A Race to Splendor

Authors: Ciji Ware

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Romance, #General

Cover design by Susan Zucker

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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ware, Ciji.

A race to splendor / by Ciji Ware.

p. cm.

1. Women architects—California—Fiction. 2. Architects—California—Fiction. 3. San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, Calif., 1906—Fiction. 4. San Francisco (Calif.)—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3573.A7435R33 2011

813’.54—dc22

2010049267

Contents

This novel is dedicated to: JOY McCULLOUGH WARE, my loving sister with whom I share a California childhood and a passion for writing;

LOY, our great-grandmother’s Chinese houseboy whom Elfie McCullough treated like a slave and whose last name we never knew;

my husband, TONY COOK, whose refined sensibilities, generosity of spirit, and ability to make me laugh create a journey worth taking;

JENNIFER JAHNER, whose sure eye dug me out of the rubble;

and the nameless Chinese forced into prostitution who perished in the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire—and whose numbers weren’t included in the official death toll.

Author’s Note

Sometimes the seeds of an historical novel sprout many decades after they’re sown.

And so it is with great pleasure that
A Race to Splendor,
published by Sourcebooks Landmark in April 2011, commemorates not only the 105th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and firestorm, but also a germ of an idea that probably began to gestate when I was sixteen years old.

A figure not necessarily heralded nationally in telling the story of San Francisco’s remarkable recovery from utter devastation is Julia Morgan, the first licensed woman architect in California who accepted the task of restoring the fabled but deeply scarred Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill.

I first heard Morgan’s name as a teenager when I stood with a gaggle of “grown-ups” in the forecourt of Hearst Castle, the fantastical Shangri-la built during the years 1919 through 1947 in Central California by the newspaper baron, William Randolph Hearst. The guide drew our attention to the massive structure’s wedding-cake towers and, later, the incredibly ornate wood-paneled interiors. During a pause, I timidly raised my hand.

“Who designed this place?” I asked, awed by its over-the-top magnificence.

“Julia Morgan,” the guide said, and in the next breath announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, shall we step into the reception hall?”

I remember thinking, “Wow! A
woman
designed and built this?” but in those pre-feminist days, I posed no follow-up questions for the taciturn tour guide who obviously felt it was more important to keep to the schedule than waste time elaborating on some “lady that old man Hearst had hired back then.” (These days Morgan merits her own, full page on the Hearst Castle-California State Park website.)

In the late 1990s, I “re-encountered” California’s preeminent woman architect when my husband and I moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco and rented a flat in an early twentieth-century apartment building on Nob Hill, designed by none other than… Julia Morgan.

Remembering that moment of wonder at Hearst Castle so long ago, I pressed our building manager for more details and learned that Morgan was also the architect who won the post-quake commission to restore the
beaux arts
-styled Fairmont Hotel on Mason and California streets, located only a few blocks from our second-floor apartment at Taylor and Jackson.

The speculation was that the female doctor who hired Morgan in 1906 to replace her home and infirmary neighboring the Fairmont after her original buildings were destroyed by the 8.25 temblor was either the architect’s personal physician, a sorority sister, or classmate at UC Berkeley where Julia Morgan had received a degree in engineering in 1894—the only woman student in the entire department. Talk about your Old Girls Network!

After graduating from Berkeley, Morgan had gone on to L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and received her diploma in architecture, the first woman in the world to gain that honor.

As my husband and I settled into our Northern California environment, I was curious to learn more about my new city and the cataclysmic 1906 event. I soon stumbled across more material relating to Julia Morgan’s restoration of the Fairmont, including insurance pictures of the hotel’s interior destruction and the absolute obliteration of the surrounding area, including harrowing images of the corner at Taylor and Jackson, the exact spot where we were then living!

What historical novelist could resist such a call to her computer?

Added to this was discovering that Morgan, who was only thirty-four when she signed on to restore the Fairmont, had a nearly morbid abhorrence of my former profession, journalism. She rarely gave interviews and despised notoriety. Anyone who worked for her and ran afoul of her edict to “let my buildings speak for themselves” suffered harsh reprimands.

I also found it curious that there wasn’t much evidence that Julia Morgan made a practice of mentoring
other
women architects coming along behind her—and from that observation sprang the plot of this book.

I have chosen to cast the “real” Julia Morgan as a secondary character, and tell the story of San Francisco’s initial recovery from the devastating quake and fire, along with its subsequent “race to splendor,” through the lens of a composite heroine drawn from the lives of the people who worked for or knew this extraordinarily talented trailblazer.

After Julia Morgan, no other woman would graduate in architecture from L’Ecole des Beaux Arts for years to come. However, in this novel, I pit the fictional Amelia Hunter Bradshaw, determined to follow in Morgan’s footsteps, against J.D. Thayer, a tall, dark, and dangerous young entrepreneur who vows
his
hotel will open before the Fairmont, even if he has to resort to some less-than-aboveboard tactics to accomplish this feat.

As with other heroines I’ve created in my historical novels, I wanted Amelia’s story, based on the facts that are known about this era, to illustrate how a few, feisty women overcame unimaginable obstacles to forge careers in formerly all-male realms—in this instance, that of designing and constructing buildings. What makes these women even more noteworthy is that, despite tumultuous times in post-quake San Francisco, some also fought hard to achieve that elusive balance between work, love, personal relationships, and everyday life.

Given the fact that the San Francisco earthquake rendered some four hundred city blocks a pile of cinders and left 250,000 of its citizens homeless for up to two-and-a-half years, the novel focuses on the whirlwind competition between several legendary hotels vying to re-open their doors
before
the first anniversary of the quake in April 1907—putting to lie the dire predictions that the City by the Bay was “Pompeii, never to rise again.”

Remember when Bette Davis declared in the classic film,
All About Eve
,
“You’d better fasten your seat belts?” As with all earthquakes, what follows is likely to be a bumpy ride…

Ciji Ware

Sausalito, California

Ciji Ware enjoys hearing from readers at www.cijiware.com

California 1906