HomeMy WebLinkAboutItem 4a. 1133 Pismo St. (HIST-0171-2022)
CULTURAL HERITAGE COMMITTEE AGENDA REPORT
SUBJECT: HIST-0171-2022 (1133 PISMO) – DESIGNATION OF PROPERTY AS
MASTER LIST HISTORIC RESOURCE
PROJECT ADDRESS: 1133 Pismo St. BY: Graham Bultema, Assistant Planner
Phone Number: 805-781-7111
Email: gbultema@slocity.org
FILE NUMBER: HIST-0171-2022 FROM: Brian Leveille, Senior Planner
APPLICANT: Christopher and Heidi Frago REPRESENTATIVE: James Papp
RECOMMENDATION
Make a recommendation to the City Council on the property’s qualification to be included
in the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources as a Master List Resource.
1.0 BACKGROUND
Christopher and Heidi Frago, represented by James Papp, have requested that the
property at 1133 Pismo Street be designated as a Master List Resource in the City’s
Inventory of Historic Resources, as the Thomas and May Brecheen House. A Historic
Resource Evaluation and Addendum evaluating the property and its eligibility for historic
listing have been prepared by James Papp , PhD, Historian and Architectural Historian.
The Cultural Heritage Committee shall review all applications for historic listing, as set out
in §14.01.060 of the City’s Historic Preservation Ordinance, and determine if the property
meets eligibility criteria for listing and provide a recommendation to City Council, for final
action on the application.
1.1 Previous Review
On May 24, 2022, the Cultural Heritage Committee (CHC) reviewed the proposed request
and evaluated if the property met eligibility criteria for listing. The CHC voted to continue
the item to a date uncertain, with direction given to the applicant to specific ally identify
unique qualities or characteristics of the property which would meet eligibility criteria to
be designated as a Master List Resource and to demonstrate compliance with the City’s
Historic Preservation Ordinance. The representative has revised the Historic Evaluation
with an Addendum (see Attachment B) based on direction from the CHC.
2.0 DISCUSSION
Meeting Date: 9/26/2022
Item Number: 4a
Time Estimate: 45 Minutes
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Item 4a
HIST-0171-2022 (1133 Pismo)
Cultural Heritage Committee Report – September 26, 2022
2.1 Site and Setting
The subject property is located southeast of Downtown in a Medium-Density (R-2-H)
residential zoned area along Pismo Street, mid-block between Toro Street and Santa
Rosa Street within the La Vina tract and one block northeast of Mitchell Park in the Old
Town Historic District. Surrounding architectural styles in the neighborhood include
Colonial Revival and Craftsman in largely original condition from the 1910s and 1920s.
At the time of the development, the property was located across the street from William
Weeks high school as well as Pierre Dallidet’s vineyard, both of which are now gone.
Other surrounding properties on the City’s Master List of Historic Resources include the
neighboring Thorne/Nuss House and the Vollmer House, both Craftsman style homes.
2.2 The Thomas and May Brecheen House
City records (see Attachment C) describe the
property as a raised one-story residence
having a rectangular plan and a Neoclassic
Rowhouse stylistic influence, with several
characteristic features highlighted:
Composition shingle hip roof
Clapboard siding
Stairs leading to a front portico
Single classical column
Prominent triple window
Brick chimney
The property is currently on the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources as a Contributing
List Resource (added in 1987 per City Council Resolution 6157). The City’s Historic
Context Statement describes the Neo-Classical Cottage style (particularly prominent
along Pismo Street) as a term used to describe simple house forms or cottages with fewer
decorative features than other styles from the period, with decorative detailing typically
being confined to the porch or cornice line (see Attachment D).
The applicant’s Historical Evaluation describes the property’s history and the building
itself in further detail,1 describing the house as a Colonial Revival or Streamline Colonial
style home. The applicant’s Historical Evaluation describes the relationship between
Neoclassical styles and the Colonial Revival style, stating: “There are in fact, many
Neoclassicisms; Colonial Revival is only one; and Neoclassical is best used as a
catch-all” (Papp, Evaluation pg. 17).
1 A description of the home’s architecture is provided in pgs. 76-79 of the Historical Evaluation
(Attachment A).
Figure 1: Thomas and May Brecheen House
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Item 4a
HIST-0171-2022 (1133 Pismo)
Cultural Heritage Committee Report – September 26, 2022
The style of the home is described as “the purest distillation of the planar, linear,
curvilinear, and minimalist ideals of the Streamline Colonial architectural type in San Luis
Obispo.…” (Papp, Evaluation pg. 83), and is also described as follows in the Summary
Conclusion of the report:
Despite or perhaps because of its modest scale, the T. L. Brecheen House
in the Old Town Historic District is the most highly refined example of
asymmetric Colonial Revival—or Streamline Colonial—in San Luis Obispo.
The bungalow communicates both its classical antecedents and modern
aesthetic with an almost Zen-like economy and rhythm of forms.
(Papp, Evaluation pg. 1)
In response to the CHC’s continuance at the previous CHC meeting on May 24 th, the
representative conducted a more comprehensive analysis to identify unique
characteristics of the property which meet eligibility criteria to be designated as a Master
List Resource. The applicant’s Addendum to the Historical Evaluation (Attachment B)
analyzes and compares the subject property to 57 other Colonial Revival bungalows on
the City’s Contributing List of Historic Resources to identify unique features of the subject
property. The Addendum describes the subject property as unique in comparison to other
Colonial Revival bungalows in the City.
3.0 EVALUATION
To be eligible for listing as an historic resource, a building must exhibit a high level of
historic integrity, be at least 50 years old, and meet one or more of the eligibility criteria
described in § 14.01.070 of the Historic Preservation Ordinance (see Attachment E).
Those resources that maintain their original or attained historic and architectural character
and contribute either by themselves or in conjunction with other structures to the unique
or historic character of a neighborhood, district, or to the City as a whole may be
designated as a “Contributing List Resource” (HPO § 14.01.050). The most unique and
important resources and properties in terms of age, architectural or historical significance,
rarity, or association with important persons or events in the City’s past may be
designated as “Master List Resources”. The property meets the eligibility criteria for listing
as a historic resource and is currently on the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources as a
Contributing List Resource. The applicant’s Historical Evaluation (Attachment A) provides
a description of the architectural and historical significance of the house (Papp, Evaluation
pgs. 76-80), and the applicant’s Addendum (Attachment B) provides further details and
analysis (Papp, Addendum pgs. 10-16) identifying specific features which the CHC can
use to make the determination whether the property qualifies for Master listing as one of
the most unique and important resources in the City.
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Item 4a
HIST-0171-2022 (1133 Pismo)
Cultural Heritage Committee Report – September 26, 2022
3.1 Architectural Criteria
Character-defining features of the Neo-Classical Cottage style are described in the City’s
Historic Context Statement (excerpt provided in Attachment D) to include:
Symmetrical façade
Simple square or rectangular form
Gabled or hipped roof with boxed or open eaves
Wood exterior cladding
Simple window and door surrounds
Details may include cornice line brackets
Porch support with turned spindles or square posts
As described and depicted in pages 76-82 of the applicant’s Historical Evaluation, the
dwelling exhibits many of these characteristic features:
The character-defining features of the Brecheen House are its low-pitched bellcast
roof, asymmetric porch, single Tuscan column on a solid railing, echoing single
and tripartite sash windows on its street façade with their muntined upper sashes
and plate glass lower sashes, rhythmic fenestration on the southwest façade, plain
frieze, novelty siding, string-coursed chimney with pyramidal base, and end-period
Bishop Peak granite curb. (Papp, Evaluation pg. 80)
As further described and depicted in pages 10-14 of the applicant’s Addendum to the
Historical Evaluation, the addendum provides further details stating that the dwelling
includes the following unique characteristic features:
Low-pitch bellcast roof
Long extending eaves
Triple window arrangement
Hidden front door
Single Tuscan column
Solid porch parapet
The Addendum states that the subject property exhibits character-defining features which
are unique in comparison to similar Colonial Revival bungalows on the City’s Contributing
List of Historic Resources:
The data shows the house to be a rare subtype of the Colonial Revival bungalow
stripped of structural but nonfunctional roof decoration. Within this minimalist form,
the anonymous designer lowered the roof pitch to the greatest extent of any of
these bungalows; extended the eaves further than any other; accentuated both
with a japoniste bellcast; created the district’s most sophisticated geometric pattern
of fenestration; successfully experimented with minimizing columns and doors;
and framed the whole with a unique pattern of frieze, architrave, corner boards,
and baseboard. These are details, but as the great Modernist Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe said, “God is in the details”. (Papp, Addendum pg. 2)
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Item 4a
HIST-0171-2022 (1133 Pismo)
Cultural Heritage Committee Report – September 26, 2022
The subject property embodies distinctive characteristics of the Neo-Classical Cottage
style and is currently on the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources as a Contributing List
Resource based on the Architectural Criteria set forth in § 14.01.070 (A) of the Historic
Preservation Ordinance.
As noted in the conclusion, the Committee should make a recommendation on whether
the property qualifies as one of the most unique and important resources in the City to a
degree that qualifies the property for designation as a Master List Historic Resource.
3.2 Conclusion
The Committee should make a recommendation on whether, as described in the
Historical Evaluation and subsequent Addendum provided with the application, the
property qualifies as one of the most unique and important resources in the City, in terms
of age, architectural or historical significance, or rarity, to a degree that qualifies the
property for designation as a Master List Historic Resource.
4.0 ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW
This project is categorically exempt from the provisions of the California Environmental
Quality Act (CEQA). Inclusion of the subject properties on the City’s Inventory of Historic
Resources does not have the potential for causing a significant effect on the environment,
and so is covered by the general rule described in § 15061(b)(3) of the CEQA Guidelines.
5.0 ACTION ALTERNATIVES
1. Staff Recommendation: Make a recommendation to the City Council on the property’s
qualification to be included in the City’s Inventory of Historic Resources as a Master
List Resource. If the Committee recommends the property to be a Master List
Resource, the Committee should note the elements of the property which satisfy
Evaluation Criteria to a degree warranting such designation, as being among the most
unique and important resources and properties in terms of age, architectural or
historical significance, rarity, or association with important persons or events in the
City’s past.
2. Continue consideration of the request with direction to the applicant and staff on
pertinent issues.
6.0 ATTACHMENTS
A - Historic Resource Evaluation - 1133 Pismo St. (Historical Evaluation, James Papp,
PhD)
B - Historic Resource Evaluation Addendum - 1133 Pismo St. (Addendum, James Papp,
PhD)
C - Historic Resource Inventory - 1133 Pismo (City “Yellow File”)
D - Neo-Classical Cottage Style (Excerpt from Historic Context Statement)
E - Evaluation Criteria (Historic Preservation Ordinance)
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Thomas and May Brecheen House • 1133 Pismo Street • Master List Application
Summary Conclusion
Despite or perhaps because of its modest scale, the T. L. Brecheen House in the Old Town
Historic District is the most highly refined example of asymmetric Colonial Revival—or
Streamline Colonial—in San Luis Obispo. The bungalow communicates both its classical
antecedents and modern aesthetic with an almost Zen-like economy and rhythm of forms.
Apparently built on spec by real estate agent A. F. Fitzgerald, president of San Luis Obispo’s
Chamber of Commerce, it was advertised on 19 July 1907. Its purchase by Thomas Levin
Brecheen was announced four days later in the Telegram. One month earlier, Brecheen, at
age twenty-nine, had been appointed principal of San Luis Obispo’s public grammar
schools. Three weeks earlier, the County Board of Education had elected him its president.
His brand new house on the north edge of La Vina tract expressed both classicism and
progress—much like Brecheen himself, whom the Telegram praised as “a hard student and
a thorough disciplinarian.” The Fates had elevated him to the zenith of a career that would,
through hubris, spectacularly self-destruct, with two precedent-setting California Supreme
Court defeats and a doomed populist coup. Likewise, the new stone-built Neoclassical high
school that his house looked out on would be demolished as an earthquake hazard, and the
brick built Colonial Revival Nipomo Street school where he taught would be torn down. But
in the reverse of the Three Little Pigs saga, the wood frame Brecheen House is still with us.
Though architect and builder are unknown, the Brecheen House is far more accomplished
than buildings of clearer provenance, embodying the Streamline Colonial as a descendant
of Shingle and purification of Queen Anne. This embodiment and its high artistic values
qualify it for historic listing. Its architectural significance and integrity make it one of the
“most unique and important” resources in San Luis Obispo, qualifying it for the Master List.
Submitted on behalf of Christopher Frago and Heidi Howland-Frago by
James Papp, PhD • Historicities LLC • 10 March 2022
ATTACHMENT A
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Contents
Summary Conclusion 1
Foreword on Terminology: Embodiment 3
Foreword on Historic Designation: Landmark, Register, Master, Contributing 3
Timelines
Streamline Colonial 6
1133 Pismo Street 10
Thomas Levin Brecheen 11
Definitions
Distinguishing Neoclassical and Colonial Revival 17
Colonial Revival and Streamline Colonial 22
Architectural Historic Context
The Shingle style and Streamline Colonial 25
Shingle minimalism and planarity 27
Shingle curvilinearity 28
Shingle historical reference and deconstruction 29
The Bay Area Shingle style 30
The East Coast and Bay Area Shingle styles in San Luis Obispo 30
Linearity: clapboard and drop siding Streamline Colonial 31
The Universe of Master List Streamline and Shingle Colonials, San Luis Obispo
Streamline and Shingle Colonial subtypes 33
Dates of Master List Streamline and Shingle Colonials 35
Historic and Architectural Evaluation 40
Righetti House 40 Hourihan House 52 Nichols House 61
Erickson House 41 Stanton House 53 Ramage House 62
Brew House 42 Hill House 54 Kaiser House 63
Fumigali House 43 Smith House 55 Bullard House 63
Crocker House 44 Dutton House 56 Bradbury House 64
Marshall House 45 Renetzky House 57 Jackson House 64
J. L. Anderson House 46 Chapek House 58 Heritage Inn 65
Upham House 47 Mazza House 58 Bushnell House 66
Aston House 49 Strickland House 59 Sandercock House 67
Unangst House 50 Kaufman House 60 F. Anderson House 68
Albert & Baker Houses 51 Oliver House 61
Thomas Levin Brecheen and May Miller Brecheen 69
Architectural Significance of the Brecheen House 76
Period of Significance 80
Character-Defining Features 80
Integrity 80
Conclusion 83
ATTACHMENT A
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Foreword on Terminology: Embodiment
The concept of how a resource might “embody” the distinctive characteristics of a type, or a
period, or a method of construction is left undefined by the National Register, which allows
communities to make their own decisions about their own resources. To embody is to give
tangible or visible form to an idea. In architectural history, this normally includes specific
decorative iconography—a column that refers to ancient Greece, for instance, and may in
extension refer to a culture’s sense of its kinship with ancient Greek ideas. But architectural
styles don’t just consist of decorative pastiche but of a different way of organizing space
and living. Greek Revival architecture in North America’s hotter climates, for instance, often
expressed itself with full-width porticos or encompassing peripteroi, hence the Monterey
style adobe, which is the most famous California expression of the Greek Revival. The style
also emphasized interior symmetry and linear order and extended this concept to such
details as the squaring off of fanlights (since the ancient Greeks didn’t have arches).
Embodiment of an architectural style, therefore, means not just treatment of iconic
decorative elements, and not just the organization of lines, planes, and spaces, but the
consistent unification of the two for expressing an aesthetic and social conception.
Foreword on Historic Designation: Landmark, Register, Master, and Contributing
San Luis Obispo’s Master List may be unique for demanding uniqueness as a standard of
inclusion. Other historical preservation systems in the United States, including state and
local systems, follow the half-century-old regulations of the National Register of Historic
Places (NRHP), whereby the standard is significance, including resources (1) associated
with significant events or figures; (2) embodying types, periods, or methods of
construction; (3) representing the work of a master; (4) possesses high artistic values; or
(5)representing a significant and distinguishable entity.
Unfortunately, any resource that is significant, in embodying a type or period or
representing the work of a master, is unlikely to be unique. A resource that is truly unique
is unlikely to be significant, being disconnected from “the broad patterns of our history.”
ATTACHMENT A
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In national and state designations, any resource of at least local significance qualifies for
the National Register, and any resource of national significance qualifies as a National
Landmark. Similarly, any resource of at least local significance qualifies for the California
Register of Historical Resources (CRHR), and any resource of statewide or regional
significance as a California Historical Landmark.
The perverse result of San Luis Obispo’s departure from the national standard is that a
resource that qualifies for the California or National Register or even as a California or
National Landmark may not qualify as a Master List resource, because of the demand for
uniqueness rather than local, regional, statewide, or national significance.
Another anomaly is San Luis Obispo’s unique use of the term contributing. In an individual
National or California Register listing or historic district, contributing is a technical term
for a component deemed to be part of its significance. In the NRHP Jack House property, for
instance, the Jack House itself and the Wash House are contributing, while the modern
restroom and catering pavilion is non-contributing, and the Carriage House is non-
contributing because, despite predating the Jack House, it has been covered with plywood.
San Luis Obispo’s 1987 Historical Preservation Program Guidelines codified two classes of
resources, Master List and Contributing List, without defining the difference between them
or the standards of inclusion for either. In practice, San Luis Obispo’s Contributing List was
the result of windshield or reconnaissance surveys for each proposed historic district, and
the Master List consisted of those resources on which supporting research, in an equivalent
of a DPR 523, was done. This is not normal practice in historic resource designation, where
documentary evidence is expected as a minimum of listing, and it has resulted in a large
number of Contributing Listings unsupported by age, significance, or integrity and a Master
List dominated by size and prominence and little diversified by race, class, and gender.
Subsequently, the uniqueness standard was introduced for Master List resources, while
Contributing List resources were defined as “maintain[ing] their original or attained
historic and architectural character” (i.e., rejecting the standard of integrity for a specific
period of significance) and “contribut[ing] … to the unique or historic character of a
neighborhood, district, or to the city as a whole” (i.e., rejecting the standard of significance
for individual properties or the larger area of which they’re a part, as any neighborhood
can—and every neighborhood does—have “unique … character”). The fifty-year standard
was also lifted for the Contributing List, so at this point the Contributing standard was
effectively no standard.
As a result, though given the same de jure protections in the Historic Preservation
Ordinance, Contributing List resources, de facto, have not been treated with the same
seriousness as Master List resources, and many have suffered significant degradation to
their integrity as a result. When the Mills Act was introduced to San Luis Obispo,
Contributing List properties were, not surprisingly, barred from benefits.
Possibly to mitigate this situation, the NRHP standards of significance and integrity were
also subsequently introduced as a minimum for any listed resource in San Luis Obispo,
Contributing or Master. Now any resource applying for the Contributing List would require
the same standards as for the National Register. But in fact no one applies to put resources
on the Contributing List, because the Contributing List confers no tangible tax beneifts or
intangible benefits of pride. Of those resources already on the Contributing List, roughly
ATTACHMENT A
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half might qualify for the National Register in terms of significance and integrity, and a few
would qualify for state or national landmark status, but they are not eligible for Mills Act,
and roughly half would not qualify under significance or integrity, and they are subject to
pointless restrictions.
Most of San Luis Obispo’s Master List resources would qualify for the National and
California Registers. For the ones that would not, integrity is usually the problem rather
than significance. In practice, uniqueness has often been jettisoned as the guide, so we have
not ended up with a Master List of bizarre anomalies. Yet too often admittance to the
Master List has depended on a vague sense of what is “special” rather than significant, and
“special” usually equates to what is expensive and noticeable, which usually means White
and upper-middle-class.
Most local California jurisdictions have a single level of historic designation, and those with
Mills Act make it available to all designees. A few jurisdictions, like Pasadena and Santa
Barbara, also maintain an additional, higher level of listing that resembles State and
National Landmarks by including local resources of regional, state, or national significance.
As far as my research on California’s five dozen Certified Local Governments has been able
to discover, San Luis Obispo is the sole jurisdiction with two levels of designation of which
one did not originally have significance and integrity as its standard and does not have
Mills Act as a benefit and of which the other has uniqueness rather than significance as a
standard and does have Mills Act as a benefit. This departure from national norms may be
why San Luis Obispo has such a small proportion of resources on the National and
California Registers and why historic resource protection is considered a bone of
contention rather than a source of community pride, a means of recognizing
underrepresented communities, and a magnet for cultural tourism.
ATTACHMENT A
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Timelines: Streamline Colonial • 1133 Pismo Street • Thomas Levin Brecheen
Streamline Colonial
1870 With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Pennsylvanian Charles F.
McKim returns from studying architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in
Paris and goes to work for Gambrill and Richardson in New York, assisting
Henry Hobson Richardson on Trinity Church, Boston, a foundational
Richardsonian Romanesque design.1
1872 After two years at Gambrill and Richardson, McKim sets up his own office
in the same building and in 1873 is joined by William R. Mead, who has just
spent two years in Florence. McKim is replaced at Gambrill and Richardson
by the nineteen-year-old Stanford White.2
1874 McKim hires William James Stillman to take photographs of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century buildings in around Newport, RI, where the family
of his Ecole contemporary and brief architectural partner William Bigelow
and McKim’s soon-to-be wife Annie Bigelow has a summer house.3
Hip, front- and side gable, and gambrel roofs on clapboard and shingle houses in one of
Stillman’s 1874 Newport photographs, entitled “Tory Corner Thames Street” in McKim’s
handwriting. Newport Historical Society.
One of the Stillman photographs, of the shingled rear of the clapboard
Bishop Berkeley House, is published in the inaugural January 1874 issue of
Richardson’s journal The New York Sketchbook of Architecture as a gelatin
transfer, the first photomechanical reproduction of a building in the United
1. Allan Greenberg and Michael George, The Architecture of McKim, Mead, and White: 1879–1915 (Lanham:
Taylor Trade, 2013), p. xxii–xxiii.
2. Ibid. and Samuel G. White, The Houses of McKim, Mead, and White (New York: Universe, 2008), p. 8.
3. Newport Historical Society collection notes.
ATTACHMENT A
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States.4 The New York Sketchbook will publish monthly for the next three
years, becoming the foundational text for revival of Colonial era
architecture with articles by McKim and drawings by White.
1874 Modern shingle-sided structures are designed for the first time by
Richardson (William Watts Sherman House, Newport, RI, extant), Gambrill
(Tinkham House, Oswego, NY, no longer extant), and McKim (Blake House,
Newton Lower Falls, MA, no longer extant), commencing the East Coast
Shingle style.5 Richardson’s Watts Sherman House is a Tudor Revival
modeled on Norman Shaw’s “Queen Anne” tile-hung work in England.
Early Colonial cabin, Centennial International Exposition, Philadelphia, 1876
1876 The Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia features a log cabin
with a sign above its door, “YE OLDEN TIME; Die Alten Zeiten; Les Vieux
Temps; WELCOME TO ALL.” It contains “relics of old Puritan and
Revolutionary days” (some of dubious origin) and demonstrations by
costumed reenactors: “a maiden, whose Puritan garb does not detract from
the brightness of her eyes, is in waiting to welcome the visitor.”6 Other than
this example of early American kitsch, the architecture at America’s first
4. Leland M. Roth, Shingle Styles: Innovation and Tradition in American Architecture, 1874 to 1982 (New York:
Abrams, 1999), p. 9.
5. Vincent J. Scully, Jr., The Shingle Style and the Stick Style, revised edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1971), p. 14.
6. “A New England Cabin,” Red Wing, MN Grange Advance, 7 June 1876, p. 2.
ATTACHMENT A
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world’s fair was contemporary rather than nostalgic: Gothic, Stick, Beaux
Arts, and cast iron and glass.
1876–1877 The Reverend Joseph Worcester builds the first Bay Area Shingle style
house in Piedmont, CA.7
1877 William Bigelow joins the partnership of McKim and Mead. With Stanford
White, they make an architectural sketching tour of Marblehead, Salem, and
Newburyport, MA and Portsmouth, NH. Harper’s in 1875 has already
published illustrated articles on Colonial towns, whose buildings are part of
the attraction of the new oceanside resorts (Scully, p. 30, note 36).
1877–1878 The firm of McKim, Mead, and Bigelow designs the Samuel Gray Ward
House, Oakswood, in Lenox, MA (demolished), likely the first Colonial
Revival house and first Colonial Revival Shingle house.
1878 Stanford White leaves Gambrill and Richardson for a year in Europe,
initially accompanied by Charles McKim (Greenberg and George, p. xxiii).
1879 With the fraught dissolution of McKim’s marriage to Annie Bigelow,
William Bigelow leaves the firm. White, returning from Europe, is invited to
replace him (Ibid. and White, p. 8). McKim, Mead, and White is born.
1879–1881 McKim, Mead, and White introduces curved porches and a bellcast roof in
the Shingle Colonial Revival style Newport Casino.
Bellcast roof of tower (left) and curved porches (center) of the Newport Casino
1881–1883 In Newport’s Shingle Colonial Isaac Bell House, down the street from the
Casino, McKim, Mead, and White uses curvature in both interior and
7. Richard Longstreth, On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 112.
ATTACHMENT A
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exterior extensions. Bell is brother-in-law of newspaper publisher James
Gordon Bennett, who commissioned the Newport Casino.
1882–1883 The firm introduces eyebrow windows in the Benson House of the Montauk
Point Association Homes, NY.
1883–1884 McKim, Mead, and White designs the Alice and Julia Appleton House in
Lenox, MA, a clapboard house that is the first Streamline Colonial. McKim
later marries Julia Appleton and moves into the house.
1885–1886 McKim, Mead, and White designs the H. A. C. Taylor House in Newport, RI,
another clapboard Colonial seen by twentieth-century scholars to have a
more traditionalizing influence.
1886–1887 The house-encompassing gable that McKim has experimented with in
Bytharbor (1878–80) for his friend Prescott Hall Butler is elongated and
simplified for the William G. Low House (demolished), Bristol, RI, to
become the purest expression of Shingle minimalism.
The cottage designed by S. B. Abbott for Ernest Graves, known as the Righetti House, at Palm
and Essex (now Johnson) in the Fire Department’s Souvenir of San Luis Obispo in 1904
1889 “Major” S. B. Abbott designs a curving, rambling “cottage” for attorney
Ernest Graves in San Luis Obispo, employing Colonial Revival elements—
among others—and described by the architect as “Romanesque.”8
1902–1906 San Luis Obispo’s leading architects—including William H. Weeks, Hilamon
Spencer Laird, and W. C. Phillips—design Streamline Colonial and Shingle
8. “A Fine Residence,” daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 17 May 1889, p. 3.
ATTACHMENT A
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Colonial houses now on the city’s Master List, for clients whose lives do not
always approach the rational and uncluttered ideals of their architecture.
1903–1911 Various known builders and presumed builder-architects—such as R. S.
Aston, William Thompson, John Chapek, B. Morganti, James Rasmussen and
Lee R. Parsons, Harry Lyman, Joseph Maino, and James J. Maino—construct
Streamline Colonials and Shingle Colonials now on San Luis Obispo’s
Master List for themselves and clients.
1901–1910 Streamline Colonials and Shingle Colonials now on the Master List are
created by now unknown architects and builders.
1907 Real estate agent A. F. Fitzgerald has the bungalow at 1133 Pismo in La
Vina tract built on spec.9 The architect and builder are unknown, but the
house distills local Streamline Colonial to its most minimalist, planar,
linear, and delicately curvilinear combination.
1133 Pismo Street
1907 July 19 Real estate agent A. F. Fitzgerald lists the newly built bungalow at 1133
Pismo for sale.
July 23 The Daily Telegram announces purchase of A. F. Fitzgerald’s new house by
Professor T. L. Brecheen, newly appointed principle of San Luis Obispo’s
Mission District grammar schools and newly elected president of the
County Board of Education.10
Aug. 1 T. L. Brecheen and his new bride, May Miller of Berkeley, will be at home at
1133 from this date.11
1908 Dec. Brecheen announces his departure from San Luis Obispo to Alameda.12
1909 Sep.– Homer J. Ridle, agent for the Standard Gear Motor, provides 1133 Pismo as
Dec. & his address, and Mrs. Ridle hosts the Parthenon Club there, assigning parts
for a reading of A Comedy of Errors.13
1910 Jan Mrs. S. E. McCool, dress fabric saleswoman, provides 1133 as her address.14
The McCools are friends of the Ridles.
Apr.– Mrs. Anna English, leasing agent for Santa Maria oil land, provides 1133
May Pismo as her address.15
1911 Jan. Mrs. Ridle, as president of the Woman’s Civic Club, hosts an at home for
club members at 1133 Pismo in early 1911.16
9. “New House in La Vina Tract,” advertisement, daily Tribune, 19 July 1907, p. 1.
10. “Fine Property Changes Hands,” p. 8.
11. “Prof. Brecheen Takes Bride,” Daily Telegram, 29 July 1908, p. 1.
12. “Brecheen Gets Place in Alameda Schools,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 15 Dec. 1908, p. 4.
13. “Important Announcement,” advertisement, Daily Telegram, 28 Dec. 1909, p. 4; “Parthenon Club Tonight,”
Daily Telegram, 27 Sep. 1909, p. 4.
14. “Newest in Ladies Dress Goods,” advertisement, Daily Telegram, 8–28 Jan. 1910.
15. “Oil Land to Lease,” advertisement, Santa Maria Times, 23 Apr. 1910, p. 2.
16. “Mrs. Ridle’s Reception,” Daily Telegram, 3 Jan. 1911, p. 1.
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1914 J. C. Driscoll, of the Wholesale Company, and Mrs. Driscoll are at 1133.17
1917–1919 Fred L. Garrett, a conductor with the Southern Pacific, and Mrs. Garrett rent
1133 Pismo, still owned by the J. C. Driscolls.18 In 1918 Harold Lee, office
boy at the Producers’ Transportation Company at Orcutt, and Miss Ellen
Lee, the sister of Mrs. Garrett, are also there.19
1919 Mar. W. V. Fisk buys 1133 Pismo to occupy with his family (ibid.).
1920 Mar. W. V. Fisk sells 1133 Pismo to W. M. Fisk, a railroad man from Lompoc.
20
1921 Sep. The Quality Bakery buys 1133 Pismo for its head baker, Mr. R. Heidorn.21
1922 Oct. The Heidorns leave 1133 Pismo.
22
1923 Feb. James Renetzky moves into 1133 Pismo, which he has purchased, after the
death and distribution of the estate of Joseph Renetzky. James had been
working as a salesman in the family shoe store.23
1938 1938 City Directory lists Emory L. McConnell as owner of 1133 Pismo
1942 1942 directory lists music teacher Andrew Onstad and wife Olga as owners.
1950–1968 Dalie Wetzel owns and lives in 1133 Pismo through the 1950s and 1960s,
according to the City Directory.
1971 The City Directory shows that Harry and Josephine Delaney purchase the
house at the beginning of the 1970s.
T. L. Brecheen Timeline
1877 July 10 Thomas Levin Brecheen is born in Texas to farmer Lemuel Lafayette
Brecheen and Martha Ann Moore Brecheen.24
1903–1905 Brecheen is principal of the Simi school and then Montalvo school in
Ventura County. At Simi, whose school district has nine voters, he is one of
two teachers, the other being a woman.25 At Montalvo he is the sole
teacher. The previous year’s teacher has left for Los Angeles after marrying
a sixteen-year-old student. Brecheen starts boys’ and girls’ basketball
17. “Episcopal Parlor Services,” Daily Telegram, 24 Feb. 1914, p. 5.
18. “Home from South,” Daily Telegram, 12 May 1917, p. 5; “Fisk Buys Home,” Daily Telegram, 28 Mar. 1919, p.
5.
19. “Promoted,” Daily Telegram, 17 June 1918, p.5; “Home from Vacation,” Daily Telegram, 30 Aug. 1918, p. 5.
20. “Fisk Place Sold,” Daily Telegram, 15 Mar. 1920, p. 5.
21. “Around the Town,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 27 Sep. 1921, p. 4.
22. “Local News Notes,” Daily Telegram, 16 Oct. 1922, p. 5.
23. “Local News Notes: Buys Pismo Street House,” Daily Telegram, 6 Feb. 1923, p. 5; “Superior Court:
Probate,” weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 17 Feb. 1922, p. 3.
24. 1949 Los Angeles County death certificate and 1880 US Census.
25. “Teapot Hiss for Simi School,” Los Angeles Times, 17 Apr. 1909, p. 25; “Ventura Notes,” Los Angeles Times,
13 Oct. 1903, p. 11; “Interesting News from Camarillo,” Oxnard Courier, 12 Feb. 1905, p. 5.
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teams and coaches the former to a county championship, then challenges
any school in Southern California to the region’s championship.26
1905–1907 Brecheen is principal of the Cambria school, one of three teachers, the other
two being women.27
Thomas L. Brecheen with his faculty as principal of the Cambria School. San Luis Obispo Daily
Telegram, 24 June 1907, p. 1.
1906 June 5 The County Board of Supervisors appoints T. L. Brecheen to the County
Board of Education.28
1907 June 22 The Mission school district trustees appoint Brecheen principal of San Luis
Obispo’s grammar schools, Nipomo Street (first through eighth grades) and
Court (second through sixth grades), one of fourteen teachers, the other
thirteen being women.29
July 2 The County Board of Education elects Brecheen its president.30
26. “Ventura: Teacher Marries Pupil,” Los Angeles Times, 25 May 1904, p. 11; “Basketball Challenges to All
Southern California,” Los Angeles Times, 19 Feb. 1905, p. 23.
27. “Brief Mention,” Oxnard Courier, 14 July 1905, p. 2.
28. “Supervisors,” daily San Luis Obispo Tribune, 6 June 1906, p. 4.
29. “New Principal for City Schools,” Daily Telegram, 24 June 1907, p. 1; “School Notes of Interest,” Daily
Telegram, 18 Sep. 1907, p. 5.
30. “School Notes of Interest,” Daily Telegram, 2 July 1907, p. 5.
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July 22 Brecheen buys the just-completed bungalow at 1133 Pismo “Fine Property
Changes Hands”).
Oct. 14 Brecheen is arrested and arraigned for assault after flogging sons of some
of the leading citizens of San Luis Obispo for disobedience. He pleads not
guilty, and the charges are dropped as unsustainable.31
Dec. 25 The eighth grade students present Brecheen with a gold-mounted
Waterman fountain pen for his “unceasing efforts in their behalf” and
“many kind words of encouragement, counsel, and advice.”32
1908 July 23 Brecheen marries May Miller of Berkeley (“Prof. Brecheen Takes Bride”).
Aug. 12 In a dispute with the district trustees over whether he will take all or part
of the eighth grade class, Brecheen resigns as principal of the Nipomo
Street and Court Schools.33
Dec. 14 Brecheen is reported departing, supposedly for a principalship in Alameda,
after the Board of Supervisors removes him from the County Board of
Education, in his absence, for being absent without leave.34
1910–1911 Brecheen is reported as a teacher in Oakland, at Fremont High School.
35
1912–1919 After clashing with the Oakland school trustees over the unauthorized
purchase of forty-four typewriters at Fremont, Brecheen becomes principal
of the new high school in Calistoga (1912–1916), superintendent of the
high school and grammar school in Ceres (1916–1917), principal of Clovis
high school (1917–1918), and Livermore (1918–1919).36 He eventually
loses a lawsuit over the unpaid bill for high school yearbooks at Ceres,
possibly flees arrest over Spanish flu infections at Clovis, and is fired by the
Livermore school trustees for interfering in a trustee election and
investigated by the Alameda County deputy district attorney for falsely
reporting University of California and University of Texas degrees
qualifications.37 The County Board of Education moves to revoke his
teaching credential, but it has lapsed three years earlier.
1920 Apr. 10 Brecheen, having turned to real estate, is arrested for assaulting his former
employer, Berkeley real estate man D. L. Jungck. He sues Jungck—twice.38
31. “Warrant Is Served,” Daily Telegram, 15 Oct. 1907, p. 1.
32. “Remember Prof. Brecheen,” Daily Telegram, 28 Dec. 1907, p. 1.
33. “Brecheen Quits His Principalship,” 13 Aug. 1908, p. 1.
34. weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune, 15 Dec. 1908: “School Affairs: Brecheen Gets Place in Alameda Schools,” p.
2; “County Matters: Brecheen Is Dropped from Board of Education,” p. 4.
35. “Teachers Ask Legislative Aid,” San Francisco Call, 15 Nov. 1910, p. 8.
36. “Berkeley Bars Oakland Pupils,” San Francisco Call, 27 July 1912, p. 17; “The High School Teachers
Chosen,” Weekly Calistogian, 6 Sep. 1912, p. 3; “Ceres Board of Education Is Economical,” Modesto Evening
News, 1 May 1916, p. 8;
37. “Ceres School Prepares for Military Class,” Modesto Morning Herald, 30 Aug 1918, p. 5; “Former Teacher in
Local Schools Leaves Fresno County and Wild Rumors Are Afloat,” 27 Sep. 1918, p. 1; “County Sifts School
Fight at Livermore,” Oakland Tribune, 13 Dec. 1919, p. 3.
38. “Realty Broker Under Arrest,” San Francisco Examiner, 10 Apr. 1920, p. 10; “Realty Operator Sued Second
Time,” San Francisco Examiner, 20 May, 1920, p. 20.
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Aug. 3 After Brecheen goes into the rea estate business on his own, police
inspector breaks up an altercation in the lobby of the First National Bank of
Berkeley between Brecheen and a client who claims he has been duped.39
Aug. 9 Brecheen is arrested at his in-laws house, where he is living, for felony
embezzlement, after a client accuses him of keeping the 25 percent down
payment on a sale whose commission was to be 4 percent. He is arraigned
Aug. 9, with bail fixed at $10,000.40 There is no record of the resolution of
the charges, but he appears to stay out of jail.
1920 Nov. 19 The State Real Estate Commissioner, under California’s pioneering 1919
Real Estate Act establishing licensure, revokes Brecheen’s 1920 broker’s
license on grounds of “embezzlement, false representations, and gross
moral turpitude.” Brecheen sues him for unconstitutionally exercising
judicial powers.41
1921 Sep. 19 The California Supreme Court rules against Brecheen, upholding the
commissioner’s quasi-judicial right to revoke licenses (“SF No. 9782”).
1921 Nov. 18 The State Supreme Court rules against Brecheen for a second time, in his
appeal against the State Real Estate Commissioner for having had his
application for a 1921 broker’s license denied. The Oakland Real Estate
Board calls these “two very important decisions by the State Supreme
Court” (“Oakland”).
1922 Mar. 29 Brecheen pleads guilty to petty larceny in the theft of two glass doors from
a Berkeley construction site.42
1924 Sep. 18 Brecheen is caught red-handed leaving a house in Albany with items
belonging to the owner and is charged with burglary.43
1925 Apr. 10 After two hung juries on the burglary charge—Brecheen had been given
keys by a tenant—he pleads guilty to petty larceny, and the burglary charge
is dropped (ibid.).
1930 Apr. 3 May Miller Brecheen, living with her parents and nineteen-year-old
daughter in Berkeley and working as a child’s nursemaid, declares herself
on the US Census as widowed.
1933 Feb. 20 Brecheen—now “Tom Brecheen”—who has become a real estate agent in
Ashland, OR and an organizer of the local Good Government Congress,
helps organize the theft from a vault at the Jackson County Courthouse of
10,000 ballots and the burning of some and dumping in the Rogue River of
others in the midst of an election recount. This is the culmination of the
Jackson County Rebellion, a Depression-era populist takeover of
39. “Realty Row Is Near Riot,” San Francisco Examiner, 4 Aug. 1920, p. 20.
40. “Fraud Charge in Realty Deal,” San Francisco Examiner, 10 Aug. 1920, p. 10.
41. “Oakland Real Estate Board: Official Bulletin,” Oakland Tribune, Development Section, 15 Jan. 1922, p. 1;
“SF No. 9782. In Bank. September 19, 1921,” San Francisco Recorder, 27 Sep. 1921, p. 8.
42. “Theft of Windows Charged to Broker,” Oakland Tribune, 29 Mar. 1922, p. 24.
43. “Former Principal Admits Larceny,” Oakland Tribune, 10 Apr. 1925, p. 20.
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government via the Good Government Congress, local Democratic Party,
and paramilitaries known as the Green Springs Mountain Boys.44
Feb. 25 State and city authorities arrest the county sheriff, county jailer, a deputy,
Brecheen, and two unnamed youths described as “courthouse boarders.”
Brecheen is held in neighboring Josephine County as a precaution.45 He
unable to make his $7,500 bail. Meanwhile, his daughter is pledging her
sorority in Oakland.46
1933 Aug. 5 Brecheen, imprisoned since February, pleads guilty to ballot theft. His
attorney seeks leniency, claiming, “Brecheen is not a chronic lawbreaker.”47
Circuit Judge George Skipworth sentences him to eighteen months in state
prison, of which he serves a year.48 The recently-elected Jackson County
sheriff, county judge, and Rogue River mayor are among others imprisoned
for the theft. Llewellyn Banks, editor and publisher of the Medford Daily
News and the quasi-fascistic and anti-Semitic prophet of the movement, is
sentenced to life for murder after he shoots the constable serving a warrant
on him in the case and dies in prison.
1934 May 7 For its coverage of the Jackson County Rebellion, the Medford Mail Tribune
receives a Pulitzer Prize for “the most disinterested and meritorious public
service rendered by an American newspaper during 1933,” the first small
town newspaper so honored.49
1937 Nov. 25 Brecheen’s daughter Natalie marries Norvin A. Reed of Los Angeles,
residing near McArthur Park. The Reeds rise in the world, living in
Hollywood by 1941, Montebello by 1942 (possibly with Natalie’s divorced
mother and widowed grandmother), and Toluca Lake by 1949.50 In 1949
Norvin Reed is described as a packing executive.51
1940 According to the US Census, Thomas Brecheen is divorced, working as a
research assistant for the school district, and living in a rooming house on
the edge of LA’s Japantown with seventy-three other male lodgers, mostly
white, with a few Japanese, Filipinos, and Mexicans, ranging from laborers
to street peddlers to night watchmen.
44. Jeff LaLande, “Good Government Congress (Jackson County Rebellion),” Oregon Encyclopedia, Oregon
Historical Society, oregonencyclopedia.org, accessed 20 Feb. 2022.
45. “Sheriff and Jailer Nabbed as Ballot Theft Suspects,” Medford Mail Tribune, 26 Feb. 1933, p. 1; .
46. “State Will Call Many Witnesses in Trying Banks,” Medford Mail Tribune, 4 May 1933, p. 7; “Activities of
Eastbay Society,” Oakland Tribune, 7 Apr. 1933, p. 12.
47. “Ashland Resident Admits Complicity in Ballot Thefts,” Sacramento Bee, 7 Aug. 1933, p. 9; “Fehl’s Tenure
As County Judge Is Ended by Court,” Medford Mail Tribune, 8 Aug. 1933, p. 8.
48. “Schermerhorn’s Commitment Is Filed In Court,” Medford Mail Tribune, 3 July 1934, p. 3.
49. “Some State Comments on Award of Pulitzer Medal,” Medford Mail-Tribune, 10 May 1934, p. 8.
50. County of Los Angeles marriage license; “Baby Shower,” Highland Park News Herald, 14 Feb. 1941, p. 10;
“Bride-Elect Feted in Hollywood,” Ventura County Star–Free Press, 31 Mar. 1942, p. 5; “Indian Student
Addresses Troop at International Meet,” North Hollywood Valley Times, 21 May 1951, p. 11; “Baskets of
Flowers,” photo caption, Los Angeles Times, 26 May 1952, part ii, p. 23;
51. Austin Conover, “Roaming Around,” Hollywood Citizen-News, 15 Nov. 1949, p. 9.
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1949 Feb. 9 At the end, suffering from cerebral thrombosis and senility, Thomas L.
Brecheen is living with his daughter’s family in Toluca Lake and dies at LA
County General Hospital, age seventy-one.52
1950s The Norvin Reeds become San Fernando Valley social fixtures in the Los
Angeles press, fundraising for the LA Philharmonic, Florence Crittenton
Home, and Toluca Lake Garden Club. Natalie joins the social-philanthropic
National Charity League with her daughters Mayla Ann and Melinda
Natalie.53
1958 Nov. 29 Brecheen’s elder granddaughter Mayla Ann Reed debuts at National Charity
League Coronet Debutante Ball at the Beverly Hilton. Graduating from
UCLA she becomes, like her grandfather, an elementary school teacher.54
May Miller Brecheen dies in 1965; Natalie Brecheen Reed, after divorce
from her husband, in 1972.
Thomas Brecheen, May Miller Brecheen, and Natalie Brecheen Reed are
interred together at Forest Lawn, Glendale.55
Natalie Brecheen Reed (third from left) raising money for
the LA Philharmonic, Valley Times, 16 Sep. 1954, p. 4
Mayla Ann Reed debuts, Los
Angeles Times, 1 Dec. 1958
52. Los Angele County death certificate.
53. Peggy McCall, “Valley Ticktockers To Receive Awards,” Valley Times, 9 June 1960, p. 11.
54. “Coronet Debutantes Bow at Charity League Ball,” Los Angeles Times, 1 Dec. 1958, part ii, p. 1; “Spinsters
Take in 22 New Members,” Los Angeles Times, 13 Nov. 1966, part I, p. 11.
55. Thomas Levin Brecheen, findagrave.com, accessed 20 Feb. 2022.
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Definitions
Distinguishing Neoclassical and Colonial Revival There is a good deal of confusion
between Colonial Revival and Neoclassical of the late nineteenth through twentieth
centuries, given their roots in the same English Enlightenment representations of Italian
Renaissance interpretations of Roman architecture. There are, in fact, many
Neoclassicisms; Colonial Revival is only one; and Neoclassical is best used as a catch-all.
Virginia and Lee McAlester in A Field Guide to American Houses, the Bible of American
house types, dangle a red herring by defining Neoclassical as having stylistic roots in the
two-story porticos of state pavilions of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. They snippily add
that Mount Vernon’s two-story portico—the basis for the exposition’s Virginia Pavilion—
was completed only in 1784 so is not Colonial, which overlooks (1) it was planned in 1774,
and Washington had an excellent excuse in not getting it done immediately; (2) other
surviving houses—e.g., the Morris Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights, New York City
and Whitehall in Annapolis, MD—had Colonial-era two-story porticos; and (3) revivalists
were not interested in parsing architectural agglomerations.56 Even the McAlesters, in their
examples, don’t stick to their narrow definition, which would allow the only Neoclassical
dwelling in San Luis Obispo to be the apartment house at 1248 Palm, a post-1941 Greek
Revival more likely inspired by Gone With The Wind than the Chicago World’s Fair.
Tara in Gone With the Wind, 1939, and 1248 Palm Street, after 1941, both with square-
columned Greek Revival portico and anachronistic Federal fanlight. (Greek Revival fanlights
are rectangular, as the ancient Greeks didn’t have arches.)
The post-Centennial revival of early American architectures cast a broad net for its
references, drawing on everything from seventeenth-century Post-Medieval English to
Dutch Colonial, Georgian, and early nineteenth century Federal and Greek Revival. Colonial
Revivalists were taken with eccentricities, and they freely mixed elements from different
periods in the same structure. Perhaps the San Luis Obispo Tribune’s 1904 comment on the
E. B. Stanton House at Buchon and Garden—“The style may be best expressed as
American”—is the most apt.
56 (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 346.
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Since at least 1856—when
Henry Miller depicted a two-
story Greek Revival adobe
next to the Mission, at the
foot of the former Indian
slave cabins of Chorro street
(detail right)—Neoclassical
buildings have aggrandized
real San Luis Obispo with a
connection to the ideal Greek
and Roman past.
These include the Sauer-Adams Adobe (extant), a ca 1860 Greek Revival expansion of two
ca 1801-1810 single-story Indian slave cabins, with its square-columned, full-width
balcony, pedimented windows and doors, and rectangular fanlight; Thomas J. Johnson’s
1872–1873 County Courthouse (demolished); William H. Weeks’s 1905–1906 Mission High
School (demolished), its walls entirely of rusticated stone; Julia Morgan’s 1934 Monday
Club (extant), based on Andrea Palladio’s Villa Poiana in its façade, La Rotonda in its (faux)
cruciform organization; Walker and Eisen’s PWA Moderne 1935–1941 County Courthouse,
with its Roman aquilae, laurel wreaths, lattice, and fasces; the opposing 1942 Greek Revival
Fremont Theater; and the recent Court Street Shopping Plaza, with a gallimaufry of
segmental arches and pediments and a Diocletian window topping its cookie store.
Left: The Sauer-Adams Adobe before being obscured by a street tree; the Gothic Revival
festoon trim is a later addition over Greek Revival square columns. Right: The Sauer-Adams
front door with pediment, rectangular fanlight, and Alex Gough, occupant since 1939, when
his grandmother, novelist Helen Adams, purchased and restored the adobe.
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Thomas J. Johnson’s San Luis Obispo County Courthouse, 1872–1873. Johnson designed a
number of substantial Neoclassical buildings in San Francisco, including Maguire’s Opera
House, the Russ House, and the Occidental Hotel’s second phase. He died in 1875; none of his
work appears to have survived. Photo by Frank Aston, 1915, Cal Poly Special Collections.
William H. Weeks’s 1905–1906 Mission High. The few formal stone-built Neoclassical
buildings of the Colonial era used rustication only on the basement floor—“the rustic.” Henry
Hobson Richardson borrowed and popularized full rustication from Renaissance Florence,
using it on his iconic 1885–1887 Marshall Field Wholesale Store (demolished) in Chicago.
Here the huge Roman lattice entry light is also non-Colonial. The pediment with oculus hints,
however, Weeks may have had Mount Vernon or Monticello back of mind.
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Above: Villa Poiana, late 1540s, from George Loukomski’s L’Oeuvre d’Andrea Palladio: Les
Villas des Doges de Venise, 1927. Below: Julia Morgan’s 1934 Monday Club, with Poiana’s
second story for grain storage removed but repeating the horizontal proportions of the
central bay and wings and details like the arch’s slight intersection with Palladio’s rare open
pediment, while deconstructing the arched and flanked Palladian opening of the entry.
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Below: Diocletian windows with
faux keystones crowning Court
Street Shopping Plaza
Above: PWA Moderne, an outgrowth of twentieth century Stripped Classicism, in 1935 section
of the County Courthouse, Monterey Street. Bas relief aquilae (spread eagles) top and laurel
wreaths flank center windows. Roman woman in tunic and soldier in cingulum militare,
backed by fasces (Roman symbol of the magistrate’s power, also adopted by Mussolini in
1914) support tablet with Lord Clarendon’s quotation on the law. Roman lattice flanks the
glass door topped oddly by a Colonial swan neck pediment, out of place in size and reference.
Above: 1942 Greek Revival neon of architect S. Charles Lee (Simeon Levi). From top: a Greek
key in purple; multi-colored palmettes flanked by gold acanthus leaves and red lotus blossoms
form the Greek anthemion; Vitruvian waves line the marquee. Acanthus leaves painted on the
ceiling and woven into the carpet glowed in ultraviolet light, and the tower is in the form of a
Greek psalterion. Scholarship had established by then that Greek temple friezes were painted
in blue, red, gold, a contrast to Walker and Eisen’s just-completed staid Romanism.
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Colonial Revival and Streamline Colonial In defining a revival, it’s essential to look
at contemporary phenomena rather than focus solely on the source of inspiration. Tudor,
for instance, was revived in five different ways—Stick, Shingle, Queen Anne, Prairie, and
Minimal Traditional—during only fifty years of American architecture. Meanwhile,
American Queen Anne never referenced the actual architecture of Queen Anne’s reign;
neither did its progenitor, the Queen Anne Revival in England, innovated by Norman Shaw
as a counterweight to Gothic for secular use but essentially Jacobethan in its inspiration.
McKim, Mead, and White’s Appleton (1883–1884) and Taylor Houses (1885–1886), both
asymmetric (to accommodate service wings) and streamlined (the Taylor House’s
wraparound terrace invisible because balustraded only at left and covered periodically). Most
significant for the birth of Streamline Colonial: both used clapboard instead of shingle siding.
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Hence what the McAlesters very practically did in 1984 in the Field Guide to American
Houses was try to divide Colonial Revival into (1) “asymmetrical form with superimposed
Colonial details” and (2) “the more authentic symmetrical” (326), using McKim, Mead, and
White’s Alice and Julia Appleton House (Lenox, MA, 1883–1884; destroyed by fire) as an
exemplar for the former and the H. A. C. Taylor House (Newport, RI, 1885–1886;
demolished) for the latter. This defined separate and oppositional modernizing and
traditionalizing trends. They based this taxonomy on Vincent Scully in 1955, who based it
on Henry-Russell Hitchcock in 1944. Yet its practicality is undermined by its inaccuracy.
Both Appleton and Taylor Houses are asymmetrical. Both superimpose Colonial details,
and neither is “authentic” (i.e., could be mistaken for an actual Colonial house—even
though McKim arranged the Taylor House’s shingles to look like it had buckled over time).
The two houses’ contemporary commonalities seem more important: these would be
passed down to America’s suburbs. Compared to actual Colonial structures, both houses
have substantial elements of streamlining, including clustering of windows (particularly in
the Taylor House), the expansion of wall space (particularly in the Appleton House), linear
friezes (above the clustered windows in the Taylor and along the whole façade in the
Appleton), continuity of horizontal outdoor space (the Appleton’s integrated porch and the
Taylor’s wraparound terrace with porches supporting balconies), and decorative details
like the stringcourses on the Taylor’s chimneys. The outdoor structural spaces introduce
the lines of classical columns that so characterize the revival and are uncommon in actual
Colonial houses (though less uncommon in Federal).
Compared to McKim, Mead, and White’s rambling Shingle structures, the Appleton and
Taylor Houses both organize horizontal space more compactly, which will be a favored
characteristic in suburban evolution. They replace the continuous skin of Shingle with
horizontal streamlines of clapboard.
A Loring and Phipps Shingle Colonial Revival gambrel house in Newton, MA and an Alfred
Messel clapboard gambrel house in the suburbs of Berlin, both from Karl Scheffler’s Moderne
Baukunst, 1908.
More practical than creating a false (and needlessly prolix) dichotomy between
“asymmetrical form with superimposed Colonial details” and “the more authentic
symmetrical” is to apply Streamline Colonial as the term for the American suburban style
circa 1890–1910. “Streamline” expresses the character-defining features of decorative
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minimalism, planar emphasis, linearity, and curvature that made Streamline Colonial the
American counterpart and counterweight to Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, and Secession,
including various European folk revival styles (Heimatstil, Transylvanian, Nordic National
Romantic) within those latter trends. While those styles to a large extent battled
Neoclassicism in the transition to modernism, Streamline Colonial (and Shingle Colonial
before it) harnessed Neoclassicism and its attendant rationalism as the only available
American folk style.
The word streamline came into use by the 1890s as a noun in nautical engineering and
would soon develop into an adjective for land-based design; consequently it fits the
Zeitgeist. But modern was the common contemporary descriptor for Streamline Colonial
and Shingle Colonial, from San Luis Obispo newspapers to Karl Scheffler’s Moderne
Baukunst (Leipzig: Julius Zeitler, 1908), which illustrated a Loring and Phipps gambrel-
roofed Shingle Colonial Revival among structures by the great Secession, Jugendstil, and Art
Nouveau architects Josef Hoffmann, Peter Behrens, and Henry van de Velde and the more
Classicizing Alfred Messel. Indeed the Colonial Revival gambrel roof was a significant
American export to the European proto-modernist movement.
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Architectural Historic Context
The Shingle style and Streamline Colonial For the roots of Streamline Colonial, and
its sense of differentiation, one can go farther back than the Appleton House, to McKim,
Mead & Bigelow’s 1877–1878 Samuel Gray Ward House in Lenox (Oakswood; destroyed by
fire 1903), which was perhaps the earliest Colonial Revival of which we have
documentation and one of the earliest Shingle style houses.
In organization, Oakswood
(right, photographed in 1886)
resembled another McKim,
Mead, and Bigelow Shingle
house from 1879, Fort Hill
(Lloyd Neck, NY; extant but
altered beyond recognition): a
rambling structure with
numerous pushouts, gables, and
chimneys. As Vincent Scully
points out in The Shingle Style
and the Stick Style, once Norman
Shaw’s floorplans became
available to American
architects, they adopted the
English revival of the central
great hall around which other
rooms agglomerated (14–16).
This created a new interior sense of space and exterior sense of disorganization. It was also
hard to carry into the restricted space of the suburbs, though San Luis Obispo’s 1906
Shingle style Victor and Alice Page House at 1344 Mill Street has a somewhat diminutive
great hall with fireplace squeezed into a the middle of a rectangular house.
One thing that distinguished Oakswood from Fort Hill (below, 1879 elevation) was Colonial
reference in the former (pediment gables; windows with wood muntins and shutters; bay-
centered entry façade window topped with a panel and swan neck pediment; and short,
plain chimneys with pyramidal crowns) and Tudor reference in the latter (overhanging
gables; octagonal towers; oriel windows; leaded panes; and tall, compound chimneys).
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Neither set of references was overwhelming nor constricting; in form and fabric they both
present as East Coast Shingle. The exterior intent of Oakswood was emphasized by interior
Colonial style paneling and furnishings, but quite often interior styles were distinct.
The William Stillman photograph (below) commissioned by Charles McKim and used to
launch Henry Hobson Richardson’s New York Sketchbook of Architecture in 1874—the first
photomechanical reproduction of a building in print—was of the rambling shingled rear
accretions to the clapboard Bishop Berkeley House, Whitehall, not the neat and rational
front. Both Shaw and the American Shinglists tried to reproduce in new architecture the
sense of the organic development of a country house over extended time and space.
Henry Hobson Richardson had innovated the Shingle style on the East Coast in 1874–1876
with the Watts Sherman House in Newport, RI (extant). Its ground floor is stone, with a
shingle second floor and shingle-faced third-floor gables. Overhangs, leaded glass, and
compound chimneys are joined by a smattering of half-timber to make the Tudor reference
clear, but the more direct inspiration was Norman Shaw’s country houses of the late 1860s
and early 1870s in England, perspective drawings of which had become available to an
American audience in the British Building News and American Architect and Building News.
Shaw’s Tudor designs—which “presently became known as ‘Queen Anne,’ for no good
reason,” as one of his American obituarists wrote57—used hung tiles on the second floor
and third-floor dormers. In Shaw’s elegant drawings, and in the absence of color
photography showing their orange clay, these were easily reimagined as wood shingles,
and the East Coast Shingle style adopted them in natural wood and eventually spread them
to all surfaces as the dominant theme. In contrast, the American Queen Anne painted them
and tended to use them for accents—on gables, towers, or dormers, for string courses, and
only occasionally for upper floors. Of course, some Shingle style buildings were
57. “Norman Shaw,” New York Sun, 3 Dec. 1912, p. 8.
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subsequently painted and may even have been painted at the time, but in general the more
relaxed aesthetic of Shingle style remained consistent with a natural wood finish.
Shingle minimalism and planarity American architects and builders experimented
with shingles in ways unimagined by their English counterparts, influencing form. Shingles
could bend around curves and add texture to otherwise blank spaces. This led in two
opposite directions: in the Shingle style, to minimalism; in Queen Anne, to additional
decorative exuberance. The two great experiments in Shingle minimalism are McKim’s
William G. Low House (Bristol, RI, 1885–1887; demolished 1962) and A. C. Schweinfurth’s
First Unitarian Church (Berkeley, CA, 1898; extant). Each is essentially one vast gable, the
latter in the form of an open pediment with a single oculus.
William G. Low House, McKim, Mead and White, 1885–1887: in the form of a single
encompassing gable. HABS photograph before demolition.
First Unitarian Church, A. C. Schweinfurth, 1908: the encompassing gable becomes an open
pediment with oculus
In contrast is Samuel and Joseph Newsom’s 1889 house commissioned by Eureka lumber
baron William Carson for his son Milton (below left), a purer form of Queen Anne than the
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Newsoms’ more iconic but heavily Stick Carson Mansion (below right), built for the father
in 1884–1886 (photographs by Clinton Steeds and Cory Maylett).
Shingle curvalinearity Curvature in
Shingle style was often expressed in such
touches as the walls of a tower, porch, or
dormer, but it extended to roof shingles, as
well, with eyebrow windows and bellcast
eaves.
Probably the greatest tour de force of
Shingle style roof and wall curvature was
Ernest Coxhead’s 1890–1891 Church of St.
John the Evangelist in San Francisco (right,
dynamited to provide a firebreak during the
San Francisco Fire of 1906. Its minimalism
and planar emphasis also stands out in
comparison to the contemporary Queen
Anne and Stick buildings above.
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Shingle historicist reference and
deconstruction The tendency for
Shingle style buildings to rely for fabric
interest on the shingles themselves—
sometimes homogenous, sometimes cut in
different patterns or arranged in different
patterns—rather than large numbers of
windows or decorative trim shows in the
dramatic superimposition of Colonial
details on planes of shingling. Bruce Price’s
influential Travis Van Buren House (Tuxedo
Park, NY, 1884–1885; no longer extant)
placed a dark-painted Palladian window
above the faux keystone of a curving shingle
entry arch that looks more organic than
structural and below four tiny arch
windows topped by shingles as faux
voussoirs (right, ca 1885).
Price may have borrowed this idea of the central Palladian window from Henry Hobson
Richardson, who placed one in the east façade of his last country house, the Shingle style
Stonehurst (Robert Treat Paine House, Waltham, MA, 1883–1886), or it may have been a
simultaneous inspiration. A façade-centering Palladian window was rare but high-profile
feature of Colonial architecture, including in the tower façade of Andrew Hamilton’s 1733–
1756 Independence Hall and the north façade of George Washington’s Mount Vernon, a
renovation planned in 1774 but completed in 1787.
A likely to Price was Ernest
Coxhead’s magnificently
minimalist and
deconstructionist 1901
Wayburn House in San
Francisco (extant, right,
photo by David Duncan
Livingston). It insets and
separates the elements of the
Palladian window within a
recess and flanks it with
similarly deconstructed flush
versions of its descendant,
the San Francisco variant of
the Chicago window (a large
fixed panel flanked by two
narrow sashes, but in mild
but foggy San Francisco the
central panel is replaced by a
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sash and the whole assemblage is thrust out in a part-octagon oriel). In the Wayburn
House, the elements that protrude from the shingle façade are an asymmetric faux staircase
balustrade below the Palladian window and a segmental pediment with a fanlight
unusually, perhaps uniquely, set within it above an asymmetric entrance.
Bay Area Shingle style The Shingle style was innovated in California at the same time
as the East Coast, when the architecturally influential Rev. Joseph Worcester built a cabin
retreat in Piedmont (1876–1877). This had no reference to the tile-hung Tudors of Norman
Shaw but instead melded into a natural landscape with its low profile and bellcast roof.
The Worcester House from a painting by William Keith and detail from another Keith view
A number of subsequent leading architects of Bay Area Shingle had worked for East Coast
firms: A. Page Brown and Willis Polk for McKim, Mead, and White; A. C. Schweinfurth for
Page Brown in New York and Peabody and Stearns in Boston; John Galen Howard for Henry
Hobson Richardson and Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge; and Bernard Maybeck for Carrère
and Hastings, who had in turn worked for McKim, Mead, and White. But the substantial
influence of East Coast Shingle in the Bay Area in the 1890s combined with local cabin
sensibilities; European influences from the Ecole des Beaux Arts–trained Maybeck and Julia
Morgan and English-born and -trained Ernest Coxhead; Japanese influence; and a California
spirit of anything goes to produce spectacularly different structures.
East Coast and Bay Area Shingle styles in San Luis Obispo Oakland architect Walter
J. Mathews’ Ramona Hotel (1888, following page), which employed 460,000 shingles, was a
clear example of early East Coast Shingle. Like Richardson’s Watts Sherman House, it was
Tudor Revival on the outside and Aesthetic in, with streamline touches chiefly in the
curving walls of its fourth-floor dormer windows and its (still angular) wraparound porch.
In contrast, the LeRoy Smith House (1905–1906) at Mill and Johnson, designed by William
H. Weeks, is an asymmetric Shingle house that appears to refer to early nineteenth-century
Massachusetts Bay Greek Revival and is an outpost of a Bay Area suburban subtype now
referred to as High-Peaked Colonial Revival but described by contemporaries as “Dutch” (it
is not at all Dutch).58 The earliest known East Bay example, from 1894, was designed by
58. Daniella Thompson, “High-Peaked Colonial Revival, a Bay Area Phenomenon,” Berkeley Daily Planet, 24
March 2006, retrieved from berkeleyheritage.com 17 Feb. 2022.
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Edgar Mathews, Walter’s younger brother. High-Peaked
Colonials are usually perpendicular to the street on the
Bay Area’s narrow lots, with a front-facing gable; the Smith
House is unusual for an entrance on the long side under
the shed dormer. The Smith House’s near neighbor of the
same year, 1344 Mill, the Page House, by architect L. H
Lane, is really only imaginable in California, with Japanese
irimoya roof and polygonal entry and porch arches—not to
mention an innovative asbestos substrate below the wall
shingles, as Shingle buildings were prone to destruction by
fire (the Ramona burnt to the ground in 1905).
William H. Weeks’ LeRoy and Sara Smith House and L. H. Lane’s Dr. Victor and Alice Page
House, both 1906, 1306 and 1344 Mill Street. The Page House, despite its West Coast origins
and Japanese look, has a (small) English style great hall in the center.
Linearity: clapboard and drop siding Streamline Colonial Streamline Colonial—in
painted clapboard, shiplap, or novelty siding—starts appearing in American suburbs
around 1890, though early examples get lumped in with Queen Anne. It comes into its own
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as a bungalow style around the turn of the century. Streamline Colonial inherits Shingle’s
minimalism, planar emphasis, and sometimes curvature (in wraparound porches and
bellcast roofs), adding linearity by replacing shingles with boards, generally lowering its
profile for bungaloid horizontality, and compacting its organization to fit a suburban lot.
Illustration of a $600 Streamline Colonial
“country house” printed across the country in
a syndicated column by Foster Thorpe in
March 1892. Note the pedimented porch
(with spindle columns), pediment front gable,
swan neck pediments over the flush windows,
dormer, and novelty siding. More opulent
versions than this two-up, two-down model
would spread porch and interior quarters
more broadly. (“A Plain Country House,” San
Diego Union, 20 Mar. 1892, p. 7.)
Streamline Colonial references These include both Colonial and post-Colonial
features, often quite rare ones that caught the revivalist eye:
pediments above entries or select windows
pediment gables, i.e., gables that are closed or partially closed at the ase, whether with
molding or the edge of a hip roof
bellcast roofs
columns, generally round, unfluted, and Tuscan or Ionic but sometimes (inauthentically)
spindle or elephant leg
Porches, often wraparound and curved
dormers
Palladian windows or variations thereof
oeil-de-boeuf windows
fanlights
diamond-paned windows with wood muntins from seventeenth-century examples,
though the examples were often victims of back-restoration, householders having adopted
square-paned windows by the eighteenth century
Common elements that are not Colonial or Federal in origin include
Grouped windows
octagon bay windows
oriel windows
Window borders, of square or diamond panes, with wood muntins or leading
Leaded windows, including stained glass
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The Universe of Master List Streamline and Shingle Colonials, San Luis Obispo
To assess the Brecheen House’s appropriateness for the Master List, it’s important to
understand the nature of the Streamline Colonial and related Shingle Colonial houses
already on the list. They number over thirty, or about 8 percent of the list, and include a
number of overlapping subtypes.
Streamline and Shingle Colonial Revival subtypes First comes the transitional
subtype, of which the prime examples are the 1889 Righetti House at Palm and Johnson
and 1894–1895 Erickson House at Broad and Islay. They have entrance pediments,
pediment gables, curved wraparound porches, and other Colonial Revival elements. But
they were also built with random elements like jerkinhead gables, non-classical columns,
and ridge cresting (Righetti), sunbursts and a horseshoe arch (Erickson). The Righetti’s
designer—“Major” S. B. Abbott, serially an Oregon millwright, Kansas lawman, Central
Coast architect, and LA oilman—called it Romanesque, presumably for the prominent arch.
In less prominent examples, mixed forms persisted. The pre-1905 Fumigalli House, post-
1905 Oliver House, and 1910 Bushnell House all have front-facing pediment gables,
asymmetric porches, and drop siding consistent with Streamline Colonial, but their porch
columns are spindle with column brackets, a persistent spindle column cottage subtype
that never acceded to the classical orders or the notion that less is more. The Fumigalli
House, in addition, has bracketed cants on its bay window, a Queen Anne characteristic.
The experimental possibilities of Colonial Revival: Left, the entry façade of Frank Lloyd
Wright’s 1889 house in Oak Park, IL substitutes a curved brick wall and elephant leg posts for
a curved portico, places a disassembled Colonial Palladian window in the center of a Federal
open pediment supported by mid-nineteenth semi-octagon bays rather than columns, and
combines them with leaded diamond panes, shingle siding, and acute gable angle of
seventeenth century New England houses. Yet it appears Modernist in its minimalism and
Postmodernist in its deconstruction. Wright borrowed the façade from Bruce Price’s Chandler
House at Tuxedo Park but simplified. Right, a San Luis Obispo house built and possibly
designed by contractor C. E. Strickland evolves its entry pediment into the gable of an irimoya
roof supported by squared Tuscan columns. It forms its façade from two semi-octagon bays
with rare blank fronts and columned rather than bracket cants at the house corners. The East
Coast and Far East are melded with unique elegance.
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San Luis Obispo’s Master List also has four quite diverse houses in a square-column
subtype, including the 1902–1903 J. L. Anderson House on Dana Street with elephant leg
columns and the ca 1906 Mazza House in Bishop Peak granite. Elephant leg columns are
strongly associated with American Craftsman but occasionally occur in Shingle Colonial
(e.g., the 1885–1887 Low House) and Streamline Colonial. The ca 1904–1905 C. E.
Strickland House, built at the same time as the Shingle style Page House, both with irimoya
roof, should be interpreted as a rare (unique?) Japonesqe Streamline Colonial. Its cutaway
corners are usually a Queen Anne characteristic, but in that style always bracketed and
here supported by squared Tuscan columns. The Mazza House may also be unique: though
Shingle Colonials sometimes have square columns of rusticated stone, these don’t have
capitals as the Mazza does, and I know of no other Streamline Colonial cottage built wholly
of rusticated stone—or of stone at all. (Frank Furness did large rusticated stone Colonial
Revivals but sensibly with wood rather than stone columns.)
The Master List includes four Shingle Colonials. The Unangst (1904) and Bullard (ca 1908–
1913) Houses employ gambrel roofs referencing the seventeenth century, with the Unangst
House combining high-peaked, acute angled gables, also a seventeenth-century Colonial
reference. Another house with a gambrel and high-peaked gables is carpenter R. S. Aston’s
house at Chorro and Church, finished just as he was beginning work on Judge Unangst’s
house. It emphasizes the seventeenth-century with a second-story overhang. The Aston
House is Streamline Colonial, begun in dark, probably stained clapboard that was later
covered with shingle and has now been restored, demonstrating that Streamline Colonial
was often equally plausible in the Shingle style from which it sprang. The 1906 Dutton
House—clapboard downstairs and shingle up—plays more freely with seventeenth-
century forms but had, like the Unangst, Bullard, and Aston Houses, anachronistic classical
columns (it’s missing one) to emphasize the Colonial reference. The 1905–1906 LeRoy
Smith House is, as mentioned before, a High-Peaked Colonial Revival, which occurs in the
Bay Area in both shingle and horizontal siding and (like the Dutton House) combinations of
both. Its square columns refer to early nineteenth century Massachusetts Greek Revival.
Another Streamline Colonial subtype comprises five houses in every respect of
streamlining and Colonial reference like asymmetric Colonial Revivals except for being a
symmetrical: the matching Albert (1904) and Baker (1904–1905) Houses at Morro and
Leff; the previously mentioned Strickland House, both symmetrical and Japonesque; the so-
called Dr. George B. Nichols House, at Monterey and Broad, built by B. Morganti in 1907
after Nichols’ death to replace the latter’s demolished house; and the Heritage Inn or Rufina
Gallego de Herrera House (1910).
Which leaves about half of Master List Colonials of the era as more mainstream in materials
and asymmetric form though nonetheless highly diverse, some even eccentric, of which the
earliest was built by 1901 and the last circa 1910, comprising one-, one-and-a-half-, and
two-story structures. In chronological order, the houses are the Brew (by 1901), Crocker
and Marshall (1902), Upham (1903), Hourihan and Stanton (1904–1905), Hill (1905),
Renetzky and Chapek (1906), Kaufman (ca 1906–1907); Ramage (ca 1907–1910), Kaiser
(1908); Bradbury and Jackson (1910), Sandercock (1910–1911) and Frank Anderson (ca
1910).
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Dates of Master List Streamline and Shingle Colonial Revivals Accurate chronology
is important in plotting the development of these styles in San Luis Obispo. The dates of the
thirty-three houses below, sourced from contemporary documentation, either narrow or
replace many of the accepted dates for these buildings. In addition, currently attributed
house names are often not those of original or even significant owners and sometimes
obscure female or minority ownership: examples include the house commissioned by Mrs.
Mary L. Elliott from Hilamon Spencer Laird, called for mysterious reasons the Upham
House, although no Upham is documented as associated with it, and the Heritage Inn,
where a current business name inappropriately substitutes for that of the original builder,
Rufina Gallego de Herrera, of a prominent Californio family.
1889 On 17 May the daily Tribune reports having been shown
plans for the Righetti House (1314 Palm) by Major S. B. Abbott,
who has drawn them for attorney Ernest Graves (“A Fine
Residence,” p. 3). The “Romanesque cottage” is “receiving the
finishing touches,” reported on 27 Oct. 1889, and painted in “warm,
rich tints,” predominately terracotta (“A Notable Building,” p. 4).
1894–1895 Charles Erickson’s purchase of the corner lot at Islay
and Broad was announced 18 Nov. 1894 (“San Luis is to have
another magnificent building,” Tribune, p. 3), the commencement of
construction Nov. 22 (“Charles Erickson will in a few days,”
Tribune, p. 1), completion expected 1895 (“Erickson-Mehlmann,”
Tribune, 8 Jan. 1895, p. 3).
By 1901 The Tribune’s first mention of the Brew House (771
Buchon) “on the corner of Buchon and Garden streets” appears on
23 Aug. 1901 (“David Andrews Wedded,” p. 4). (The owner is
variously referred to as N. C. Brew, C. N. Brew, and Charles N.
Brew.) It does not appear in panoramic photographs of the early to
mid 1890s so is likely constructed about the turn of the century.
Circa 1901–1905 In 1901 Andrew M. Erickson and wife sell the
lot on which the Fumigalli House (463 Islay) sits to Anton
Fumigalli for $300, reported in the Tribune (“Recorder’s Office,” 15
Sep., p. 3). The house appears in the 1905 Sanborn map.
1902 Design of the Crocker (793 Buchon) and Marshall Houses
(785 Buchon) by William H. Weeks is announced in the Tribune on
27 Apr. 1902 (“Plans Received,” p. 2). The Crockers are
“comfortably located in their new residence” on 7 Dec. 1902
(“Personal Mention,” p. 3); the houses are both listed by the
Tribune on 1 Jan. 1903 as having been built in 1902 (“A Year of
Building,” p. 1).
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Marshall House
1902–1903 The Tribune reports on 14 Sep. 1902 that J. L.
Anderson is to build the Anderson House (532 Dana) on his new
Dana Street lots (“Several New Homes,” p. 1), and the first record of
a finished house is a 19 May 1903 surprise party for the Andersons
by the Odd Fellows and Rebekahs, the latter of which did
housewarmings for their members (“Surprise Party,” Tribune, p. 1).
1903 The Tribune credits “Architect [Hilamon Spencer] Laird”
for its description of Mrs. Mary L. Elliott’s house (the Upham
House [779 Buchon]) on 8 March 1903 (“Building Still Continues,”
p. 2); it is pictured under her name in the 1904 Fire Department
Souvenir of San Luis Obispo.
1903 Newly arrived carpenter R. S. Aston’s near commencement
of the Aston House (1746 Chorro) is mentioned by the Tribune 17
July 1903 (“Aston Gets Contract,” p. 4) and its near completion—
plus his commencement of Judge Unangst’s house—23 August the
same year (“Fine Stone Mantels,” p. 3).
1903–1904 The Tribune reports on 3 Apr. 1904 that Judge
Unangst has moved into The Judge’s House (1720 Johnson), begun
the previous year (“Personal Mention,” p. 4).
1904 The Tribune announces on 8 Apr. 1904 that builder and
house mover William Thompson has moved into his own new
house, the Albert House (1642 Morro), at the corner of Morro and
Leff, with lumber on the ground for the adjoining house (“Personal
Mention,” p. 4). The Tribune describes Thompson’s as “quite a
novel house,” featuring in the sub-head the automatic window
screens that lower as the sash is raised (Grading Building Site,” 1
Mar. 1904, p. 1).
1904–1905 In “Building Commenced,” the Tribune announced
the Thomas and Kathleen Hourihan House (860 Buchon) designed
by Hilamon Spencer Laird and built by John Chapek (6 Oct. 1904, p.
3). The following June the house was finished and retaining wall
being built (“Thos. Hourihan, Tribune, 21 June 1905, p.1).
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1904–1905 The commencement of Thompson’s adjoining Baker
House (1636 Morro) is noted in “New Residence Commenced” as a
duplex “almost identical to the first house built, which is a very
artistic, modern cottage” (Tribune, 19 Nov. 1904, p. 1).
1904–1905 The Tribune reports W. C. Phillips as architect of the
Stanton House (752 Buchon), with completion of the foundation
and ongoing carpenter work, on 16 Dec. 1904 (“E. B. Stanton’s
House,”p. 1) and on 10 June 1905 describes it as “just completed”
(“Serious Embezzlement,” p. 1).
1905 Construction of the Leonard W. Hill House (1144 Buchon)
by John Chapek is announced by the Tribune 27 Jan. 1905 (“Work
has been commenced,” p. 1).
1905–1906 Watsonville architect William H. Weeks and Merced
contractor Charles M. Kuck are named for the LeRoy B. Smith
House (1306 Mill) on 1 Nov. 1905 (daily Tribune, “Home For L. B.
Smith,” p. 4), and the Smiths’ first houseguests are reported the
following summer (“Personal Mention,” Tribune, 14 July 1906, p. 4).
1906 The Tribune notes on 11 Feb. 1906 that Supervisor E. M.
Payne and his wife will move out of the Falkenstein House and into
the Dutton House (1426 Broad) being constructed by Arthur L.
Dutton adjoining the Myron Angel home on Broad Street (“Personal
Mention,” p. 4); on 8 Apr. 1906 it is announced they have so
moved. (“Personal Mention,” p. 4).
1906 The Renetzky House (1516 Broad), not on the 1905
Sanborn, is clearly under construction in the left-hand of three
panoramic photographs taken from Terrace Hill in early 1906 (Cal
Poly Special Collections 168-1-b-01-35-02, incorrectly dated on the
back 1907). Mrs. Otto James Kruell, who and whose new husband
have moved to San Luis Obispo from the Bay Area in 1906, is
referred to as entertaining at that address in 1907 (“Here From Los
Angeles,” Telegram, 27 Sep., p. 8).
1906 The Chapek House (843 Upham) is also shown under
construction in the left-hand Terrace Hill panoramic photo.
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Circa 1906 The Mazza House (1318 Chorro) is not shown on
the 1905 Sanborn, but its hip roof appears to be just visible in the
center of the three early 1906 panoramic photographs taken from
Terrace Hill (168-1-b-01-35-05, incorrectly dated on the back
1907). It is occupied by Mrs. Emma Brumley on 26 May 1910
(“Lost,” Telegram, p. 1), and veterinary surgeon D. B. Mazza
announces on 1 June 1910 that his office will be there
henceforward (Telegram “Notice Of New Office,” p. 1).
Circa 1906–1907 The early 1906 right-hand Terrace Hill photo
does not show the Charles E. Strickland House (1152 Buchon),
but a panoramic photo (Cal Poly Special Collections 168-1-b-01-36-
01) that can be dated to the first months of 1907 does. 1150 (now
1152) Buchon was listed as Strickland’s address in the
advertisement for a patent kidney medication by 17 May 1907 (“In
San Luis Obispo,” Tribune, p. 2).
Circa 1906–1907 The Kaufman House (1052 Islay) is not in the
1906 center panoramic photograph from Terrace Hill (168-1-b-01-
35-05), but it is in the early 1907 photograph and occupied by Mr.
and Mrs. James A. Leavitt by 1908 (Telegram: “Young People’s
Social,” 4 May, p. 8; “Baptist Social Occurs Tonight,” 8 May, p. 1).
After 1906 The Oliver House (1953 Chorro) is not in the 1905
Sanborn or left-hand of the early 1906 Terrace Hill panoramic
photos, and the contemporary press mentions neither the address
nor lot.
1907 The one-story so-called Nichols House (664 Monterey)
replaced the actual two-story home of the late mayor, Dr. George B.
Nichols, recorded in the 1905 Sanborn map, two doors to the west
of the Carnegie Library. On 17 May 1907, B. Morganti applied for a
permit to build the one-story house on the site. The old Nichols
House is visible in the 1907 Terrace Hill panoramic photo.
Circa 1907–1910 The Ramage House (1129 Marsh) does not
appear on the 1905 Sanborn map or in the right-hand photo of the
1906 panorama (168-1-b-01-35-03) or in a panorama that can be
dated to later 1907. The lot occupied by the Ramage House was
sold by J. L. Faulkner to G. C. Lewis and Claude C. Stalnaker on 19
Mar. 1907, by Lewis et al to Charles C. Brumbaugh on 11 Feb. 1908,
and by Brumbaugh to Hans P. Wybrandt on 7 Feb. 1910. Faulkner
was in the business of building and renting cottages, and neither
Lewis, Stalnaker, nor Brumbaugh was a resident of San Luis.
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Wybrandt toured Europe from June to October 1910, returning to
the Ramage House address (“Mr. Wyburn Back From Long Trip,”
Telegram, 5 Oct. 1910, p. 1). It would seem most plausible for
Faulkner to have built the house by March 1907, photographic
evidence confirms he did not, proving the folly of plausible
assumptions.
1908 Lee Parsons of contractors Rasmussen and Parsons applied
for a permit to build William H. Schulze the Kaiser House (751
Buchon) on 19 Oct. 1908.
Circa 1908–1913 The Bullard House (1624 Moro) is not in the
1907 panoramic photograph from Terrace Hill, and the address
does not appear in the press till a Telegram ad for a Buff Orpington
cockerel in 1914 (3 Feb., p. 1).
1910 Harry Lyman applied for a permit to build the Bradbury
House (745 Buchon) for Dr. R. M. Bradbury on 12 Jan. 1910.
1910 Joseph Maino for a permit to build the Jackson House (790
Islay) for Dr. Jackson on 3 May 1910.
1910 Rufina Gallego de Herrera, widow of Antonio Jose Herrera,
of a pioneer Californio family, purchased part lot 6, block 24 from
Laura White and Daniel Wolf on 3 Oct. 1909. The first ad for
furnished rooms at 1066 Monterey appeared in the daily Tribune
on 30 October 1910 (p. 4), and a Dec. 28 article on a break-in
attempt confirms Herrera’s ownership. The absence of earlier
press mention of the lot or address suggests that what today is the
Heritage Inn (978 Olive), subsequently moved twice, was built
soon after the purchase.
1910 A “modern five-room cottage” at 1105 George Street—
presumably the Bushnell House (1105 George), as this was the
address listed when Bushnell sold his house to Mr. and Mrs. G. C.
Gale in 1919—was offered for sale with bath, stationary tubs, and
electric light in 1910 (“For Sale,” Telegram, 29 Sep., p. 4). The fact
that this section of George Street was only sewered in late 1909
confirms the house was not only modern but brand new.
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1910–1911 James J. Maino applied for a permit to build the
Sandercock House (535 Islay) for William Sandercock on 24 Oct.
1910, completed the following March (“Two New Homes In San
Luis Obispo,” Telegram, 11 Mar. 1911, p. 3).
Circa 1910 The Frank Anderson House (1345 Broad) had not
been built by the 1905 Sanborn map and does not appear in the
left-hand photo of the early 1906 Terrace Hill panorama. In July
Anna Foreman Schilling, a former resident of San Luis with
frequent mention in the social press, and her husband Frank were
staying at the Ramona (“Personal Mention,” Tribune, 19 July 1905,
p. 4), and on 7 Aug. 1905 C. T. Greenfield sold her the empty lot
(“News in Brief,” daily Tribune, 9 Aug. 1905, p. 1). On 26 June 1909,
Schilling sold the property to Mrs. Lila M. Andrews. Schilling and
her husband lived in Arizona, and her presence in town is not
mentioned by local newspapers between 1905 and 1913 (“Hotel
Arrivals,” Daily Telegram, 13 Sep. 1913, p. 3), and in her 24 Jan.
1920 obituary (“To Be Buried Here,” Daily Telegram, p. 5) and that
of her husband the following December, it is never suggested they
lived in San Luis or had a house here. A 23 Aug. 1911 ad in the
Telegram (“For Sale Or Exchange,” p. 4) is the earliest documentary
evidence of a house on the property.
Historic and Architectural Evaluation All of the thirty-three following Master List
resources would qualify for the California Register of Historical Resources and National
Register of Historic Places for embodying an architectural type, though the Heritage Inn
and Bushnell House would probably not qualify based on integrity. Only about two-thirds
would seem to qualify for the Master List’s current uniqueness standard, however.
Righetti House, 1314 Palm, 1889 The Righetti House, so-called because by the 1904
Fire Department Souvenir of San Luis Obispo it was owned by Michael Righetti, was built in
1889 by attorney Ernest Graves, who died in 1900. Graves was a prominent San Luis
Obispo pioneer, having been born next to the Mission in 1852 and served as city attorney
1874–1877 and district attorney 1880–1886 (“Death Claims E. Graves,” daily Tribune, 14
July 1900, p. 1). Graves continued to be a prominent attorney and political operative during
his occupation of the house up to the time of his death, serving as chair of the county
delegation to the state Democratic Convention in 1896 and being granted certiorari by the
State Supreme Court for a twenty-day jail sentence for contempt of a local superior court
judge in 1899 (“After Thirteen Ballots It Is a Deadlock,” Los Angeles Herald, 18 Aug. 1896, p.
6; “The Contempt Matter,” Tribune, 10 Sep. 1899, p. 3). Michael Righetti was a Cayucos
dairy rancher and occupied the house till 1912 (“Righetti Home Sold,” Daily Telegram, 1
Nov. 1912, p 5). Advertisements show by 1915 it was renting furnished rooms, and an
apartment house, originally on the Contributing List and since demolished, was built in
front of it by 1937.
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From its construction by Graves, the house was considered a prominent landmark, and its
architect, S. B. Abbott, though having no apparent professional background, showed
facility with Colonial reference and skill at using massing as a decorative element
consonant with the era and emphasizing the hillside site. The admixture of styles
(jerkinhead gables, etc.) is not overwhelming and was also a contemporary characteristic.
The building embodies the transitional style from Queen Anne to Streamline, which occurs
in tandem with the transition from Shingle.
Abbott arrived in the county as a developer exaggerating his accomplishments in that
department, which were and would continue to be none, so it is possible he borrowed the
design from a pattern book and passed it off as his own. However, in 1890 he designed a
“Romanesque” Baptist Auditorium in Santa Cruz that appears to have been built, a harder
design to find in a pattern book (“Baptist Auditorium,” Santa Cruz Daily Sentinel, 9 Nov.
1890, p. 3). I can find no other evidence of his apparently short-lived career as an architect.
The Righetti House, which should be renamed the Graves House to reflect its historically
significant builder, is one of two complex transitional types, but each has a sufficiently
oddball combination of features to claim uniqueness, and this is the only documented
extant work by architect Abbott.
Erickson House, 461 Islay, 1894–1895
In contrast to the Ernest Graves’ house, Charles Erickson’s house uses Ionic columns, as
well as rather abstract fluted pilasters. It also has pediment gables, a segmental pediment
above the entrance, soffit dentilation, bellcast tower roof, and other Streamline Colonial
characteristics. As with Graves’ house, the addition of exotic extraneous elements, like a
horseshoe arch and Juliet balcony on a rather bulbous outcropping, brackets, and
sunbursts. Streamline Colonial is interesting in going through a purification process in the
1890s rather than starting pure and going centrifugally eclectic.
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Unfortunately, no contemporary sources list an architect for the Erickson House. The
craftsmen were employees of Erickson who may have used pattern books for the whole or
elements of the whole.59
N. C. Brew House, 771 Buchon, by 1901
There appears to be no record of who were the architect and builder of the Brew House or
when—before the first newspaper reference to it in August 1901—it was built. By the 1905
Sanborn map it had its current footprint with curved porch so was most likely built as such.
59. “A New Residence,” Tribune, 5 Jan. 1896, p. 1.
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The Brew House represents the Streamline Colonial with open pediment gables intersected
by windows, curved wraparound porch with Tuscan columns, semi-octagon bay, and shiplap
siding. Fishscale shingling in the entry pediment gable is a common Queen Anne holdover,
but the overall appearance is more rational and linear, even severe.
It would be hard to claim uniqueness for the Brew House, but its Master Listing is doubtless
based on its being one of a quartet of surviving houses on the south side of Buchon between
Chorro and Garden of the same era and style—though the city’s current Master List Historic
Properties website attributes them to four different styles (“Carpenter Gothic–Neo-Colonial,”
“Queen Anne with Colonial Revival influence,” “Neo-Colonial–Neoclassical with Queen Anne
detailing,” “Gothic Revival with Neoclassical overtones”). It is San Luis’s version of Alamo
Square in an area referred from the late 1880s to the early 1910s as Nob Hill.
Fumigalli House, 463 Islay, ca 1901–1905
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The McAlesters identify “about 35 percent” of Queen Anne houses as the “Free Classic”
subtype, using “classical columns rather than delicate turned posts with spindlework
detailing.” Most of those “Free Classic” houses are actually Streamline Colonial or
transitional Streamline Colonial, making their referents clear with pediments, pediment
gables, Palladian windows, etc., as well as an absence of spindlework, brackets, half-
timbering, and other Queen Anne decorative exuberance.
The Fumigalli, Oliver, and Bushnell Houses are the opposite: cottages in other respects
Colonial Revival except for spindle columns and column brackets (and corner brackets on
the bay window cutaways, in the case of the Fumigalli House). It is a subtype of Colonial
revival that might be described as transitional (spindle columns and corner brackets are
shown as the “plain” country house in Forster Thorpe’s 1892 article) except for its
persistence in modest cottages. All three have a pediment above the usually semi-octagon
front window, with the portico supporting a hip roof, as do similar examples in San Luis. The
porch railing here appears to be a go at Colonial Chinese Chippendale.
As the embodiment of a type of architecture, the Fumigalli House would qualify for National
Register status. The three examples on the Master List and the many off suggest it does not
have the uniqueness to qualify for Master Listing.
Crocker House, 793 Buchon, 1902
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Having commissioned San Luis Obispo architect Hilamon Spencer Laird in 1887 to design
his Crocker Building, a forceful exercise in Eastlake, at Higuera and Garden, merchant Jacob
Crocker fifteen years later chose Canadian-born, Watsonville-based architect William H.
Weeks to design his house. This is the first documented building in San Luis Obispo by
Weeks, who for the next decade would become a dominant force in San Luis Obispo for
both public and domestic structures. He was chosen in 1902 to design the house next door
(also Streamline Colonial) and Cal Poly’s first two buildings (Mission Revival); in 1903, Dr.
W. M. Stover’s House (Shingle style); in 1904, the Carnegie Library (Richardsonian
Romanesque); in 1905, the new public high school (Neoclassical) and LeRoy Smith House
(Bay Area Shingle style); in 1906, a third Cal Poly building (Mission Revival); and in 1911,
the Stover Sanitarium (Neoclassical). In 1911 Weeks moved from Watsonville to Palo Alto,
and his work in San Luis Obispo apparently ceased.
In the octagonal lantern above the porch, which forms a tiny accessible room, Weeks refers
to Mount Vernon, America’s first historic house museum. Art Nouveau acanthus leaves in
the entrance pediment make both classical and contemporary reference. The use of wave-
form shingles at the tops of the pediment gables is Shingle style holdover that Weeks
repeats in the adjoining house and Hilamon Spencer Laird in the house next to that.
Weeks, at age thirty-eight, was a more awkward architect than he would subsequently
become, and the entry façade’s faux balcony with a sort of reverse-Palladian window (a
rectangle in the middle and arches on the side) is crammed into the half-story pediment
gable for an effect that Frank Lloyd Wright achieved infinitely more elegantly on his own
house in 1889.
The Crocker House, though not a particularly streamlined Streamline Colonial, nonetheless
is a stylistically engaging and unified house by someone who would become a master
architect, and the patriotic Washingtonian octagonalism of the porch and cupola makes it
unique in San Luis Obispo, giving it two justifications for Master Listing. It has the high level
of integrity to communicate its significance.
Marshall House (Mr. and Mrs. J. C. Naylor House), 785 Buchon, 1902
This house is wholly understood only as a pairing with the Crocker House next door, and
though Marshall had a longer tenure, it should be renamed after the Naylors, who
commissioned it from architect William H. Weeks at the same time Jacob Crocker, for
whom J. C. Naylor worked as head clerk, commissioned his. It was an audacious move for
the two to simultaneously commission designs by Weeks on neighboring lots. Too
audacious, for shortly after its completion Naylor absconded with funds from the
Woodmen of the World, St. Stephen’s Church, and various friends and relations he had
borrowed from. The one person he does not seem to have embezzled from was his
employer Jacob Crocker. After Naylor was spotted in San Francisco, his wife went there to
remonstrate with him and returned to sell the house, to rising Azorean jeweler Manuel
Marshall (who had also just bought a car). Mrs. Naylor restored the embezzled funds, and
the J. C. Naylors moved to Bakersfield.
The Crocker House was started first, but both houses were finished by the end of 1902. The
Naylors’ house was a more modest structure in size as well as design. The result is a less
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awkward structure but also a less interesting one. The street façade is dominated by a
semi-octagon bay window topped by a pediment gable, with an entry portico to the side.
The broad frieze between the window and pediment is, perhaps uniquely in San Luis
Obispo, decorated with a floral bas relief, although it doesn’t have the Art Nouveau flair of
the bas relief in the Crocker House entry pediment. The tiny semi-octagon window in the
front-facing gable is inset within an elegant curve, a Shingle style touch. Ionic columns,
wave shingles, anachronistic diamond panes, and rusticated chimney medallions echo the
Crocker House next door, and both employ novelty siding, but there is no sense that they
are paired in design.
As one of three documented Weeks houses in San Luis Obispo, all Colonial Revival, the
house is rare though not unique and on that basis should qualify for the Master List.
J. L. Anderson House, 532 Dana, 1902–1903
With pediment gables centered by oculus vents, horizontal soffit brackets resembling
dentilation, and Tuscan columns supporting a wraparound porch, the Anderson House
makes clear reference to Colonial and Federal architecture with minimal twee, and its
semi-octagon bays, clustered windows, and shiplap siding are characteristic of Streamline
Colonial Revival. One interesting touch of intentionality is that in its cruciform
arrangement, the front and one side gable are boxed into pediments, one side gable is
hipped (also a common Streamline Colonial arrangement, and the rear gable is plain, as it
doesn’t need to impress anyone, being along the creek.
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The house is unusual for local Streamline Colonial for being two stories, not one or one-
and-a-half: on the Master List, only the Stanton House (1904-05), Kaiser House (1908), and
Heritage Inn/Herrera House (1910) also have two stories. It is unique in the city for being
surrounded on four sides by portico, and though a small portion has been enclosed on the
front with unmatching columns, this does not undermine its ability to communicate its
significance. It is also unique here for combining Streamline Colonial with elephant leg
columns, rare in other parts of the country. Its uniqueness would appear to qualify it for the
Master List.
Upham House (Mary L. Elliott House), 779 Buchon, 1903
This house was designed by Hilamon Spencer Laird, the first person in San Luis Obispo
documented to have practiced solely as an architect—rather than builder-architect—for
any length of time and with any record of buildings, his known projects dating from 1874
to 1911 and including some of the most prominent buildings in the city, almost all of them
on the Master List, though the provenance of most of them was not known when they were
so placed.
The house was commissioned by Mrs. Mary L. Elliott, born 1864 to prominent San Luis
Obispo banker (and farmer) J. P. Andrews. She lived in it for a short time, married William
A. Rideout in 1905, and appears to have rented it and then returned to it with her husband
by 1913, J. P. Andrews dying there in 1914.
The asymmetric porch with Ionic columns and dentilation/horizontal brackets above
immediately suggest Streamline Colonial. Though the front gable is not transformed into a
pediment with a physical box, the wide frieze creates a similar effect, and Frank Furness
used this method on the Alexander J. Cassatt Stable (Berwyn, PA, 1898). Besides, the
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dentilled boxing at the top creates a mini-pediment above the semi-Palladian window
(tripartite with a heightened center but no arch). Molding creates two further mini-
pediments flanking the window, filled with wave shingling, echoing the deconstruction
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common to creative architects like Coxhead and Wright with Shingle Colonial. A front
addition has caused severe damage to integrity.
The festoon over the gable window and the scroll below it and the ground floor front
window denote Federal reference (e.g., The Athenaeum, Portsmouth, NH, 1803, previous
page, detail). The stepped gable edges were also employed by Frank Furness, and Laird’s
1894 Shipsey and 1903 Kimball Houses show Furnessian influence.
The number of Laird-designed buildings in San Luis Obispo would not raise the Upham
House to the uniqueness standard, but it is the only one commissioned by a woman.
Furness influence makes it unusual, which raises the question of whether the Kimball
House should be considered Furnessian Streamline Colonial, but its use of ridge cresting,
Egyptian columns, and multiple arches seems to take it to a different realm. The
significance of Mary Elliott’s commissioning of the house from a major architect should not
be obscured by the meaningless Upham name.
R. S. Aston House, 1746 Chorro, 1903
Contractor R. S. Aston, brother of noted San Luis Obispo photographer Frank Aston, had
just arrived here from Bakersfield when he built this house for himself (and to advertise his
work) in what seems to have been about a month. A gambrel roof intersects a high-peaked
roof; rare octagonal columns supported on stone form the corner entrance characteristic of
High-Peaked Colonial Revivals of the Bay Area, though the corner lot gives two façades and
warrants four gables. The house has novelty siding, which was a common alternative to
shingle in Bay Area High-Peaked Colonials. Aston likely brought his own crew from
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Bakersfield to get started so quickly; it was reported by Judge Unangst’s daughter Dorothy
Bilodeau that of the two stonemasons on the Judge’s House, one was Irish and one Black.60
As Aston’s own house, the first house by him in the area, and both the earliest surviving
High-Peaked and Gambrel Colonial in the city, it achieves Master List uniqueness.
The Judge’s House, 1720 Johnson, 1903–1904
Dorothy Bilodeau claimed that her father
was not satisfied by the original design of
the house, presumably by Aston, so
designed it “on his own ideas, in
cooperation with a minister in the area
whose church was made of similar
materials” (Winslow). It is certainly less
rational on the outside and perhaps more
accommodating inside. Aston’s house,
completed immediately before he started
Unangst’s, is true cruciform in its roofs.
Unangst’s entry gambrel gable runs a
straight ridge back to—peculiarly, perhaps
uniquely—a high-peaked gable in back,
while a gambrel gable on the west side and
high-peaked gable on the east are offset.
In another way of looking at it, the entry and Johnson Avenue façades are both dominated
by a roof slope with a gambrel gable at the left. Unlike the Aston House, all novelty siding,
here the ground floor is shiplap and gables shingled, somewhat unusual in a Shingle
Colonial for being scalloped.
Unangst presided over many of the most important cases in the county, though, since there
have been scores of judges in San Luis, and only one Unangst, the Judge Unangst House
would seem to be a more transparent and less twee name. Architecturally, the house is
unique for being the oldest surviving Shingle Colonial in the city.
60. Carleton M. Winslow, Jr., ed., “The Judge’s House,” Discovering San Luis Obispo County (San Luis Obispo:
1971).
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Albert House, 1642 Morro, 1904; Baker House, 1636 Morro, 1904–1905
The uniqueness of these two houses comes from their being paired symmetrical Streamline
Colonials by the same builder (and presumably designer) William Thompson at roughly
the same time. Tiny speculative developments were a characteristic of small town San Luis
Obispo, but this is the only Streamline Colonial one I know of. It is a pity that neither are
named after Thompson, as Albert and Baker seem to have no significance and Thompson
was actually built 1642 for himself (though local spec builders and developers—including
organic architect Warren Leopold, according to Henry Miller in Big Sur and the Oranges of
Hieronymus Bosch61—often occupied their new houses and moved as soon as sold).
These houses are unusual for streamlining their Colonialness with a square footprint, hip
roof, and central hip dormer, a dropping of the pediment that would become more
common. There are almost unnoticeable asymmetries. Neither entry portico is quite
centered, and the Albert had an inset semi-octagon bay window (now partially walled in)
on only one side. The Baker retains them on both sides, but one cutaway corner has a
61. (New York: New Directions, 1957), p. 257.
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window and no support, the other a door and a support column. Despite the alteration to
the Albert House, it retains enough of its integrity to communicate its significance.
Hourihan House, 860 Buchon, 1904–1905
In a four-decade architectural career (after initially having worked as a dairy farmer)
Hilamon Spencer Laird designed in many different styles and was disinclined to limit
himself in any. His house for Mary Elliott experimented with decorative techniques that
went well beyond common or garden Streamline Colonial; his Kimball House (actually
commissioned by John Ingram) is so Furnessian as to depart its genre. (Curiously, Frank
Furness’s own Colonial Revival buildings are among his most whitebread designs; perhaps
he didn’t feel he had enough abstract decorative scope in them.)
Laird’s design for Thomas and Kathleen Hourihan’s house
emphasizes its Streamline Colonial nature in two ways:
through its asymmetric wraparound ground floor porch
and porch-topping balcony supported by Tuscan columns,
and by the great hood of a hip roof enclosing the balcony,
with the echoing porch roof. It is an audacious design
most reminiscent of McKim, Mead, and White’s double-
decker piazzas at the Newport Casino. They tie to a front-
gabled bay that is unusual but not unique for being neither
high-peaked nor pedimented, but some late seventeenth-
century Colonial buildings (like Boston’s Bridgham House
at right) took this form and were copied by revivalists. It is
unique to the city and so Master List qualified.
The Hourihan House is one of sixteen houses the city’s Master List properties website
erroneously and anachronistically calls Gothic: the Biddle (Stick), Brew (Colonial Revival),
Brooks (Romanesque), Buckley (box frame vernacular), Falkenstein (Stick and Queen
Anne), Finney (Queen Anne), Greenfield (Cottage), Kaetzel (Queen Anne), Lewin
(Eastlake), McKennon (Queen Anne), McManus (Stick), Rogers (Italianate), Tucker
(Colonial Revival, Italianate, and Queen Anne), Upham (Colonial Revival), and Jessie Wright
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(Queen Anne). The text for the Hourihan House adds insult to injury by explaining that its
supposed Gothicism is ”reflective of the tendency for architectural styles to reach SLO
decades after peaking in larger Metropolitan areas,” when San Luis was in fact on the
cutting edge of architecture and Laird at the apex of that edge.
Stanton House, 752 Buchon, 1904–1905
Like J. C. Naylor’s house, this structure demonstrates how people dealt with the housing
crisis at the turn of the century: they embezzled. There is a poignancy to the patriotic
nostalgia and smooth modernity of the Streamline Colonial and the criminal undercurrent
used to pay for it.
E. B. Stanton had been the Pacific Coast Railway’s agent, dispatcher, and lumber yard agent
since the late 1890s and was a prominent enough figure to be married to a Dana: Irene
Josephine, daughter of the longtime county clerk. Edward and Irene had built a 1½-story
asymmetric Colonial Revival cottage at Marsh and Toro in 1902 for their brood of children
(pictured in the Fire Department Souvenir of San Luis Obispo with that brood but no longer
extant). Stanton paid off its mortgage in September 1904 and commenced the two-story
house at Buchon and Garden.
The house was described in superlatives during both its building and sale soon after—for
in late May 1905, before it was quite finished and certainly before it was paid for, the PCR
demoted Stanton from railroad agent and hired a new bookkeeper, and in early June
Stanton was arrested, ultimately charged with embezzling $14,433.74 from his employers.
He was additionally sued by contractors for various unpaid bills on his $6,000 house, for
which he had also taken out a $2,400 mortgage.
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In November Stanton was tried, convicted, and sentenced to five years at San Quentin.
Coverage of the trial does not explain why he did it, but Stanton’s character witnesses
included some of the leading men of the town: Louis Sinsheimer, Dr. W. M. Stover, William
Sandercock, and the merchant Jacob Crocker. M. Lewin, agent for the mortgagee, seems to
have had difficulty in either selling or renting the house and occupied it himself into the
1920s.
The Tribune named the architect as W. C. Phillips, who was based in Arroyo Grande when
he became, in 1896, the architect of the Neoclassical (with Eastlake interior) H. M. Warden
Building on Higuera at the foot of Garden Street (extant). Phillips relocated to San Luis
Obispo and practiced here for about ten years before graduating to the big city of San Jose.
The Stanton House has a sophisticated play of symmetry and asymmetry, depending on
whether one sees the tower as one side of a façade or the center of two façades. Curvatures
abound: in tower walls and glass, porch balustrade, oculi, the art nouveau soffits of the
pediment gables, and the bellcast roofs. Eaves are horizontally exaggerated, including the
deeply inset gable pediments. This suggests the influence of Bay Area architects like A. W.
Smith, whose 1900 Siegriest House in Oakland (extant) uses a similar wide-eaved,
columned corner tower between gabled façades. (Octagonal and round towers were a not
uncommon feature of Streamline Colonial, despite the absence of such appendages or
appurtenances on actual Colonial houses.)
In 1904 the Tribune wrote, “The style may be best expressed as American,” adding: “There
will be colonial windows.” It is hard to interpret the second statement, as there is a huge
variety of windows—sash, oculus, arched, oriel, leaded, diamond-pane, stained glass—
probably too many for a unified effect. The first statement is interesting in its recognition
that asymmetric Colonial had moved beyond a revival into its own expression of modern
Americanness, as Shingle had done and the California Bungalow was to do.
The Stanton House is certainly unique as the most exaggerated expression of Streamline
Colonial in San Luis Obispo; I believe it is also the only documented house by W. C. Phillips
here, though others may come to light: two reasons to qualify for the Master List.
Leonard W. Hill House, 1144 Buchon, 1905
The Hill House in the Old Town Historic District is the most recent Streamline Colonial
addition to the Master List and was added by ignoring the uniqueness criterion. Hill was a
local businessman but did not rise to any leadership position that would define him as
historically significant. The carpentry was done by local builder John Chapek as a
subcontractor, one of his early projects but by no means earliest, and despite the
application’s assertion that he was the building’s architect, there is no evidence that he
designed the house and considerable that he did not.
First, given the somewhat awkward contemporary Streamline Colonials in which Chapek
was listed as architect (the George A. Brown House at 1241 Beach [1907–1908]) or can be
plausibly posited as architect (his spec-built 1946 Chorro [John T. Anderson House, 1902–
1903] and 1045 Leff [1903]; 865 Buchon [the William Alberts House, 1904], on which he
was the primary contractor; and 843 Upham [1905–1906], where he settled himself), the
sophisticated planes and curves of the Hill House were beyond his architectural ability.
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Triplets: Master List Leonard Hill House and Frank Anderson House and Contributing List
Patrick and Catherine McHenry House
Second, the Hill House is virtually identical—except in reverse—to the Frank Anderson
House at 1345 Broadway, at the other end of the Old Town Historic District, one of the
earliest additions to the Master List; also to the James M. Akin–built Patrick and Catherine
McHenry House at 1264 Palm (1910), in the middle of the Mill Street Historic District but
inexplicably relegated to the Contributing List. In short, all three houses were clearly from
a marketed set of plans: embodying Streamline Colonial by NRHP standards but the
opposite of unique by the standards of the Master List.
LeRoy and Sara Smith House, 1306 Mill, 1906
LeRoy Smith arrived at Cal Poly in his late twenties to teach English and history but was so
impressed with the school’s mission that he retrained at Berkeley as an agriculturist—after
he had become Cal Poly’s director. He also seems to have arrived with money, immediately
buying three adjoining lots at the corner of Mill and Johnson (then Essex). He sold one lot to
Leroy Anderson, his boss as the first director of Cal Poly, and hired William H. Weeks, the
architect of Cal Poly’s buildings—all in Mission Revival—to design a house.
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It took the form of a redwood shingle Bay Area High-Peak Colonial with characteristic shed
dormers. As the dormers run the length of the house, it is functionally a two-story,
retaining the dormer look with deep overhangs. Another way it differs from most Bay Area
models is occupying a corner lot with an entry centered in its long façade. The entry uses,
appropriately, square columns, for the side gables have the open pediments of circa 1830s
Massachusetts Bay Greek Revival, not a reference seen in other High-Peak Colonials and
unique to this city. The building shows Weeks coming into his own as an architect, at the
same time he was designing the rationalized and simplified high school of rusticated stone.
Some months after the Smith House was finished, Leroy and Isabel Anderson took out a
$4,000 loan to build their own house next door: a Prairie School in dark stained wood
(extant). Sara Smith was from Wisconsin; LeRoy Smith had worked there and in San
Francisco before coming to Cal Poly. In 1902 Leroy Anderson visited the Midwest to
examine other agricultural schools before opening Cal Poly. Any of these might have been
the Wright connection. The Anderson House’s architect is unknown (not inconceivably
Weeks), but it is the first Prairie School building in San Luis Obispo, of the style Wright was
producing in the early 1900s, demonstrating San Luis was indeed on the cutting edge.
Shortly after its completion, Benjamin Ide Wheeler hired Anderson to run the University of
California’s ag station, now UC Davis, and Smith replaced his colleague as director.
Dutton House, 1426 Broad, 1906
The first occupant of the Dutton House—built by Dutton for him—was plumber, tinsmith,
and County Supervisor E. M. Payne, who was arrested two years after he occupied the
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house for illegally selling a consignment of pipes to the county through a third party. But
the grand jury, some of whose members were intent on punishing Payne for voting to
rescind prohibition of alcohol sales in county jurisdictions, had broken the rules by
conducting interviews in the field. The judge threw out the case, which was never revived.
With cruciform footprint and roof arrangement, seemingly a San Luis characteristic for
Shingle style, the Dutton House has a pedimentless seventeenth-century reference and
unusual roof and portico flaring that are unique in San Luis. The perpendicularity to the
street and columned corner entry is reminiscent of suburban High-Peak—though at least
one and probably two columns are missing.
Renetzky House, 1516 Broad, 1906
A surprising number of Streamline Colonials have polygonal or round towers; this was an
enthusiasm of the early Shingle architects that the absence of towers on Colonial buildings
was not able to shake, e.g., McKim, Mead, and White’s dodecagonal tower on the Newport
Casino (1879–1881; see p. 8). The Renetzky House’s closed pediment gable on the street
façade and open pediment gables on the side façades make its Colonial intentions clear, as
does its asymmetric portico with Tuscan columns.
Some lathework in the middle of the columns, a small sunburst at the top of the front
pediment gable, and a diamond window rather than oeil de boeuf in the front are eccentric
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details but not enough to detract from the genre. As the only Streamline Colonial with an
octagonal tower in San Luis, it attains the uniqueness standard.
The Renetzky House’s minor inconsistencies draw attention to the major ones of the next
door Master List Tucker House, which the city website oxymoronically describes as
“Carpenter Gothic Revival/Neoclassical.” The Tucker House has open pediments with
oculus windows, referencing Federal architecture; corner boards and deep eaves with
baroque corbels, which are Italianate; and a spindlework and bracketed entry from the
Queen Anne. It does not succeed in embodying any of those three styles and so does not
attain significance, though it is certainly unique as a mishmash.
Chapek House, 843 Upham, 1906
The Chapek House looks like John Chapek may, indeed, have designed it or aspects of it, as
it is ambitious and not everything fits. A later shed dormer and porch enclosure have added
slightly to the confusion. Chapek hailed from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so Colonial was
not his milieu, but he was clearly an enthusiast for Colonial Revival, as that is the style of
his early surviving spec houses. Like other spec builders, he was in the habit of living in his
new buildings until sold, but he settled at 843 Upham for a relatively long time.
The pushout in the street façade’s gable apex is a not uncommon feature of Colonial Revival
(and Queen Anne), though its integration into a square balcony topping a semi-octagon bay
is unusual, intersecting an open pediment gable. Also unusual is the use of pilasters as well
as columns. The side entry portico as a component of a more obtuse roof slope is also an
elegant touch, reminiscent of the New England saltbox, though the clutter of dormers
detracts somewhat from the effect. Prominent builders’ own houses are always of interest;
in San Luis, this one is unique.
Mazza House, 1318 Chorro, circa 1906
This would be a Colonial Revival cottage of little distinction apart from its construction of
rusticated Bishop Peak granite (which also confirms an origin of around 1906). The
monolithic columns are a tour-de-force, and the provision of stone capitals extremely
unusual. The pediment gable is, necessarily, faux stone, and the arched vent would
subsequently show up in other Streamline Colonials, becoming a bit clichéd. Yet there is
nothing clichéd about the muscularity of the material, which seems completely antithetical
to streamlining or to actual Colonial buildings.
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Strickland House, 1152 Buchon, circa 1906–1907
One might accuse this house as being as much of a mishmash as the Tucker House except
for its clear—and successful—intentionality. The bungaloid profile and Tuscan portico say
Streamline Colonial, but the irimoya roof is a wholly successful Japonesque imposition that
echoes a front-facing Streamline Colonial pediment gable. Corner cutaways, usually a
Queen Anne characteristic, replace Queen Anne corner brackets with additional Tuscan
columns, re-emphasizing the Colonial. The retention of the street façade’s flanking semi-
octagons embodies the Streamline Colonial, but the removal of their central front-facing
panels streamlines it further. The Strickland House recalls William Randolph Hearst’s apt
characterization of the Greene and Greene style (which he originally asked Julia Morgan to
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do for what instead became Hearst Castle) as a “Jappo-Swisso bungalow.” It is the seamless
melding of two styles for a result greater than the sum of its parts.
Strickland did the construction for Laird’s design of Mary Elliott’s house, and in 1904 he
built a pair of remarkably minimalist and elegant flared-roof Streamline Colonials—a third
has been lost—at 2127 and 2135 Price Street.62 These seem to presage 1152 Buchon and
should be on the Master List. Was Strickland capable of designing this extraordinary house?
Is it too extraordinary to have come from a pattern book? It is unique in San Luis.
Kaufman House, 1052 Islay, circa 1906–1907
This is a perfectly characteristic Streamline Colonial cottage with hip roof and asymmetric
pediment gable supported by Tuscan columns. The absence of bay or clustered windows
and any flair to its rectangular vent makes it plainer than most. As there is nothing unique
about the Kaufman House, it is a mystery why it is the only Master List house on the 800,
900, 1000, and 1100 blocks of Islay. It was added much later than the original survey.
62. “Locates Kansas Colony,” Tribune, 11 Dec. 1903, p. 4
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Oliver House, 1953 Chorro, after 1906
The Oliver House is likewise unremarkable, though slightly less unremarkable than the
Kaufman House. The Master List website describes it as “significant as ‘a workingman’s
farmhouse,’” but it was not a farmhouse, and that would not have made it significant,
historic significance of a person requires they be a leader or otherwise exceptionally
notable in their field. Rather this is a suburban bungalow that may have been owned by a
farmer. It embodies, like a number of other spindle column Streamline Colonial cottages in
San Luis Obispo, a type of architecture and should be on the National Register, but it is by
no means unique and does not qualify for the Master List.
Nichols House, 664 Monterey, 1907
This is the earliest house in the Morganti compound and was built two years after Nichols’
death, replacing his two-story house shown on the 1905 Sanborn map and visible in
contemporary photos. Its fluted ionic columns are unusual, as are its square oriels, and this
might attain to uniqueness, but its integrity has been compromised by the glazing of its
front porch and blocking (or removal) of its pediment’s oeil de boeuf and the loss of the
capital on its side entrance column. If it was Master Listed for its association with Mayor
Nichols, that was erroneous; if for its architecture, it is probably unique here. Its integrity
would unlikely pass the NRHP. It should certainly be renamed.
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Ramage House, 1129 Marsh, circa 1907–1910
The Ramage House is a similar type of three-columned, pediment-gabled Streamline
Colonial cottage to the Kaufman House, though it is somewhat more interesting and
characteristic for its semi-octagon bay, decorative hexagonal panes, and arched gable vent.
Not unique on its own, and though outside any historic districts, it is one of five adjoining
cottages on 1100 block of Marsh added to the Master List at the time of the original Historic
Resources Survey: a more modest version of the 700 block of Buchon, and a good save. The
Ramage House is the only Streamline Colonial among them.
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Kaiser House, 751 Buchon, 1908
Unusual as one of the few two-story Streamline Colonial houses in San Luis Obispo, the
Kaiser House also follows the one-story Brecheen House (1907) in eschewing gables,
pediments, and dormers, with a low-pitched bellcast and deep eaves. Unlike the bayless
Brecheen House, however, it employs four semi-octagons on first and second floors. It also
has a curved wraparound porch with somewhat bulbous Tuscan columns and courses of
diamond and fishscale shingles. No architect is known, but Rasmussen and Parsons built it.
Bullard House, 1624 Morro, circa 1908–1913 (next page)
The Bullard House, unlike the Aston and Unangst Houses, is a cruciform of all gambrels,
two dominant and two essentially exaggerated side dormers. Neither architect nor builder
is known for this deceptively elegant structure, whose integrity has been somewhat
compromised by the glazing of its entry portico, though its columns are visible through the
glass. It embodies the gambrel form, but it is not unique in the city, a nearly identical
though not as long gambrel house being situated at 3470 Broad Street, also with novelty
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siding below and shingles above, also perpendicular to the street, with surviving stained
glass bay in front though missing its columns.
Bradbury House, 745 Buchon, 1910
Harry Lyman, more famous for his Craftsmans, is the documented builder here. Like the
Kaufman and Ramage Houses, the Bradbury is a Streamline Colonial with pediment gable
over an asymmetric porch supported by three Tuscan columns. It has a flush rather than
bay triplet of identical sashes, plus fishscale wainscoting borrowed from curved porches. It
embodies the Streamline Colonial cottage but is not unique.
The neighboring Bradbury Sanitarium is a Prairie Box that, like other Prairie Boxes and
Kansas City Shirtwaists, is essentially a Colonial Revival offshoot but enough of a distinct
type that I have not included it among the Streamline Colonials. Kate Goodrich, a local
teacher, purchased the lot from the Vetterlines and took out a $1,100 building loan in 1902
and built a one-and-a-half-story Stick house that the Bradbury’s sanitarium replaced a
mere nine years later.63
Jackson House, 790 Islay, 1910
The house of Dr. P. K. Jackson and later blind Judge Jackson—in whose attic apartment
Assistant DA and later State Appellate Court Judge Donald Gates shot his wife’s divorce
attorney, Lloyd Somogyi, in 195464—was built by Joseph Maino with ambitious Streamline
Colonial aesthetics. Its main block runs parallel to Islay, with pediment gables at each end.
Its front façade dormer and rear extension also terminate in pediment gables, and all four
63. “Recorder’s Office,” Tribune, 30 Sep. 1902, p. 2.
64. Bill Morem, “Lawyer’s Rib May Have Saved Two Lives,” Tribune, 10 Feb. 2010.
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are centered by Palladian windows, providing an effective use of the triangular space and a
Neoclassical reference both inside and out. Simplifying elsewhere, the design eschews bay
windows for flush windows. The porch is unusually long but not a curved wraparound; its
columns are rather thick, and they bulge and taper minimally; and the eaves do not have
the exaggerated depth or creative treatment of the Stanton or Kaiser Houses. Yet the
Jackson House makes a forceful statement, and in 1910 the Tribune called it “elegant.”65 No
separate architect is documented, and it seems likely to have been designed by Maino, as it
does not have quite the professional feel of pattern house. It both embodies the Streamline
Revival and is unique in the city.
Heritage Inn, 978 Olive, 1910
Rufina Gallego was born in California of New Mexican parents—probably in San Luis
Obispo County, the daughter of ranchero Francisco Gallego—in 1853. She married Antonio
Jose Herrera, nineteen years her senior, in 1867; bore eleven children; and died in San Luis
Obispo in 1943.66 Antonio was the son of Maria and Tomas Herrera, the latter one of the
chief rancheros of the county, who was appointed superintendent of water (juez de agua)
in the new American county administration in 1850.67 Don Tomas subscribed $50 to the
1858 Vigilance Committee, and Antonio appears to have been one of its members (p. 303).
In 1890 Antonio made news for offering free right of way through his property to the
Southern Pacific for the hoped for railroad extension to San Luis, which the SP had agreed
to build only if the local committee obtained right of way.68 Antonio Herrera died at his
house on East Monterey Street in 1905, and Rufina appears to have built her new
Streamline Colonial on Monterey at the corner of Santa Rosa, where the new, spectacularly
banal court building is, in 1910.
65. “In New Home,” 1 Sept. 1910, p. 1.
66. US Census, 1880 and 1900; “A Pioneer Passed Away,” Tribune, 7 July 1905, p. 1.
67. Myron Angel, History of San Luis Obispo County, California (Berkeley: Howell-North, 1966), p. 131.
68. “Railroad,” Tribune, 2 Sep. 1890, p. 2.
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Based on early advertisements, it appears to have been designed to function as a rooming
house (“neatly furnished rooms; gentlemen preferred”) and office building, as well as a
family home. It was also the headquarters of the chief local baseball operation. The San Luis
Juniors, fielding Osbaldo Herrera, sent out an all-comers challenge from there in 1911: “Tell
’em to address 1066 Monterey Street” (“Kids Play Ball,” Telegram, 30 Sep., p. 8). In the
aughts and teens, Osbaldo’s elder brother Manuel Herrera managed various San Luis teams
(the Outlaws, the Stars, the 23 Club, etc.), to the extent that his name became synonymous
with baseball (“Herreras Will Meet Regulars: Baseball Supremacy Of City Will Be Decided
Tomorrow,” 14 Oct. 1911, p. 1).
The house was moved to a different position on its lot and then to its current location on
the motel strip of Olive Street, ironically requiring the demolition of a house owned by a
different Herrera family—the Andres Herreras from Michoacan—in what was San Luis
Obispo’s barrio before the freeway displaced it. Losing its integrity of location, setting, and
feeling, the Rufina Gallego de Herrera House should not also be forced to lose its integrity
of rich historical association by suppressing her name. The two-story size and symmetrical
design appears unique in San Luis Streamline Colonials and qualified for the Master List.
Bushnell House, 1105 George, 1910
The Bushnell House retains its location, setting, and feeling but has lost much of its design,
workmanship, and materials with new fenestration and garage level. It also has no claim to
uniqueness. It is of the common spindle column cottage subtype.
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Sandercock House, 535 Islay, 1910–1911
Possibly the youngest of the Master List Streamline Colonials, the Sandercock House, built
by James J. Maino, went all in on pediment gables, including closed and (where windows
intervene) open. It falls just short of being Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. As with
Weeks’s 1902 Marshall House (and the more modest Fumigalli cottage), an extension
thrusts forward with a semi-octagon bay in front and a pediment gable above. But in the
Sandercock house the hip roof is considerably broadened and given a central pediment
above the entrance, farther up the roof. Another bay window topped by a pediment gable
anchors the center of the other street façade on Beach. A curved wraparound porch
balances the front façade bay, but the eaves are not so exaggerated as on the Kaiser House
and without the aileron flair. Still, if not a masterpiece, it is a worthy late effort of
streamlining the Streamline Colonial, compared to the first cluttered, angular, and vertical
essays of William H. Weeks a mere eight years before. It appears to have a design, not just
size, unique in the city.
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Frank Anderson House, 1345 Broad, circa 1910
As pointed out earlier, this house, one of the first wave of additions to the Master List, is
virtually identical to the Leonard Hill House, which was added almost four decades later
(after a two-decade effort) at the other end of the Old Town Historic District. The Frank
Anderson House has much better integrity than the Hill House, which added a second story,
which may explain why it was put on the Master List in the first round. On the other hand,
the virtually identical McHenry House at 1264 Palm, with equal integrity and in the middle
of the Mill Street Historic District, was relegated to the Contributing List at the same time
the Frank Anderson House was put on the Master List. None of them can claim to be
unique, although the McHenry House is at least unique to its district.
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Thomas Levin Brecheen and May Miller Brecheen
Thomas Brecheen might have been a historically significant educator but became instead a
historically significant rogue. Alas, his initial ownership of 1133 Pismo, though providing a
name for the house, is too brief to qualify for historic association. His and May Miller
Brecheen’s story reminds us, however, that architecture is worked in and lived in, designed
or chosen by people. It entwines its iconography—aspirationally if sometimes
inappropriately—with their lives. Colonial Revival architecture combined knowledge,
reason, and patriotism. Poignant, then, that of San Luis Obispo’s Master List Streamline
Colonial houses, two should have been built with the profits of embezzlement, a member of
the County Board of Supervisors should have been arrested for malfeasance in a third, and
the assistant district attorney should have shot a lawyer in a fourth, owned by a
personification of blind justice.
Thomas Brecheen’s connection to two of San Luis Obispo’s Colonial Revival buildings—the
brick Nipomo Street School and his wood frame house six blocks to the east—is, like these,
a classical tragedy played against the backdrop of Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico.
The Nipomo Street School, where Brecheen taught, was an imposing Colonial Revival brick
building with a pediment and bell tower. Built in the late 1880s and expanded in 1897, it
looked like a New England church or courthouse, except for somewhat ill-conceived dual
entries with wood porches.
Brecheen’s Colonial Revival bungalow looked across Pierre Dallidet’s remaining unbuilt
vineyards of at the city’s brand new Mission High School, an even more imposing
Neoclassical edifice in rusticated granite. Yet the principal of the high school was in charge
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of only four teachers in one school and Brecheen of fifteen in two. As president of the
County Board of Education, he doubtless also thought himself in charge of everything.
The moment of Brecheen’s purchase of the house—newly presiding over the County Board
of Education; new principal of San Luis Obispo’s grammar schools after previously
supervising two other teachers in Cambria, one other in Simi, or in Montalvo only himself—
was an iconic but ephemeral one. One year later, in August 1908, Brecheen, only just
married to May Miller, abruptly resigned his principalship over a minor matter of class
division. In December the Board of Supervisors removed him from the County School
Board.
Over the next ten years he moved through
five school districts, beset by legal and
administrative troubles. He went into real
estate, in short order was twice arrested,
and fought the revocation of his real estate
license all the way to the California
Supreme Court, then fought the refusal of a
new license all the way to the Supreme
Court again. Shortly after losing both cases,
he pleaded guilty to petty larceny, then was
arrested for burglary. Eight years after that,
he was sent to prison for participating—as a
representative of the Good Government
Congress—in the theft of 10,000 ballots
before a recount in Jackson County, Oregon.
In unsuccessfully pleading mercy, his
lawyer asserted he was not a habitual
criminal.
According to census and death records,
Thomas Brecheen was born in Hunt County,
Texas in 1877, the fifth son and seventh
child of a farmer. When he was hired as
principal of San Luis Obispo’s high school,
he had been principal of the Cambria
schools for two years and of Montalvo
School and Simi School in Ventura County
for one year each, confirmed by
contemporary newspaper reports.
San Francisco Examiner, 20 Sep. 1921, p. 11
He was supposed before then to have graduated from the Sam Houston Normal Institute in
Huntsville—or, in a later version, the University of Texas—and to have taught at the Llano
Estacado Institute in Plainview for three years, led the Lockney public schools in Floyd
County for two, and been principal of the Dalhart public schools in Dallam and Hartley
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Counties.69 This would have made him 19 or 20 when he started his teaching career and in
his early twenties when given administrative responsibility. This might have been possible,
given his ambition and energy and the fact he was a man in a woman’s field, but in 1919 the
district attorney of Alameda County concluded he had falsified his Texas educational record
and a subsequent claim of qualifications from the University of California.
Thomas Brecheen appears to have been
idealistic, generous with his time, hard-
charging, opinionated, and unwilling to
compromise but quite willing to cut legal
and administrative corners. He had what
tragedians would have called hubris, though
he met his nemesis not among the gods but
in boards of trustees and courts of law. We
would probably now describe him as dark
triad: narcissistic, manipulative, and
psychopathic.
Front page above the fold: San Luis Obispo
Daily Telegram, 12 Oct. 1907, p. 1
In October 1907, barely two months after he purchased 1133 Pismo on the instalment plan
(broker A. F. Fitzgerald’s specialty), Brecheen was charged with battery after whipping the
sons of four prominent citizens with a leather strap—according to Brecheen’s version for
refusing his instructions to leave school grounds.70 Newspapers in San Luis Obispo and
Ventura Counties came out in his favor. Though he was arrested by Deputy Taylor and
arraigned by Justice Smith, the battery charge was thought unsustainable for someone in
loco parentis, and there is no evidence of a trial.
Two months later Brecheen was presented with a Christmas present of a gold-mounted
Waterman fountain pen by the eighth graders of the Nipomo Street School, “as a testimony
of their high appreciation of his unceasing efforts in their behalf and their deep obligation
to him for his many kind words of encouragement, counsel, and advice,” again making
front-page news.71
Professor Brecheen would appear to have been sitting pretty in the district, with a
reputation for being dedicated but not to be trifled with. On 26 July 1908 he married May
69. “New Principal for City Schools,” Daily Telegram, 24 June 1907, p. 1.
70. Daily Telegram: “School Trouble,” 12 Oct. 1907, p. 1; “Warrant Is Served,” 15 Oct. 1907, p. 1.
71 “Remember Prof. Brecheen,” Daily Telegram, 28 Dec. 1907, p. 1.
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Miller of Berkeley, brought her to her new home at 1133 Pismo on July 29, and on August
12—making front-page news again, above the fold—resigned his principalship.72
The district trustees had decided against
him, immediate past president of the
County Board of Education, in what would
seem a minor matter: the division of an
unusually large eighth grade class of more
than fifty students between Brecheen at
Nipomo Street School and the district’s vice-
principal, Miss Sarah Wayland, at Court
School, when he would normally have taken
them all. He turned in his school keys after
the trustees’ meeting and submitted his
resignation letter the next day. One can only
imagine the scene in his neat but not-paid-
for home.
Front page but below the fold: Daily
Telegram, 28 Dec. 1907
Whether he thought the trustees would back down or he was too obstinate to back down
himself is unknown. He immediately hinted to the press at business opportunities in San
Diego or San Luis.73 These seem to have been illusory. He was reported to have taken
charge of Martinez High School, also apparently false.74
Exactly four months after his resignation, he returned from Nevada for a County School
Board meeting to discover the Board of Supervisors had removed him two days before for
being absent without leave. There was presumably some underlying issue, but after having
hung about San Luis Obispo since his resignation, with occasional trips on “business
interests” out, Brecheen took the opportunity to announce that he had been offered a
principalship in Alameda County for $2,100 a year and was leaving immediately.75
It seems doubtful there was any truth to this; he disappeared from the news until listed
among a group of Oakland teachers in 1910.76 In 1911 he was mentioned as a teacher at
Fremont High School in Oakland and in 1912 as secretary of the department of business
education in the National Education Association.77 Attending a national conference of
72. “Prof. Brecheen Takes Bride,” Daily Telegram, 29 July 1908, p. 1; “Brecheen Quits His Principalship,” Daily
Telegram, 13 Aug. 1908, p. 1.
73 “Brecheen’s Resignation,” Daily Telegram, 15 Aug. 1908, p. 1.
74. “News From Afar,” Daily Telegram, 25 Sep. 1908, p. .
75. “Brecheen Gets Place In Alameda Schools,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 15 Dec. 1908, p. 2.
76. “Teachers Ask Legislative Aid,” San Francisco Call, 15 Nov. 1910, p. 8.
77. “Pedagogues Mix Up In Baseball Battle,” San Francisco Call, 3 Sep. 1911;“Commercial Teachers May
Come,” San Francisco Call, 8 June 1912, p. 5.
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commercial teachers in June, in July he was called on the carpet by the Oakland Board of
Education for ordering forty-four typewriters without authorization.78
Possibly he was forced out, for in September 1912 Brecheen found an appointment as
principal of the new Calistoga High School in Napa County.79 Calistoga High would be his
longest appointment, and the local newspaper had consistent praise for his strenuous
efforts at school improvement. In fall 1914 he was unanimously reappointed at a salary of
$1,600 per year, but in spring 1915 was writing the state superintendent of schools for
information on recalling school trustees, later denying he had anyone particular in mind.80
In 1916 he became principal of Ceres High School in Stanislaus County. The Weekly
Calistogian eulogized Brecheen as having “boosted the school and the town for all he was
worth” during his tenure.81 After a year at Ceres he became principal at Clovis High School
in Fresno County.
After a year at Clovis, in July of 1918 it was announced that Brecheen had left to become
principal of Livermore High School. In August he was back in Ceres being successfully sued
by the editor of the Ceres Courier for the unpaid printing bill of the school yearbook. In
September the Daily Telegram in San Luis printed a sensational article, based on a letter
from the Clovis relative of a local person, that Brecheen had fled from justice and another
teacher had been arrested, “suspected of having spread tuberculosis germs among the
pupils of the school” after a pneumonia outbreak (this was during the Spanish Flu
pandemic).82 The story seems dubious; the other teacher mentioned had also been hired by
Livermore, and no other paper picked up this extraordinary story; but with Brecheen’s
history, there’s no knowing.
T. L. Brecheen was principal of Livermore High from 1918 till the following April, when he
was terminated by the board of trustees, having been investigated after alleged
involvement in the school trustees’ election and found to been unknown at either of the
institutions—the University of California and the University of Texas—from which he
claimed graduation.83 He was also accused of having closed his school without
authorization of the trustees. The attempt to revoke his Alameda County teaching
certificate was found unnecessary when it turned out it had expired three years earlier. In
November 1919 Brecheen sued for the remaining two months of his year’s salary and
reinstatement in his job, gaining the first but not the second.
Shortly after this, Brecheen went into the real estate business in Berkeley, his wife’s home
town, and appears to have been living with his in-laws. He was arrested after his employer
swore out a complaint that Breechen had attacked him in the street. Brecheen filed two
78. “Berkeley Bars Oakland Pupils,” San Francisco Call, 27 July 1912, p. 17.
79. “The High School Teachers Chosen,” Weekly Calistogian, 6 Sep. 1912, p. 3.
80. “High School Trustees Meet,” Weekly Calistogian, 24 April 1914, p. 2; “Some Misunderstanding: Principal
Brecheen Is Not After Anyone’s Scalp,” Weekly Calistogian, 7 May 1915, p. 1.
81. “Renewals for Calistogian Are Very Complimentary,” 28 Sep. 1917, p. 4.
82. “Calistoga News,” Napa Daily Journal, 28 July 1918, p. 8; “Ceres School Prepares for Military Class,”
Modesto Morning Herald, 30 Aug. 1918, p. 5; “Former Teacher In Local Schools Leaves Fresno County And
Wild Rumors Are Afloat,” San Luis Obispo Daily Telegram, 27 Sep. 1918, p. 1.
83. “County Sifts School Fight At Livermore,” Oakland Tribune, 13 Dec. 1919, p. 3.
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lawsuits against the employer, then went into business for himself.84 In business for
himself, he embezzled from a client and was arrested from his in-laws house shortly after
the police broke up a fracas in Berkeley’s First National Bank lobby with another injured
client. This was all in his first year of practice, which was unfortunately the year after
California had passed first-of-its-kind legislation to regulate the real estate industry. The
state commissioner revoked Brecheen’s license for “embezzlement, false representations,
and gross moral turpitude.” Brecheen sued. Twice. And lost twice. But his suits established
the precedents that the state commissioner’s quasi-judicial power to revoke and refuse real
estate licenses was Constitutional.
After pleas for petty larceny and trials for burglary, Brecheen dropped out of the news
between 1925 and 1930, when he was practicing real estate in Ashland, Jackson County,
Oregon. In the 1940 census he listed himself as divorced, but in the 1930 census May
Brecheen—living with their nineteen-year-old daughter at her parents home and working
as a private children’s nursemaid—claimed he was dead.
84. “Realty Operator Sued Second Time,” San Francisco Examiner, 20 May 1920, p. 2. In 1920, Brecheen ran
seven real estate ads in the San Francisco Examiner but was featured in ten articles about his legal and
criminal problems.
In Ashland he involved himself (it was
imputed as its paid representative) in the
Good Government Congress, one of the local
populist movements of the Great
Depression. The group, taking over the local
Democratic Party, managed to elect their
candidates for county sheriff and judge, but
when a recount was ordered, they stole and
burned and drowned the ballots. This
became known as the Jackson County
Rebellion, and the state swooped in and
arrested the ringleaders, including
Brecheen, who served a year in prison. The
movement’s overall leader, a local
newspaper publisher named Llewellyn
Banks, died in prison, having shot dead the
constable who came to arrest him. A female
leader of the congress horsewhipped the
editor of another local paper in the street. A
third local paper won the Pulitzer Prize for
its coverage, the first small-town
newspaper to do so.
Right: Front page above the fold, Klamath
News, 6 August 1933
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Brecheen disappeared from coverage after his release from prison and in 1940 was living
in a large workingmen’s rooming house at the edge of Japantown in Los Angeles, working
as a research assistant for the school district, so he claimed to the US Census. Before he
died, suffering from senility, his daughter Natalie, who had moved to Los Angeles and
married a successful businessman, Norvin Reed, took him in. As she also appears to have
taken in her mother, this must have been awkward. After Thomas Brecheen’s death, the
Reeds rose to social prominence in Los Angeles, though Nathalie’s marriage also ended in
divorce. Norvin and Nathalie’s elder daughter Mayla Ann became a debutante, earned an
actual University of California degree, and worked—like her grandfather—as an
elementary school teacher.
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Architectural Significance of the Brecheen House
Thirty-three Master List Streamline Colonial houses are a limited comparative sampling of
the evolution of the style in the city, and rather than being a random selection, they skew
toward large houses in prominent locations. But they help us to understand the
significance of the Thomas and May Miller Brecheen House.
The bellcast roof of the Brecheen House resembles that of other houses: the 1904–1905
Albert and Baker Houses, the circa 1906–1907 Strickland House, and the 1908 Kaiser
House. The Albert and Baker Houses, which removed looming pediment gables in favor of
more diminutive hip dormers pushed back to the very center of a square hip roof (not very
practical for interior use but audacious for exterior appearance), show that the next step of
streamlining was to lower the roof profile and even further integrate the dormers or
remove them altogether yet still retain Colonial iconography. The Strickland House did this
spectacularly, integrating dormers into the ancient irimoya form, simultaneously
demonstrating that Orientalism was not absent from the mind of Colonial Revival
architects and builders in creating bellcast roofs. (This interest was not limited to the West
Coast; “Chinese Chippendale” had re-entered the lexicon, and Chinese Chippendale
furniture was being manufactured in Michigan, the center of the American trade.)
Baker and Albert
Houses (above),
dormers facing to the
left (Chorro Street)
and bay windows top
and bottom
Strickland and Kaiser
Houses, front at
bottom; both have
been added to at back
Cowdery House
(below) and Brecheen
House (right), full lot,
oriented to front of lot
at bottom
The Kaiser House, built the years after the Brecheen house, eschews dormers. Its
rectangular roof is disturbed only by a slight pushout on the back of its wider side.
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The 1904 Cowdery House, 1907 Brecheen House, and top floor of the 1908 Kaiser House
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But a Contributing List structure now hidden behind extensive shrubbery at 880 Buchon
street had anticipated this trend. The Cowdery House was built for Tribune news editor P.
B. Cowdery in early 1904—slightly earlier even than the Albert House—by an unknown
architect and builder. Like the Brecheen House, it is perpendicular to the street, a pure
rectangle in shape, with a low bellcast roof entirely free of dormers and pushouts, though
bay windows are accommodated under its wide eaves.
Compared to the Cowdery House, the architect of the Brecheen
House narrowed and extended the rectangle for its roof, brought
the roof pitch is even lower, and moved the house forward on the
lot. He or she also was able to lower the street profile of the entire
house, since it was not built on a slope, and substituted smooth
concrete for rusticate stone in its foundation. Where the Cowdery,
Strickland, Albert and Baker, and Kaiser Houses used semi-octagon
bay windows, the Brecheen Housed used flush windows
exclusively, limiting curvature to the roof and making the walls of
the house uninterrupted planes.
In decorative detail, the Brecheen House architect skillfully
pursued minimalism. Where the Cowdery House has a plain frieze
and wainscot encircling the house, the Brecheen House makes do
with the frieze. Where the standard Streamline Colonial bungalow
uses three columns for its asymmetric porch, the Cowdery House
reduces that to two, integrated with the siding rather than
displaying classical orders, and the Brecheen gets it down to a
single contrapuntal column balanced by a cornerboard.
Simultaneously with pursuing minimalism, the Brecheen House
architect expanded visual interest. The Cowdery House has two
identical plain sash windows on its façade, one on the porch and
one on the bay. The Brecheen house repeats this pattern, but the
window on the bay is flanked by two half-width windows to create
the minimalist and linear version of a Palladian window (no central
arch, which also allows the whole window grouping to be taller and
admit more light). Each upper sash is divided into two rows of
vertical rectangular lights, six wide for the two larger and three
wide for the two smaller windows, echoing the three-sash-wide
window and avoiding the distraction of diamond and hexagonal
panes.
In a sense, that column is the sole explicit vertical reference, the
bellcast roof the sole explicit horizontal reference, to the actual
Colonial, bracketing the more implicit Palladianism of the front
window.
Another Zen-like detail: Where the Cowdery House front door faces the street, pushing the
window to the side, the Brecheen House puts the door on the side of the porch, so the
single porch window and triple window on the bay can be both exactly centered.
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The Brecheen House’s side windows are also more intentionally employed for exterior
effect from the street and rhythms within the house. Two identical single sashes flank the
fireplace, followed by two paired sashes, whose pairing overcomes the internally necessary
dissonance of different sizes at slightly different heights. This does not seem so remarkable
until compared to the cluttered, seemingly random side-wall window placements of other
suburban houses.
The last detail to remark upon is the remarkable chimney. Like McKim, Mead, and White
with the H. A. C. Taylor House chimneys in Newport, the architect has employed
stringcourses. But the columnar shaft braced on the wide base with quarter-pyramids of
brick is a particularly engaging touch that combines streamlining with visual interest. This
is not a design from the Colonial Era, where chimneys were generally interior and, if
exterior, were braced with a simple slope from sides or front.
The genius of the Thomas and May Miller Brecheen House is apparent only when we put it
in the context of (1) the Streamline Colonial ideals of planarity, linearity, curvilinearity, and
minimalism and (2) the inventiveness with which some designers pursued these ideals and
others did not. Interestingly, the architects of the era—Hilamon Spencer Laird, W. C.
Phillips, William H. Weeks, and even the dubious S. B. Abbott—tended to produce busy
house designs, as if their clients were paying for extra details. Two of the most innovative
designs, both with bellcast roofs, are associated with professional builders in their own
houses: William Thompson and C. E. Strickland. Of the two most minimalist, the Cowdery
and Brecheen Houses, we know neither architect nor builder. It is certainly possible that all
of these came from a pattern book, like the Hill, McHenry, and Frank Anderson Houses, but
they seem to unusual to have done so.
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Period of Significance
Because of its short association with the somewhat
disastrously historically significant Thomas Brecheen, the
Brecheen House’s period of significance is not based on his
1907–1908 tenure. It is significant as embodying suburban
Streamline Colonial architecture, so its period of
significance would be from its construction to the filling in
of the Pismo Street section of La Vina tract
(contemporarily spelled without the tilde) of which it is
the oldest surviving occupant: 1907 to circa 1925.
Above right: The back of 1133 Pismo, the front looking northwest across the Dallidet
Vineyard, 1132 Buchon in foreground, in a later 1907 photograph when Brecheen was living
at his new house, a detail of a panoramic photograph from Terrace Hill (Cal Poly Special
Collections (168-1-b-01-36-05). In a nice touch, the back has an asymmetric exit cater-corner
to the asymmetric entrance. Below, a wider detail showing the Brecheen House at left facing
Pismo, the Hill House at center facing Buchon, and the Strickland House at right facing
Buchon.
Character-Defining Features
The character-defining features of the Brecheen House are its low-pitched bellcast roof,
asymmetric porch, single Tuscan column on a solid railing, echoing single and tripartite
sash windows on its street façade with their muntined upper sashes and plate glass lower
sashes, rhythmic fenestration on the southwest façade, plain frieze, novelty siding,
stringcoursed chimney with pyramidal base, and end-period Bishop Peak granite curb.
Integrity
The Brecheen House retains excellent integrity of location, design, setting, materials,
workmanship, feeling, and association.
Location It is in the same place as built, seen in the 1907 Terrace Hill photo at Cal Poly.
Design An addition has been constructed in back, part of which is visible in an L on the
southwest side, but in design and materials the L is reasonably compatible with and
definitely distinguishable from the original house, being considerably lower and in a
modern interpretation of Craftsman. A hip-roof pushout has been added extending
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between 2 and 3 feet from the northeast wall and about ten feet long, behind the fence and
under the eaves in a largely non-visible area on the lot line. It is distinguishable to an expert
but probably, from its singularity, to a non-expert.
The 1926–1956 Sanborn shows no alterations. Oddly, it shows the house as having a full-
width porch, but all the physical evidence—including structural fabric and hardware and a
full-width porch’s incompatibility with the placement of the chimney, which the 1907
photo 168-1-b-01-36-05 shows to be original—confirms the asymmetric porch to be the
original design. Sanborn maps periodically had erroneous drawings, as contemporary
photography shows, and their errors would not be corrected unless other changes were
made to the structure.
All the structural and decorative work on the front and southwest façades appears to be
original, including fenestration.
Setting Although it initially looked across to William Weeks’s high school (now
demolished) across Pierre Dallidet’s vineyards (now developed), the bungalow
surroundings that had been designed to spring up all over La Vina tract soon did. The
Brecheen House is surrounded by one- and one-and-a-half-story Colonial Revival and
Craftsman houses (whose vogue overlapped by roughly five years) in largely original
condition from the 1910s and 1920s. It is next door to the Master List 1913 Thorne/Nuss
House and across the street from the 1912 Vollmer House, both Craftsman. Other
surrounding houses include the Contributing List 1109 Pismo (post-Craftsman), 1145
(Craftsman), 1147 (Craftsman motifs on a Colonial Revival form), 1155 (Romanesque
Streamline Colonial), 1163 (post-Streamline Colonial), 1171 (Streamline Colonial), 1179
(Craftsman), 1185 (Craftsman), and 1195 (Craftsman) on the same side of the street and
1126 (post-Streamline Colonial), 1152 (Craftsman), 1160 (post-Streamline Colonial), 1166
(Craftsman), 1176 (post-Streamline Colonial), and 1190 (Minimal Traditional) on the
opposing side. Somewhat older structures (including the Strickland and Hill Houses) line
the neighboring Buchon Street and Pismobuchon Alley.
North side of 1100 block of Pismo Street circa 1925 taken by Pasadena photographer Bob
Plunkett (detail; courtesy Huntington Library). With the exception of the gas lamp, all the
structures visible—1152, 1160, 1166, 1175, 1190, 1202, and 1208 and their concrete curbing,
as well as 1206’s brick gatepost in foreground—survive with good to excellent integrity.
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Materials The house’s visible materials on the street and southwest façades appear to be
all original. The roof shingling and flush ridge cresting has been replaced.
Workmanship The house’s visible workmanship appears to be original.
Feeling The feeling of the house and surroundings are as they were in the early
suburban period.
Association Were he to return from prison and the dead, Thomas Brecheen would
instantly recognize his house, though it no longer faces the Dallidet vineyards.
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Conclusion
The Thomas and May Miller Brecheen House is the purest distillation of the planar, linear,
curvilinear, and minimalist ideals of the Streamline Colonial architectural type in San Luis
Obispo. It is significant in embodying a type of architecture and possessing high artistic
values; its excellent integrity communicates this significance; and it is important and
unique in San Luis Obispo. Its addition to the Master List would help to redress the paucity
of Master Listings among the more modest but no less significant bungalows at the east end
of the Old Town Historic District.
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1
Addendum to Brecheen House Master List Application
Uniqueness and Importance
Contents
Summary Conclusion 1
Methodology and Statistical Results 3
Data set 3
Period 3
Contemporary commonalities in Colonial Revival, with departures from
American Colonial architecture 4
Seven subtypes 4
Photographs of the 57 Contributing List Colonial Revival Bungalows in the 5
Old Town Historic District
I. Asymmetric pedimented porch 5
II. Asymmetric pedimented window bay 6
III. Symmetric pedimented porch 7
IV. Unpedimented full-width porch 7
V. Asymmetric and unpedimented with centered pyramidal dormer 7
VI. Asymmetric and unpedimented without dormer 8
VII. Asymmetric with irimoya roof 9
The Brecheen House: Architectural Uniqueness and Importance 10
Stripping of decorative, nonfunctional structures from the roof 10
Low roof pitch 10
Bellcast 10
Deep, soffited eaves 10
Complex window geometry 11
Invisible door 13
Single column 13
Solid parapet 13
Frieze, architrave, corner boards, and baseboard 14
Integrity 14
Conclusion 16
Summary Conclusion
At its May 2022 hearing, the CHC asked applicant for clarification of how 1133 Pismo in the
Old Town Historic District meets the “most unique and important” standard of the Master
List. The clarification required analysis of the house in comparison with its class. I used a
data set of the 57 Contributing List one-story Colonial Revival bungalows in the district,
focusing on where the Brecheen House was restrained by physical and stylistic
considerations, and where its designer took it in unique directions to embody its genre.
The data shows the house to be a rare subtype of the Colonial Revival bungalow stripped of
structural but nonfunctional roof decoration. Within this minimalist form, the anonymous
designer lowered the roof pitch to the greatest extent of any of these bungalows; extended
the eaves further than any other; accentuated both with a japoniste bellcast; created the
district’s most sophisticated geometric pattern of fenestration; successfully experimented
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with minimizing columns and doors; and framed the whole with a unique pattern of frieze,
architrave, corner boards, and baseboard. These are details, but as the great Modernist
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said, “God is in the details.”
The result is minimalist, linear, curvilinear, and unified: empirically the district’s most
streamlined bungalow in our National Revival style at the cusp of America’s suburban
bungalowization. Embodiment of core stylistic goals, juxtaposed to revolutionary ability to
stretch the envelope and to find complexity in simplicity, simplicity in complexity, are what
make the Brecheen House not just unique but important—San Luis Obispo’s bungaloid
forerunner to Purcell and Elmslie’s 1912 “Airplane House” at Woods Hole and equally
worthy of distinction, despite—or because of—its modest size and anonymous designer.
James Papp, PhD, on behalf of Christopher Frago and Heidi Howland-Frago | 2 August 2022
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Methodology and Statistical Results
Data set To address the CHC’s question in a statistically unbiased way, I selected as a
data set all one-story Colonial Revival bungalows on the Contributing List in the Old Town
Historic District. This is a large list—57 properties—because almost no one-story Colonials
were originally placed on the Master List, and almost no one-and-a-half or two-story
Colonials were originally placed on the Contributing List. In the Old Town Historic District,
the Master and Contributing Lists were essentially distinguished by size.
Period A quick check of permits and newspapers shows 1900–1913 construction
dates for 15 of the 57 bungalows. The 1907 Brecheen House falls in the middle of the range.
Contemporary commonalities in Colonial Revival, with departures from American
Colonial architecture What is remarkable about the 57 bungalows is their
consistency. Each one has (or originally had) a columned front porch. Each one has a hip
roof that appears pyramidal on the street façade, with roof ridge running front to back.
53 (93%) of the porches are asymmetrically placed, a departure from actual American
Colonial architecture, as Neoclassical entry porticoes were centered, quite often under a
pediment. 31 (54%) of these bungalows also have a front-facing pediment, though a
majority (55%) of these pediments are placed over the window bay rather than the porch:
another departure from Colonial architecture. Only one of the pediments is centered, with
the other 30 (97%) asymmetric.
A hip roof with a pyramidal front façade is also an extreme outlier among American
Colonial structures, particularly the New England ones on which McKim, Mead, and White
originally based the Colonial Revival style. Most New England Colonial houses are side-
gabled; the few hip roofs have the ridge running parallel to the street.
McKim, Mead, and White revived these broad-façade Colonials for the landed plutocracy,
but a broad façade is impractical on a narrow suburban lot. Some ur–suburban architect
may have borrowed the form from Southern Colonial houses, whose H-form wings more
often have pyramidal façades; these were being published around the turn of the century.
Rear of Thomas Pinckney’s 1797 Eldorado, South Carolina, sketched before burning in 1897.
Wings present a pyramidal roof to the garden, like the Colonial Revival bungalow to the street
(C. R. S. Horton, Savannah and Parts of the Far South, 1902, The Georgian Period, vol. iii). At
right, one of Emil John’s three adjoining Eastlake cottages, Santa Cruz, 1884. Two survive.
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But asymmetric pyramid-and-gable Eastlake cottages—unpedimented—were in Santa
Cruz by 1884 (Santa Cruz Historic Building Survey [San Francisco: Page, 1976], p. 70; see
photograph above).
In short: Colonial Revival suburban bungalows are likely to be inconsistent with actual
American Colonial architecture but overwhelmingly consistent with one another.
Seven subtypes These 57 porched and pyramidal bungalows fall into 7 subtypes
(percentages add to 102% due to rounding):
1. asymmetric pedimented porch (23%)
2. asymmetric pedimented window bay (30%)
3. symmetric pedimented porch (2%)
4. unpedimented full-width porch (5%)
5. asymmetric and unpedimented with centered pyramidal dormer (20%)
6. asymmetric and unpedimented without dormer (11%)
7. Japanese irimoya roof, hipped with gablet (11%) (This is the only subtype covered in A
Field Guide to American Houses [under Queen Anne], but all can be found across the US.)
The Brecheen House is subtype 6, a bungalow with neither pediment nor dormer.
Photographs of all 57 bungalows appear under their subtype on pages 4–8 following, in
order to make the similarities and differences visually clear.
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I. Asymmetric pedimented porch (13, or 23%)
1. 641 Buchon
4. 985 Pismo
7. 481 Islay (later porch
enclosure)
10. 1045 Islay
With torii-inspired entry
13. 1053 Islay|Akin 1909
2. 1132 Buchon
5. 663 Pismo|Chapek 1913
8. 572 Islay
With pyramidal dormer
11. 1160 Buchon
3. 1137 Buchon
6. 657 Pismo|Chapek ca 1913
9. 1035 Islay
12. 1512 Santa Rosa
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II. Asymmetric pedimented window bay (17, or 30%)
14. 578 Buchon|Esplin 1910
17. 1190 Buchon
20. 1035 Leff
23. 1627 Santa Rosa
26. 1428 Morro|Storz 1908
15. 1051 Buchon
18. 683 Pismo
21. 1606 Santa Rosa
24. 1543 Morro
27. 1720 Morro (later second
pediment and porch
enclosure)
16. 1165 Buchon
19. 1005 Islay
22. 1504 Santa Rosa|1900
25. 1520 Morro (later porch
enclosure)
With pyramidal dormer
28. 1624 Santa Rosa (later
enclosure)
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With pyramidal dormer
29. 972 Church
With second pediment
30. 1029 Islay
III. Symmetric pedimented porch (1, or 2%)
31. 533 Buchon|Lyman 1909
IV. Unpedimented full-width porch (3, or 5%)
With dormer
32. 1145 Buchon
33. 1151 Buchon
Without dormer
34. 1157 Buchon
V. Asymmetric and unpedimented with centered pyramidal dormer (11, or 20%)
35. 1171 Pismo
36. 1176 Buchon
37. 1011 Islay
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38. 1040 Islay
41. 1045 Leff
44. 1512 Morro
39. 1044 Islay
42. 1027 Leff
45. 1535 Morro
40. 1059 Leff|Wallis 1909
43. 1705 Santa Rosa (later
porch enclosure)
VI. Asymmetric and unpedimented without dormer (6, or 11%)
46. 880 Buchon|1904
49. 878 Islay
47. 1042 Pismo (later porch
enclosure)
50. 1017 Islay|Truesdale ’08
48. 1527 Nipomo
51. 1133 Pismo|1907
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VII. Asymmetric with irimoya roof (6, or 11%)
52a. 770 Islay (west façade)|
Strickland 1904
54. 1542 Osos
57. 1535 Nipomo
52b. 770 Islay (south façade)
55. 1533 Osos
53. 870 Islay
56. 1529 Osos
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The Brecheen House: Uniqueness and Importance
Stripping of decorative, nonfunctional roof structures The Brecheen House is one
of only 6, or 11%, of Colonial Revival bungalows in the Old Town Historic District with
neither pediment, dormer, nor irimoya gablet topping the roof. These decorative structures
on the other 89% of bungalows normally exhibit even more interior complexity: e.g., 74%
of the pediments in the data set have decorative wall shingling and 61%, attic windows or
vents.
Low roof pitch The 57 Colonial Revival bungalows have roof pitches up to 40%. The
absence of pediments and dormers allows the roofs of subtype 6 to be lower-pitched. Of
their 6 roofs, 3 (figs. 46, 49, and 50) are within the normal range of pitch for the complete
data set of 57, at 25–30%, but the other 3 (figs. 47, 48, and 51 [the Brecheen House]) are
the lowest pitched for the complete data set, at only 12% pitch. This minimal-pitch subset
represents 5% of the complete data set.
Bellcast Only 12, or 21%, of the the complete data set’s roofs are bellcast. Of sybtype
6, all three of the high-pitch roofs are bellcast, but the Brecheen House has the only low-
pitch bellcast roof, creating a unique effect, with the vanishing pitch at the eaves
accentuating horizontality.
The pyramidal bellcast roof is clearly a Japanese aesthetic reference—a hogyo roof—in the
context of increasing visual knowledge of Japanese architecture through Japanese entries in
American World’s Fairs. San Luis Obispo’s irimoya roofs, a number of which are bellcast,
also emphasize this origin (see the Hazzard and Minnie Root House at 770 Islay, figs. 52a
and b; the Master List Strickland House at 1152 Buchon in the main application, the
Contributing List Page House at 1344 Mill, and the Master List Payne House at 1144 Palm).
Deep, soffited eaves All but 5 of the 57 bungalows in the complete data set appear to
have soffits or closed eaves, the exceptions including the overtly japoniste 1705 Santa Rosa
(fig. 42, bellcast roof), 1535 Nipomo (fig. 56, irimoya roof), 770 Islay (figs. 51a. and b,
irimoya and bellcast roof), and 1054 Islay (fig. 13, torii-inspired entry arch), all of which
have exposed rafter tails, whether faux or not. In addition, 5 of the soffited houses have
faux rafter tails attached to the soffits for decorative effect. Thus the Brecheen House is not
particularly rare for the clean lines of its soffited eaves.
The Brecheen House is unique, however, for having the furthest extending eaves—in
comparison to its clad wall height—among all 57 bungalows, accentuating its linear
horizontality. The Brecheen house’s eave-to-wall ratio is 1 to 4, compared to 1 to 4.5 for the
data set’s irimoya roofs, to as low as 1 to 7 for the more traditional Colonial Revival
bungalows.
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Complex window geometry One of the most unusual and skillfully designed features
of the Brecheen House is its street façade windows, comprising a single window in the
porch and triple window on the bay, the latter consisting of a central window identical in
size and configuration to the porch window, flanked by windows of half the width and half
the number of rectangular muntined lights. This achieves the balance of a semi-octagonal
bay window but flush to the wall rather than protruding, to emphasize planarity. The
muntined upper sashes are half the height of the lower plate-glass sashes, and all sashes
are functioning, with meeting rails of the same height, emphasizing horizontal lines. Head
and sill extend slightly to the side, a further subtle accentuation of horizontality.
This flush, triple-window arrangement is rare, its details unique. In the 57 bungalows, 22
(39%) of the windows on asymmetric bays are protruding semi-octagons, a common
feature of Colonial Revival (though not of actual Colonial) houses. Another 17 (30%) are
single sash windows, 9 (16%) double windows, and only 5 (9%) triple windows flush to
the wall, as in the Brecheen House. The 4 symmetrical bungalows all have flush single or
double windows.
The other 4 houses with—like the Brecheen House—flush triple windows treat them with
dramatically less precision and creativity. 1042 Pismo (fig. 47) has no clear proportional
relation between its central and side windows, the upper and lower sashes are the same
height, and the porch window is obscured by subsequent enclosure, so any relationship is
unclear. The triple window at 1051 Buchon (fig. 15) also lacks a clear proportion between
center and sides, the bar across its nonfunctioning center window doesn’t match the height
of the meeting bars of the side sash windows, its double porch window doesn’t echo
elements of the triple window on the bay, and all the panes are plain plate glass.
The triple windows at 663 and 657 Pismo (figs. 5 and 6) do have side sashes half the width
of the central sash, as with the Brecheen House, but in each case triple windows are merely
duplicated in bay and porch, rather than the Brecheen House’s creative echo of its single
window on the porch in the center of its triple window on the bay. Decorative muntins at
663 Pismo and leading at 657 Pismo are reserved for the upper part of the nonfunctioning
center windows, and the bars separating the decorative from the plate-glass sections (two-
thirds up the window) are a different height than the meeting rails of the sashes (halfway
up). Muntined diamond panes at 663 and leaded diamond-topped panes at 657 don’t
contribute horizontal linearity. They are not bad design, but they are—compared to the
precise geometry of the Brecheen House fenestration—careless.
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The flush triple windows of 1051 Buchon (top
left), 1042 Pismo (bottom left), and 657
Pismo (above) do not match the attention to
proportion, rhythm, and continuity of the
Brecheen House triple window (below).
The Brecheen House’s rectangular muntined lights are rare. 32 (56%) of the 57 bungalows
have plain plate glass sash windows, 12 (21%) have diamond-topped vertical lights, and
only 4 (7%) have rectangular lights. But the Brecheen lights are not random: they have an
aesthetic function directly related to their form and proportions: nearly double in height to
width, they almost exactly echo the proportions of the porch and central bay windows
themselves, providing a subliminal geometric harmony.
Stacked double, twelve across, and repeated on the porch at six across, their effect is
rhythmic horizontality. Compare the off-square lights in only the center window of 1042
Pismo, a perfunctory attempt at decoration with no thought to greater structural effect.
Taken together, the geometry of the windows on the Brecheen façade is varied but unified,
aesthetically subtle but forceful, and entirely unique in its relentless attention to geometric
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detail among the 57 Contributing List Colonial Revival bungalows—or for that matter the
Master List Colonial Revival houses—in the Old Town Historic District.
Invisible door The Brecheen House hides its door by turning it to the side, one of only
7 (12%) in the complete data set that do so, leaving the singular window to center and
dominate the porch wall, just as its twin centers and dominates the bay.
Single column All 57 bungalows have (or had) porch columns, ranging from a
maximum of 8 to a minimum of 1. There are 43% with 2 columns, 23% with 3, and 14%
with 4 columns. Only 9% have a single-column design, and in the 4 cases apart from the
Brecheen House, the single-columned porch is a minimal entry porch rather than, as with
the Brecheen House, a wide porch for sitting.
Brecheen porch
1044 Islay, one of two single-
column duplex entries
1533 Osos entry porch
The Brecheen porch’s single, slightly bulging Tuscan column has a triple function: to
express (1) minimalism and (2) counterpoint and (3) not block the view of the aesthetically
crucial porch window and its relationship to the center window on the bay.
59% of the data set use Tuscan columns, but it’s nonetheless an intentional choice of the
Brecheen designer: projecting, like the bellcast roof, a combined linearity and
curvilinearity, along with Neoclassical reference that was considered compatible with
Japonisme (e.g., 1053 Islay [fig. 13] uses square columns with Tuscan base and capital to
form a Japanese torii-inspired entry arch). Of the 6 bungalows of the Brecheen subtype 6, 3
use Tuscan columns; 2, busier spindle columns; and 1, plain 4x4 posts. 12 (21%) of the
bungalows in the overall data set use spindle columns, and 12 use the square columns
better known on contemporary Craftsman houses, some of them in elephant leg form. Of
these, the Tuscan column is clearly the apposite choice for the Brecheen House.
Solid parapet Like 38 (67%) of examples of the data set, the Brecheen House has a
solid porch parapet rather than an open balustrade (15, or 26%) (others, altered, are
unknown). So the solid parapet is not rare but is still an architectural choice that enhances
linearity, horizontality, and streamlining.
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Frieze, architrave, corner boards, and baseboard Key to the house’s streamlined
effect is the linearity and unity of its wide accent boards against the narrow novelty siding.
A blank frieze below the
eaves occurs in 43 (75%) of
the data set. 37 (68%) have
defined corner boards, and
39% have defined boards for
the base of the wood wall.
Very rare, however, is a
façade-wide architrave
below the frieze: the
Brecheen House is one of
only 6 (11%) that have them,
3 of these from subtype 6.
As well, the Brecheen House is 1 of only 2 bungalows employing frieze, architrave, base,
and corner board. The other is Charles Strickland’s 1904 japoniste Colonial Revival Hazzard
and Minnie Root House at 770 Islay (figs. 52a and b), a forerunner to Strickland’s own
1906–1907 japoniste Colonial Revival Master List house at 1152 Buchon. The Root House,
like the Brecheen House, is a strong candidate for Master Listing, though with less integrity
than the Brecheen House because of new fenestration.
The Brecheen House’s unique innovation is to use the same width of board for architrave,
corner boards, and base to create a unifying and streamlining frame for street and side
façades. The window casings also use the same width, further accentuating the unity.
Integrity No example of the Brecheen House’s subtype 6—the pedimentless and
dormerless bungalow—is on the Old Town Historic District’s Master List. Of the 6 possible
Contributing List candidates, 1042 Pismo had its porch enclosed in the 1930s or ’40s, 880
Buchon has had a deck added to the front, 1527 Pismo has new fenestration on its façade,
and 1017 Islay has an overtopping stucco addition that has subsumed part of the original
house. There is evidence that 878 Islay was moved from a different location, and has an
addition on the side. Of the 6 of subtype 6, the Brecheen House is not only the best-
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designed example, in its original location and with an addition conforming to the Secretary
of the Interior Standards for Rehabilitation—at the rear, differentiated, and compatible in
materials; features; size, scale, and proportion; and massing—it retains the best integrity to
communicate its significance.
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Conclusion
Analyzing the complete data set of 57 Old Town Historic District Contributing List Colonial
Revival bungalows allows us to define what is unique and important in the Brecheen
House. As Mies said, “God is in the details.” The anonymous designer of the Brecheen House
had a keen sense of the streamlined aesthetic goal of the Colonial Revival and the potential
of the small suburban bungalow within that genre. But the designer also had the
extraordinary command of rare and unique structural and decorative detail—from roof
pitch to corner board width—to make sure the result would demonstrate, as Mies also said,
“Less is more.”
The Contributing List and Master List data sets, in juxtaposition, also demonstrate that
admission to the Old Town Historic District’s Master List was largely a matter of size,
abundance of decorative features, and proximity to Nob Hill. The Brecheen House—as the
distillation of streamline Colonial bungalow architecture at the opposite end of the
district—was destined to be excluded. It may be the finest but is not the only bungalow that
merits Master List protection for embodying a character-defining style of San Luis
architecture. After forty years, we need to take a more systematic look.
The 1907 Brecheen House may have been influenced by Prairie style aesthetics (as displayed
in the 1912 Airplane House below), but Purcell and Elmslie may equally have borrowed from
the bellcast roof, deep eaves, and clustered windows of japoniste Streamline Colonial
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City of San Luis Obispo Architectural Character
Citywide Historic Context Statement
HISTORIC RESOURCES GROUP
138
NEO-CLASSICAL COTTAGE
The term “Neo-Classical Cottage” is used to describe simple house forms or cottages with fewer
decorative features than other styles from the period. While vernacular residences may display certain
characteristics of recognizable styles, decorative detailing is typically confined to the porch or cornice
line.
Character-defining features include:
Symmetrical façade
Simple square or rectangular form
Gabled or hipped roof with boxed or open eaves
Wood exterior cladding
Simple window and door surrounds
Details may include cornice line brackets
Porch support with turned spindles or square posts
1203 Pismo Street, c.1900. Source: Historic Resources
Group.
1211 Pismo Street, 1908.Source: Historic Resources
Group.
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Zoning, or remove the property from historic listing if the structure on the property no longer
meets eligibility criteria for listing, following the process for listing set forth herein.
14.01.070. Evaluation Criteria for Historic Resource Listing
When determining if a property should be designated as a listed Historic or Cultural Resource,
the CHC and City Council shall consider this ordinance and State Historic Preservation Office
(“SHPO”) standards. In order to be eligible for designation, the resource shall exhibit a high
level of historic integrity, be at least fifty (50) years old (less than 50 if it can be demonstrated
that enough time has passed to understand its historical importance) and satisfy at least one of the
following criteria:
A. Architectural Criteria: Embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, region, or
method of construction, or represents the work of a master, or possesses high artistic values.
(1)Style: Describes the form of a building, such as size, structural shape and details
within that form (e.g. arrangement of windows and doors, ornamentation, etc.). Building
style will be evaluated as a measure of:
a. The relative purity of a traditional style;
b. Rarity of existence at any time in the locale; and/or current rarity although the
structure reflects a once popular style;
c. Traditional, vernacular and/or eclectic influences that represent a particular social
milieu and period of the community; and/or the uniqueness of hybrid styles and how
these styles are put together.
(2)Design: Describes the architectural concept of a structure and the quality of artistic
merit and craftsmanship of the individual parts. Reflects how well a particular style or
combination of styles are expressed through compatibility and detailing of elements.
Also, suggests degree to which the designer (e.g., carpenter-builder) accurately
interpreted and conveyed the style(s). Building design will be evaluated as a measure of:
a. Notable attractiveness with aesthetic appeal because of its artistic merit, details and
craftsmanship (even if not necessarily unique);
b. An expression of interesting details and eclecticism among carpenter-builders,
although the craftsmanship and artistic quality may not be superior.
(3)Architect: Describes the professional (an individual or firm) directly responsible for
the building design and plans of the structure. The architect will be evaluated as a
reference to:
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a. A notable architect (e.g., Wright, Morgan), including architects who made
significant contributions to the state or region, or an architect whose work influenced
development of the city, state or nation.
b. An architect who, in terms of craftsmanship, made significant contributions to San
Luis Obispo (e.g., Abrahams who, according to local sources, designed the house at
810 Osos - Frank Avila's father's home - built between 1927 – 30).
B. Historic Criteria
(1)History – Person: Associated with the lives of persons important to local, California,
or national history. Historic person will be evaluated as a measure of the degree to which
a person or group was:
a. Significant to the community as a public leader (e.g., mayor, congress member,
etc.) or for his or her fame and outstanding recognition - locally, regionally, or
nationally.
b. Significant to the community as a public servant or person who made early, unique,
or outstanding contributions to the community, important local affairs or institutions
(e.g., council members, educators, medical professionals, clergymen, railroad
officials).
(2)History – Event: Associated with events that have made a significant contribution to
the broad patterns of local or regional history or the cultural heritage of California or the
United States. Historic event will be evaluated as a measure of:
(i) A landmark, famous, or first-of-its-kind event for the city - regardless of whether
the impact of the event spread beyond the city.
(ii) A relatively unique, important or interesting contribution to the city (e.g., the Ah
Louis Store as the center for Chinese-American cultural activities in early San Luis
Obispo history).
(3)History-Context: Associated with and also a prime illustration of predominant
patterns of political, social, economic, cultural, medical, educational, governmental,
military, industrial, or religious history. Historic context will be evaluated as a measure
of the degree to which it reflects:
a. Early, first, or major patterns of local history, regardless of whether the historic
effects go beyond the city level, that are intimately connected with the building (e.g.,
County Museum).
b. Secondary patterns of local history, but closely associated with the building (e.g.,
Park Hotel).
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