Sätty Through the Fantasy Lens

The cultural riches produced in San Francisco during the Sixties were so abundant that new treasures continue to surface. There was so much going on during that crazy renaissance! Radical hippie group the Diggers incited the community daily, the music scene was exploding, the Black Panther Party launched, the city was flooded with drugs, runaways were living on the streets, Rolling Stone magazine went on press, Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan, Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios was operational—there was something for everyone, and a joint was always being passed. The city was a magnet for unusual people who drifted in from near and far, and among them was Wilfried Sätty.

Born Wilfried Podreich in 1939, in Bremen, Germany where his parents ran a flower shop, Sätty had a front row seat for one of the heaviest episodes in human history. Imagine the karmic weight of being a German child, living in Germany, during World War II; it must’ve been crushing. Attending a trade school as a teenager, Sätty earned a degree in industrial design in Berlin, then lit out for the adventure that was his life. Over the next two years he bounced from a job in Canada, to a brief stint working on Oscar Niemeyer’s grand architectural folly, Brasilia, to San Francisco, where he settled in 1961. He was 22 years old at the time, and on arriving in the city he landed a job as a draughtsman at BART, but he didn’t last long at the post. Grander things were calling him.

Officially changing his name to Sätty, he described himself as an alchemist and artist who resided simultaneously in the past and the future; chief among Sätty’s artworks was his lifestyle. He lived for two decades in a rambling house at 2141-43 Powell Street that was within walking distance of the North Beach jazz clubs, City Lights Bookstore, and the San Francisco Art Institute, and was described by writer Thomas Albright as “a cross between Mrs. Havisham’s parlor in Great Expectations and something out of Luna Park.” The heart of the place was the basement Sätty transformed into an exotic chamber with walls hung with fraying tapestries and a dirt floor carpeted with thread- bare oriental rugs. Perfumed with incense, furnished with odds and ends scavenged from trash bins, and lit primarily with candles, the basement housed a vast library of occult books, and one was obliged to travel by ladder to get from one floor to the next. Somehow it’s not surprising to learn that Kenneth Anger lived there shortly before it was taken over by Sätty, who said he fashioned the place after the underground grottos built by Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.