Max Kirkeberg, SF State Professor Who Chronicled the City on Foot, Dies at 93

Max Kirkeberg, a San Francisco State University professor known for his famed walking-tour classes and extensive archive of the city’s architecture, died this week. He was 93.

Kirkeberg came to San Francisco in 1965 while writing his doctoral thesis on the impact of oral history in preserving a region’s story. He began a decadeslong career as a professor at San Francisco State, where for more than 40 years, he taught local geography and history to rapt cohorts of undergraduate students and, later, older adults by taking to the city streets.

His well-known “San Francisco on Foot” course launched in the early ’70s, leading students on hourslong excursions through the city’s neighborhoods and sharing the lesser-known history of famous sites like the Painted Ladies. On a 2003 tour of the homes on Alamo Square’s Postcard Row — covered in a San Francisco State Magazine article about the course — he told his class that in 1894, a famed Victorian on the street sold for just $4,000.

Rachel Cunningham, an alumna of the university’s Geography Department, said Kirkeberg roamed the halls “like a magical geography fairy godmother,” handing out free pastries and donning a different necktie each day.

At the end of each semester, he was known to pin up the ties he’d worn to class — he never wore one of his 600 twice in one session — and ask students to vote for their favorite.

“His joy and care was contagious, and every day that I saw Max, I knew was going to be a good day,” Cunningham said.

Professor Laura Wilkinson, who shared an office with Kirkeberg for more than 10 years, said watching him work shaped her teaching style.

“After every class that he taught, Max would come back to the office, and he’d pull out a little notebook, and he would start writing down, ‘This was the class today, this was a topic and this is what went well and this what I would change next time,’” she said. “Seeing somebody that was still both that excited and that devoted to teaching after all those years was just the coolest inspiration for me.”

She described Kirkeberg’s class as a “cult classic.” “Once people had heard about it, they really sought out and tried to take [it],” she said.

Kirkeberg was also always willing to lead a neighborhood tour outside of class for visiting alumni, or a colleague — like Wilkinson — whose in-laws were in town.

“Max was my witness at my wedding at City Hall; Max held the baby shower for my first kid,” she told KQED.

Born in 1933 in a small town in southern Iowa, Kirkeberg attended Augustana College in Illinois, where he majored in geography, history and political science. After being drafted into the Army, he went on to get a graduate degree in geography from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, according to a biography on San Francisco State’s website.

Once he was in San Francisco, according to his bio, Kirkeberg came out as a gay man. And at SF State, he found a family of his own.

“I met Max in the courtyard at SFSU,” said Kirkeberg’s husband, Gabriel Proo, who was celebrating the graduation of a former student of Kirkeberg’s at the time. “She would complain about him, because he’d make fun of her for arriving late … and I said, ‘Joan, you never told me he was gay.’”

Proo said the two realized they had much in common.

“We both had this great passion for San Francisco — the freedom, the architecture, the history … the beauty of the city, the climate,” Proo said. “He was just so in love with the city.”

Kirkeberg could often be found spending long days in the College of Health and Social Sciences building, digitizing his massive archive of photographs documenting San Francisco’s ever-shifting landscape. Nearly 60,000 slides of his work, collected through his field classes, walking tours and related lectures, are cataloged through SF State as the Max Kirkeberg Collection.

The archive includes collections dedicated to different parts of the Mission District and Bernal Heights, various city neighborhoods, as well as the Castro Theatre and Alcatraz Island. It’s listed on the San Francisco Public Library site and has been used for smaller neighborhood history projects, like one by residents of Bernal Heights — his former home — that began in 2009.

“As he toured San Francisco’s many neighborhoods repeatedly, he became aware that the city, like most cities, was changing,” an introduction to the collection reads. “Gentrification, ethnic succession, industrial abandonment or conversion, the shift in workforce demographics, the rise and decline of the hippy era, the growth of gay San Francisco, and countless other socio-economic factors and events contributed to this change.”

Kirkeberg officially retired as a professor in 2002 but continued to teach “San Francisco on Foot” and a series of shorter, neighborhood-specific walking tour courses for adults through SF State’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Jaqcueline Proctor, one of his OLLI students, said she began taking classes at the university specifically to enroll in one of Kirkeberg’s courses in the late 2000s. She took nearly every one he offered in the ensuing years.

“They were just extraordinary,” Proctor told KQED.

Her favorites were a course chronicling the redevelopment of Moscone Center and the surrounding area, and another on the commercial corridor of Valencia Street. Now lined with upscale consignment shops and trendy wine bars and restaurants, the street was home to a number of mortuaries 100 years ago, when a streetcar ran down the common funeral procession route to Colma.

Kirkeberg’s six-week OLLI sessions usually focused on a single city district, Proctor said, during which he would alternate between classroom lectures featuring his tens of thousands of photos of the city and adventures to those places, sprinkling in little-known history.

“One of the fun things I really learned living in the city and doing all the walking is that all the commercial streets are in the valleys,” she said. “I live by West Portal, and it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, West Portal’s pretty flat, but everything around it is uphill.’”

According to the SF State magazine story, Kirkeberg taught that people don’t like to shop — or tour — uphill. The magazine said he had a rule against inclines in his courses’ routes, though Proctor remembers a few.

Easygoing, warm and funny, Kirkeberg created a community among his students, Proctor said. A group of about five of them still meet for walks weekly, years after he retired fully and moved to Oregon in 2019.

“Pretty much everybody in the class did all his classes,” Porter told KQED.

Ann Scalf, another former OLLI student, said that even after Kirkeberg moved away, he and “a bunch of us ‘Max groupies’” would gather for lunch in the Castro when he visited San Francisco.

His legacy is also still felt across the San Francisco State campus.

Last year, he and Proo established the Max Kirkeberg Scholarship, an annual grant awarded to a School of the Environment student whose work aligns “with the dedication to the lived and changing environment of the Bay Area,” according to the university.

“As a first-generation college student, Max’s scholarship has helped me fund my last semesters of college, leading me closer to my goal in being the first in my family to graduate,” said Angela Tafur, who was the inaugural recipient of the scholarship last spring. “I cannot wait to see how future SFSU students will benefit. … His legacy and passion for geography lives on in this department in many wonderful ways.”

Kirkeberg also founded and led a team in San Francisco’s annual AIDS Walk for 40 years, merging two of his communities: the SF State Geography Department and his congregation at St. Francis Lutheran Church.

“He always said that the young people at the university would walk, and the old people had money,” Proo said. “That was a good combination.”

Over the decades, the team raised more than a million dollars, about a third of which Proo said Kirkeberg solicited himself.

“Max was truly a larger-than-life figure whose presence could be felt across campus, in the church, and throughout the broader community,” said Andrea Dransfield Kraus, an SF State Geography Department alumna and the team’s co-captain for many years. “Max’s commitment to community, remembrance, and collective action touched countless lives.”

For Kirkeberg, the AIDS crisis was personal; he lost his former partner and multiple friends to the disease.

“Max made our AIDS Walk team as large as possible, raising tens of thousands of dollars each year,” said Valerie Wagner, the St. Francis congregation’s president. She noted that the team often finished among the likes of Chevron and Bank of America in the walk’s top fundraisers.

Kirkeberg was a devoted member of the church and a weekly volunteer at its Sunday morning free breakfast program, Wagner said, adding that he “once organized a bus tour for the congregation so he could show us notable sites.”

“Max was Lutheran to the core, as a Norwegian-Swede from Iowa but also a very cool San Franciscan,” she said on behalf of the congregation. “We will all miss Max very much and are deeply grateful for his leadership and witness.”