Sign Hill & Parkway, South San Francisco Homes for sale, recent sales and a Property Nerd’s guide

The hill came before the houses, and so did the sign. The city's Sign Hill Letters page says city leaders created it in the early 20th century to advertise the town to heavy industry. The first version, in 1923, was whitewashed onto the slope, and the permanent letters were finished on May 15, 1929 in gunite concrete by the Cement Gun Construction Co. of San Francisco. They run 48 to 65 feet tall in an anamorphic arrangement on the 581-foot hill, reading 'South San Francisco The Industrial City', so they read evenly from a distance. The city's Historic Preservation Commission designated the letters a historic resource in 1986, and they were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.

The streets grew up the slope from downtown. The lower blocks belong to the 1890s town plat and to the High School Park Addition, recorded in the 1900s-1910s; the city's historical marker program places the original South City High School at 501 Spruce Avenue, today the address of Spruce Elementary, and the story map says the high school moved to its B Street campus in 1951. In 1930 the land company agreed with San Francisco builders James Arnott and Sons to build houses, aiming at 50 that year and 50 more in 1931, most of them in Parkway Terrace, per a newspaper item quoted in the city's story map.

After the war the upper slope filled in: Elm Court, Loma Linda, Viewmont Terrace and Park Avenue Heights were recorded in 1940-1959, and the Stonegate Ridge condominiums went in near Hillside Boulevard in phases from the 1960s through the 1990s. The park on the summit kept growing too: the city now describes Sign Hill Park as 65 acres of natural open space, with habitat for the endangered mission blue butterfly, a native grassland restoration project begun in 2019, and the Seubert Grove, which burned in the 2020 Diamond Fire.