Death and Burial
By Beth Winegarner
On the same day Steven Welch got his driver’s license, he drove to pick up a body for his family’s funeral home, Duggan’s Funeral Service on 17th Street. He was 17.
More than 40 years later, he’s the mainstay of the multigenerational business. A lot has changed since those days; cremations outnumber direct burials nationwide, and people no longer want multi-day visitations, he says. Now, “they want it short and convenient.”
More than a dozen funeral homes lined Valencia Street for much of the 20th Century. Back then, funeral streetcars and a local railway ferried the dead and their mourners to cemeteries in Colma. Now, just two remain: Duggan’s Funeral Service, which moved from 1234 Valencia St. to 3434 17th St. in 1932, and Driscoll’s Valencia Street Serra Mortuary, near Cesar Chavez St.
With all the changes on Valencia in recent decades — restaurants, high-end shops, bike lanes, double-parked Ubers — Welch says that moving off of Valencia is one reason Duggan’s is still going.
“Where, on Valencia, would you put a hearse?” he asks, baffled.
Inside Duggan’s, the atmosphere is solemn and quiet; the traffic and bustle of Valencia Street seems miles away. Rooms are meticulously arranged for the next viewing or funeral, one chapel holds rows of empty pews and a podium where someone’s urn will be placed. Each chapel has doors to seal off the room, giving mourners space and privacy to grieve.
Welch grew up on Dolores Street, the latest in a long line of morticians with deep roots in San Francisco. His great-grandfather, William Duggan, opened Duggan’s in 1918, after marrying Henrietta Hagan, whose father opened a funeral parlor on Valencia near 16th Street sometime in the 1880s.
Duggan was 16 when he immigrated to the United States from Ireland in 1898. He served in the U.S. Army until his enlistment ran out in San Francisco, where he stayed. He ran a horse-and-carriage business for a while, then drove a motorized taxi with stands at the Ferry Building and in the Tenderloin, Welch said. Henrietta’s father, James, hired Duggan to drive Henrietta to medical college in the afternoons. They fell in love and married in 1903 at Mission Dolores.
“It was a bit of a ‘Downton Abbey’ situation,” Welch says. “The daughter marrying the chauffeur. His father-in-law never accepted him.”
Even though death is a constant, Duggan’s has endured both busy and lean times in its 105-year life. Until the 1960s, it catered largely to Irish Catholic families; Welch points out the shamrocks in the front door’s wrought-iron gates, and in the stained glass ceiling above one of the main chapels.
But those families moved out of San Francisco, taking their business with them. Duggan’s daughter, Leticia Duggan Welch, was running the funeral home in those years. She had to lay off most of her employees, and sold her house on Dolores Street to buy paint for the funeral home, Welch says.
More recently, local Black communities have come to Duggan’s for funeral services, and in the 1990s, the business was running about 700 funerals a year, up from 100 or so a year in the 1980s.
“We’ve been the biggest provider for that community since the late 1990s,” Welch said, noting that San Francisco used to have a half-dozen Black-owned funeral homes, but none remain. And now, “that population is declining. No one can afford to live here.”
These days, business is quiet, more like it was in the 1970s, Welch says. He makes most of his money from a cluster of other death-centered businesses, including a crematorium in Benicia, the Chapel By the Sea funeral home in Pacifica, and College Chapel Mortuary, an online service that provides low-cost cremations.
Welch is holding out hope that he won’t be the last in his family to keep Duggan’s alive. His daughter, an engineer who’s worked on biotechnology labs and the Uber headquarters on Third Street, isn’t interested in switching careers. But his son James, a National Guardsman who maintains Chinook helicopters, “thinks about it. He says — maybe when he’s more mature,” Welch says. His niece, Megan Doyle, recently joined the business in an administrative role.
In the meantime, Welch says, “I’ll keep it going as long as I can.”
Beth Winegarner is a San Francisco-based journalist and author. Her new book, “San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History” was released Aug. 28, 2023.
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