Storybook architecture

A reader emailed me recently. She had remembered my (long ago! dating to 2002) Montclarion column about Storybook architecture in Oakland. This style is near and dear to my heart. The article is not cached online, so I’m going to post it here on the blog, slightly rewritten from its original text.

Storybook is the style of architecture that makes you feel like you suddenly slipped into the Germanic forest of Hansel and Gretel, and are peeping at a quaint cottage in the clearing. The Montclair neighborhood boasts two wonderful public examples, pictured here.

At top is the firehouse on Moraga Road. Its roof is not supposed to be painted white to represent snow, but should rather shine with its original copper finish to represent flames –see them roaring up at either end of the building-- quite appropriate for a firehouse. Note the scalloped roofline, the heart above the entry, the tiny windows in the eaves: all illustrative of that olde worlde charm.

The other structure is the library on Mountain Boulevard. Its roofline was built to look like it was already sagging for centuries, although the library was quite new at the time of this photograph. You can see the clinker brickwork behind the bushes and its general homespun, European appeal.

I must credit the coffeetable book Storybook Style: American's Whimsical Homes of the '20s by local architect Arrol Gellner. It’s filled with gorgeous photos by Douglas Keister of many Bay Area buildings, including private residences in Oakland, Berkeley, Piedmont and Alameda. In an email interview, Gellner told me that he thinks "Storybook Style homes, more than any other, represent the embodiment of the builder's personality, creativity and sense of humor. They're also a snapshot of an optimistic era when anything seemed possible, which no doubt appeals to people in these jaded times."

So what defines Storybook? Gellner calls it a "rambunctious evocation of medieval Europe" and sets the three criteria: an overstated rendition of medieval forms, use of artificial measures to make the building look extremely old, and the third, amorphous quality: "whimsy."

Storybook homes, at their most extreme, have crooked chimneys, lopsided walls, roofs that undulate like the wind making waves on a pond, misaligned shingles, askew shutters, clinker brick: all things to suggest antiquity, as if the very house is settling due to its age. Some homes have drawbridges (like Humphrey Bogart's Hollywood home) or streams with bucolic bridges over them, reminiscent of a pastoral Europe.

Gellner presents an interesting reason for why Storybook architecture arose. Even dating to the 1700s, people were fascinated by the Middle Ages (my dictionary says the Middle Ages ended in 1500, so the fascination began 200 years later). For instance, Marie Antoinette's famous "farm" at Versailles was her interpretation of a medieval countryside hamlet. The 1869 castle Neuschwanstein (which Disney later based his Sleeping Beauty castle on) is in essence fake, because it purports to look far older than it is.

Gellner points out that because Victorian style was so fussy, with its overwrought gingerbread detailings and interior doilies and tassles, people longed for a return to simpler times, like the society of a medieval town where goods were made by hand rather than in a factory. This was the basis of the Arts and Crafts movement, which valued craftsmanship. By the 1920s, people were ready for Storybook architecture, which allowed them to pretend they had stepped back in time. However, it seems to me that storybook architecture is a little fussy on its own, with turrets and eaves and different roof levels. Gellner says Storybook architecture relies on Craftsman ideals (like using natural materials, buildings of a small scale and architecture that appears organic to its setting) that were "recast in a rather more theatrical style."

And why theatrical? A major factor contributing to the rise of Storybook was the indomitable presence of Hollywood. By the 1920s, talking movies had created the first "stars" – people whose homes needed to reflect their unique standing in life. Moreover, there was a ready workforce that was used to creating fantasy sets – or was inspired by them – builders whose dials were already set on creative. Hollywood is indeed, as Gellner says, the "epicenter of Storybook style," although I did see at least 10 Oakland buildings featured in the book, as well as a handful from other Bay Area cities.

Another reason for this style? Men returning from WWI with memories of appealing European villages.

Sometimes entire housing tracts were built in Storybook style. Three are local, and were all based on designs by Oakland-based architect W. W. Dixon. One is Stonehenge in Alameda, another is Normandy Gardens in Oakland, and the third is on Oakland's Ross Street. This street was chosen because its electrical and phone cables had already been undergrounded by the time of the construction, and the street had pleasant light standards, rolled curbs and concrete pavement rather than asphalt. Part of the Ross Street tract, built by R.C. Hillen, was removed during freeway construction in the 1960s.

A few other streets host Storybook enclaves. One is 75th Avenue near MacArthur Boulevard. This stretch is called Holy Row, Gellner says, because at one point many of the homes were lived in by various church leaders. These homes were built in the early 1930s. Another street is the charming, tiny Veteran Way in the Dimond District, with three full-fledged Storybook homes and several "almosts."

Storybook architecture was gone by the late 1930s when Art Deco took over—a style that was also revivalist, looking in part to Egyptian motifs after the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb. Unfortunately, there are few buildings left. Gellner told me "Sometimes we (he and photographer Keister) had to spend days just to find one good one. It was like finding a diamond buried in a sand dune." So Oakland should certainly appreciate its good fortune in having many structures!

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Timberline's True Name

--This is a reposting; I know there is renewed interest in Woman of Ill Fame and so I'm going to put this blog post up again.


This blog is currently about witchcraft persecutions, ancient and modern, but now and then I will dip into material regarding my first novel Woman of Ill Fame. The novel is about a Gold Rush prostitute in a dangerous, brand-new San Francisco.

A few days ago, someone was in my archives and saw my post about the real-life prostitute whose image is featured on the cover. All I knew was that her name was Timberline, she was a Dodge City prostitute, and her image is in the collections of the Kansas State Historical Society.

Well, the anonymous commenter wrote that her name was Rose Vastine.

That for one thing totally threw me. Although I fashioned my character based on this photograph and named her Nora, for some reason I had “felt” that this real woman’s name was Kate.

Secondly, the commenter wrote that she earned the name Timberline for being 6’2” in height. Another big surprise. In my mind, the nickname had dirty connotations!

Armed with her real name, I consulted Professor Google.

The first link I accessed made me gasp out loud in the café I was working in, and literally grab my forehead. According to Linda Wommack’s Ladies of the Tenderloin, “Timberline climbed up into the hills above Creede and shot herself not once, but six times.”

When you have spent so much time staring at someone’s photograph and constructing an entire novel around them, you develop a strange and intense connection to them. It was almost as upsetting as hearing this news about someone I knew…but not only was Timberline a stranger to me, but she died 150 years ago. Whatever sorrows she endured, they are dust now.

I dedicated the novel to two wonderful women the world lost at an early age, and on the second line dedicated it to “Timberline and the other girls of the line: I hope the world was kind to you.”

And here was evidence that the world had not been kind to her.

The link went on to say that Timberline did not die from that suicide attempt, but strangely enough, another link had her recovering from an “intended overdose.” Is it apocryphal that she tried to kill herself with such vastly different methods and survived both times? Whatever the truth is, she must have been an unhappy young woman.

Several sources have her living in Creede, Colorado, a silver mining camp 420 miles from the Dodge City that her photograph is labeled with. Sure enough, the website for Creede, Colorado mentions Timberline on its “About Creede” page. Bat Masterson too (whose biography the commenter mentions) lived in both cities, so maybe she hitched a ride with him.

If anyone has any more information on her, I’d most definitely love to know it.

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Germanic wood sculpture

Sculptor Stefanie Rocknak makes the incredible life-sized pieces you see here, inspired by the medieval art of Germany.

I was so taken with these images (seen in my alumni magazine, Colby: we both attended the same college) that I contacted Rocknak to rave. There's so much emotion captured in these faces and in their body language. I feel like I could stare at them for hours to try to figure out what their individual stories are.

There's something about these figures that is timeless and we see they are the same as us today...but deep in the wood is the darkness of their shortened, brutal lives. They lived in a world where superstition reigned, where food was scarce, and where they couldn't even use logs to warm their huts (only nobles could burn logs; peasants were reduced to whatever branches they could scrounge on the ground).

These sculptures visually show what I tried to convey with words in The Witch's Trinity. In fact, had I known of Rocknak's work in 2006, I would have begged and pleaded with my editor to have one of her pieces on the cover --or maybe even this triptych, which to me looks like the priest, Gude and Irmeltrud.

Check out Rocknak's artist statement on her website. I love her eclectic, whimsical look back at what fueled her work (like her brother's wooden robot, or a face she carved with her dad as a child), rather than some high-flung attempt to interpret her philosophy for others.

This image of her is from the Colby magazine article by Pat Sims. I love how the statue in the background is arching around to look at the camera too.

Nice review of Witch's Trinity

Many thanks to blogger and writer Susan Spann, who just posted a very nice review of The Witch's Trinity on her site, www.susanspann.com.

I met her at the Historical Novels Society conference this year in San Diego. I had a great time sitting with her at dinner and talking shop. One cool thing about her (among many) is that she is required to drink about five cups of coffee a day. I thought it was great to have a medical dictate to freely imbibe! She was a lot of fun, and now she has written a really nice review of my book, on top of buying multiple copies of my book. Many thanks, Susan!



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Suffrage Re-enactment Parade

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What a fine day we had, and how high were all the spirits! I loved wearing the purple "Votes For Women" sash and feeling like I was marching in the footsteps of my forebears (unfortunately, we were not able to recreate the exact path of the 1908 parade in Oakland, but close enough!)

Today, the 14th of October, is the 100th anniversary of the official tally for women getting the vote in California. HOORAY! (The polling date was the 10th, but back in 1911 it took four days for all the votes to be counted up and down the state--and in fact one of the reasons against woman's suffrage was the idea that it already took so long just to count MALE votes.)

Here's a photograph of me in my parade sash. I'm at far left, gesticulating, pushing a younger voter. I have many, many photos to post, but this will suffice for now. If you're a woman and you're not registered to vote, the ghosts of the past are shaking their fingers at you.


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Suffrage article about Governor Markham

I wrote this piece for the Oakland Heritage Alliance newsletter. If you'd like to subscribe (it appears three times a year, and always has great articles about Oakland history), visit www.oaklandheritage.org. Membership is affordable, and the subscription comes with it.

Gov. Markham sets back women's movement several decades
By Erika Mailman

Suffrage passed in California in 1911, nine years before it passed nationally. We can pat ourselves on the backs for being the sixth state to permit woman at the polls. Yet if not for the bullheadedness of an early governor, women could have been voting as early as 1893.

The villain? Governor Henry Harrison Markham, a Republican who served 1891-95.

Born in New York in 1840, he was educated at Wheeler Academy in Vermont. After graduation, he and his brothers moved to Wisconsin. There, he worked as a teacher before volunteering for a Wisconsin infantry regiment of the Union Army. He participated in Sherman’s famous march to the sea, including slogging through waist-deep swamp water, and sustained severe injuries at the Battle of Whippy.

After the war he returned to Wisconsin and studied law. In 1876, he married Mary Dana. They responded to a newspaper ad to buy 23 acres in Pasadena, in part to improve Henry’s ill health, and moved there with their young daughter in 1879.

Markham certainly sounds like a good guy: he volunteered for the school board and helped establish the local library. He was the first U.S. representative for California’s sixth congressional district, 1885-87, and won the campaign for governor thanks to his solid grip. “The victory was attributed partly to Henry’s manner of personally greeting thousands of voters who became well acquainted with the ‘Markham Glad-hand.’ It was his signature move—a firm, hearty handshake evoking sincerity,” wrote Lawrence P. Gooley. He took office in 1891.

In response to the state’s economic woes, he pushed for the 1894 Mid-Winter Exposition which indeed brought needed money and attention. Held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for six months, the fair’s legacy is the original De Young Museum and the Japanese Tea Gardens.

A lovely anecdote about Markham shows his good heart. Out walking one day, he found a woman and child who had been evicted from their apartment. He secretly slipped a $100 bill into the keyhole and told the boy to go look again for the “key.” He left before his good deed was discovered.

All this makes it hard to conceive that this gentleman looked at the suffrage bill that had passed both the Senate and Assembly and summarily vetoed it.

Harder still to understand how he justified his decision to his wife and four daughters, Marie, Alice, Gertrude, and Hildreth. The family had no sons.

The discussion may actually have been easier than we might think, since it was doubtless conducted by mail, if at all. His fifth daughter Genevieve had died of typhoid fever six months after the family moved to Sacramento. Mary and the remaining daughters returned to Pasadena where they stayed until the end of his gubernatorial term three and a half years later.

It’s hard to enter the 1800s male mindset to determine why Governor Markham didn’t think that his closest circle deserved to vote. His wife had been formally educated at Rockford Seminary in Wisconsin (whose most famous graduate was Jane Addams, winner of the Nobel Prize), and was a tireless volunteer for her Pasadena church and its causes. He had been raised with five brothers and four sisters, so surely the female gender was not a cipher to him.

He loved his daughters. I found an article that talked about an elaborate playhouse he built for them, which is still extant and now sits in a corner of the yard of Pacific Oaks Children’s School in Pasadena.

Yet it’s said he felt suffrage was unconstitutional. Trying to locate more information than that is difficult, and in fact one of my sources indicates that the bill may not have been for blanket suffrage, but rather for “school-suffrage,” so that women might vote at any school election and hold office.

This appears to have been a tactic to chip away at public sentiment; men might be more likely to grant power in an arena viewed as female anyway, and then armed with that success, women could then lobby for more. By 1904, 19 states permitted school-suffrage (in addition to the four states then granting full suffrage: Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming), while in a few other states women might vote on municipal bonds or questions of public expenditure.

According to the 1904 World Almanac prepared for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, other persons excluded from voting in California included “Chinese, idiots, insane, embezzlers of public moneys, convicted of infamous crime.” A footnote added, “Or a person unable to read the Constitution in English and to write his name.”

Markham did not run for a second term, and his grand three-story Pasadena mansion was torn down several decades after his 1923 death from stroke. His mansion had stood near today’s tourist mecca for Craftsman enthusiasts, the Greene & Green Gamble house, and homes owned by other titans of industry: Busch (beer), Wrigley (gum), Maxwell (coffee), Spalding (sporting goods) and others.

The issues around suffrage were complex, and not solely attributable to misogyny. As is endlessly the case with politics, financial interests played a huge role. Many feared women would promptly institute social reforms such as limiting hours that children might work, making factories and mills less profitable. They also predicted women would institute prohibition, not a farfetched fear since the Christian Women’s Temperance Movement was a stalwart suffrage crusader.

Indeed, when the issue of suffrage went (unsuccessfully) to a statewide referendum in 1896, the Liquor Dealers League urged its members, “See your neighbor in the same line of business as yourself, and have him be with you in this matter.” Still others felt suffrage would create an administrative nightmare: it already took nearly a week to count the male votes in the state.

Whatever Markham’s reasoning was, he set back the women’s movement in California by 18 years.

One final tidbit: my research yielded the fact that Gov. Markham has his own Facebook page, and six people like him. Hilarious!

Suffrage article by Elaine Elinson

I just stumbled across a suffrage piece by an old writers group friend, Elaine Elinson. She too is a Heyday author, and her nonfiction book Wherever There's a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California won a California book award.

She outlines here how Selina Solomons got San Franciscans to work for suffrage. She's a fantastic writer.

Sad discovery of woman possibly thought a witch

Friend Linda McCabe alerted me to this link, about the discovery of an 800-year-old corpse in Tuscany. Because seven nails were driven through her jaw, it's thought she was a witch, and this was a measure to keep her from rising from her grave. (But that seems spurious, as she was buried in consecrated ground.)

Thirteen nails were also found around her body, as if fastening her clothing to the ground. She was not in a coffin or shroud. Hm, seven and 13: both kind of "evil" numbers.

Another nearby corpse was buried with 17 dice. Seventeen is an unlucky number in Italian, and women were prevented from playing dice in medieval times, so it's thought she too may be a victim of a witchcraft accusation.

Stories like this are always such sad mysteries. Were the nails driven before or after death? What were these women's stories? And how would they feel knowing their images are posted on some worldwide device that everyone can access, and see the horrible truth of their skulls displaying the violence of their treatment?

Here's the link.