
The house “was an open canvas,” he added, “and the palette became the people and the activities that were involved.”
One day, a man who looked to be in his 80s showed up on the porch and told Dodt his mother had been born in the house. He explained that he was related to Daniel Sylvester, the home’s namesake and first owner, a wholesale butcher who moved to the Bayview to establish his ranching business, back when the area was mostly pastureland. Dodt led the man and his son upstairs to the room where his great-grandmother had birthed his grandmother. He remembers tears streaming down the older man’s face.
Yet in speaking with Dodt, it’s clear that for him the breathing heart of his home is not its history, the award-winning results of its renovation, or even the community it has created. It’s his wife: “Ageless, timeless, and beautiful,” as her obituary reads, a woman who loved blue cheese and white blouses, who was born on Valentine’s Day in Kentucky, and adored Christmas, insisting on decorating her tree with actual burning candles, Victorian-style.
She brought her love of the holidays into the house, creating elaborate tablescapes and going all out for Halloween, decorating the front porch with a dry-ice cauldron, lanterns, and spooky music.
“These kids would come by the hundreds and unload from their cars,” Dodt said. Perhaps that’s part of why he can’t imagine being in the home without her.
Dodt, who works as an electrical engineering consultant, is preparing to put the house up for sale in February. He hopes to find a buyer who appreciates its history as much as he and Blacketer did. As a city landmark, the facade cannot be altered, but he has no control over what happens to the interior.
For his part, Dodt is not sure where he’ll go next, though he knows it will be someplace smaller. He may stay in the Bayview, a place where he’s developed many decades-long friendships.
“One of the things people don’t appreciate about the Bayview is its authenticity,” Dodt said. “And the weather is pretty darned good too.”
