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EDGAR A. MATHEWS Edgar Aschael Mathews was a Bay Area native, born into an artistic family. His father Julius Case Mathews, originally from New York, was living in Wisconsin with his wife Pauline McCracken and their two children, Walter and Caroline, when he decided to try to make his fortune out west. He arrived in Oakland in 1852, with his younger brother Benjamin, and they tried their luck in the gold and silver mines, supporting themselves as carpenters. Julius returned to Wisconsin towards the end of that decade and a second son, Arthur, was born in 1860. In May 1866 Julius returned to Oakland with his family. Pauline was pregnant with their third son at the time and Edgar was born on September 8th of that year. Julius turned his construction experience into an architectural practice, opening his own office in 1875 in Oakland. His eldest son, Walter, after training as a carpenter and draftsman, joined him in 1879 and J. C. Mathews & Son was established. Walter later became a very prominent architect in his own right and was Oakland City architect for many years. The second son, Arthur, also trained as a draftsman with his father, but quickly developed his own artistic talents. He studied and exhibited in Paris, and ultimately achieved international prominence as a muralist, furniture maker, interior designer and teacher. Arthur’s work embellished the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition and can be seen today in the Oakland Museum and the Mechanics Institute lobby at 57 Post Street in San Francisco. Edgar also started in his father’s office, then attended the Van Der Naillen School of Engineering, graduating in 1888. He continued to work for his father, and other architects, before opening his own office in 1895. Soon afterwards, he and his wife Katherine Dart moved into San Francisco and by the early 1900's he was well established as an important designer of town residences.
His earliest influences were the rustic houses of Ernest Coxhead and Willis Polk, but he quickly developed his own styles. Two of his early favorites were a half-timbered, half-stucco look (termed “Elizabethan” by an architectural reviewer at the time) and a more steeply-roofed brown-shingle covered “box” (a less descriptive term used by the same reviewer). He would define his building sites with low brick walls and create inviting clinker-brick entry porches. Characteristic early Edgar Mathews’ homes in Pacific Heights include the adjacent houses at 2508 and 2510 Green (1895) and the matching pair at 2415 and 2421 Pierce (1897). When the situation demanded it though, he was not afraid to design in more formal styles, as seen by the house at 2590 Green (1899). For 2505 Divisadero, also commissioned in 1899, he knew he was designing a house to sit adjacent to the Georgian-style Spooner residence at 2800 Pacific, designed by Coxhead & Coxhead, and completed in the spring of that year; the first house to be built on this prominent Pacific Heights block and the only house shown on the 1899 Sanborn map of the block.
Mathews’ client for 2505 Divisadero was Clinton Jones, General Agent for the Rock Island Railway, which operated Pullman sleeping car trains from the West Coast to Chicago and Boston. Jones, a 51 year old native of Maine, and his wife Sarah, had seven children by 1899. The 1900 census shows that their household at 2505 Divisadero included, along with their five sons and two daughters, two servants - Belinda Murphy, from Ireland, and An Sing, from China. The water connection date of Sept. 26th, 1899 indicates that this house on its 9,000+ sq.ft. lot was completed before the end of that year.
In 1924, 2505 Divisadero was filmed for a characteristic visual gag in the silent movie The Navigator. Buster Keaton, as playboy Rollo Treadway, is wooing shipping heiress Betsy O’Brien, played by Kathryn Maguire. Intending to propose to her, he leaves the house on the north-east corner of Divisadero and Pacific, gets into his limousine and has his chauffeur take him to Betsy’s house, which means simply making a U-turn on the block and dropping him off across the street outside 2505 Divisadero! Inside the house, Keaton’s proposal is summarily rejected with “Certainly not!” He leaves, shrugging off his chauffeur, saying “I think a long walk would do me good” and goes back across the street on foot! During his career, Mathews was involved in two well-publicized disputes. The first, in 1908, was an attempt by an attorney client for whom Mathews had designed a house in San Rafael (“a plastered cottage of an unusual English design”) to stop him designing a similar house for someone close by. The plaintiff submitted an affidavit signed by four respected San Francisco architects stating that Mathews was guilty of a breach of professional ethics by supplying the same plans to two residents of the same city! The judge ruled otherwise, “If this injunction were granted it would have the practical effect of putting architect Mathews out of business, because his personality expresses itself in a certain type of house, and this injunction seeks to restrain him from constructing that type. The application for a restraining order is therefore denied.” The second issue, in 1916, found Mathews as the plaintiff seeking to recover $11,900 for his time and expenses from the Board of Library Trustees after they had awarded the competition for the San Francisco Public Library (now converted into the Asian Arts Museum) to George Kelham, for a plan which Mathews thought was suspiciously similar to the Detroit Public Library design which had been won by New York architect Cass Gilbert. Gilbert was one of the judges for the San Francisco Library competition, as was Paul Cret, Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, who had also been a judge in the Detroit competition and had voted for Gilbert’s design. Furthermore, Kelham had employed a draftsman who had assisted Gilbert in evolving the Detroit Public Library plans! Despite the evidence, Mathews did not find much legal or architectural community support for his position in that dispute, but his point had been made.
Mathews served as Vice-President of the San Francisco Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) for four years from 1913 to 1916, and as its President in 1917. At the State level, he was President of the Board of Architectural Examiners (the licensing agency) for four years from 1915 through 1918. He also designed several churches, of which a fine example in Pacific Heights is the First Church of Christ Scientist, 1710 Franklin at California (1912), and many commercial buildings, including one for P. G. & E. at 447 Sutter (1916) in the Italian Renaissance style of which he was a noted proponent later in his career. He became well-known state-wide, designing several public buildings in Sacramento and he won a prize for his group of buildings for the Santa Barbara Civic Center. Edgar Mathews died at the age of 80 on December 31, 1946, a year after his six-year-older artist brother Arthur, but a year before his 16-year-older architect brother Walter, who died November 20, 1947 at the age of 97. Walter and Edgar were guests of honor at an AIA chapter meeting in September 1945 at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, with Walter, then 95, celebrated as the oldest living architect in the U.S. Both reportedly gave interesting accounts of the development of the practice of architecture in the Bay Area and it was noted that at times the older men were more progressive in their ideas than were the newer practitioners!
©David Parry |
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