architects

WHO DESIGNED THE SONOMA COUNTY MUSEUM?

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

There’s a plaque at the Sonoma County Museum noting the building was “designed by James Knox Taylor.” Perhaps that line should be taped over, or at least a question mark added. A bright red question mark.

The magnificent old place was once Santa Rosa’s post office. Even before the 1906 earthquake, the town’s Congressman requested funds for a new federal building because the post office had outgrown its 19th century rooms in the old Athenaeum, Santa Rosa’s opera house. When that building collapsed in the quake, the post office temporarily relocated to the tent city on a Mendocino street vacant lot (along with almost every downtown business). After that, postal workers operated a window at a grocery store as they waited for a new home to be built by the government. And waited. 1906 turned into 1907, then 1908, when the Squeedunk parade mocked the endless delays with a float portraying a vacant lot surrounded by a worn fence. Finally, the blueprints arrived from Washington (now available online via the Library of Congress). On each page was stamped the signature and title of “James Knox Taylor Supervising Architect Treasury Department”.

(TOP: Santa Rosa received its first glimpse of its new post office in an unsigned architect’s rendering that appeared in the Republican January 14, 1909. CLICK or TAP any image to enlarge

MIDDLE: Construction progress was delayed by water continually filling the excavated site, probably because of an underground tributary to Santa Rosa creek. Photo courtesy Sonoma County Library

BOTTOM: Postcard c. 1910. Note the bicycles strewn on the curb and steps. Photo courtesy Bancroft Library/University of California)

James Knox Taylor was in charge of the Office of the Supervising Architect, a Treasury subdepartment that designed and commissioned federal buildings as well as awarding construction contracts. It was a job of tremendous responsibility; he managed an annual budget and inventory worth around $25 million, which would be closer to a billion dollars today. In FY 1909, when work was underway in Santa Rosa, he had 134 new buildings under construction or recently completed, additions or major repairs on dozens of others, and a further 263 projects somewhere in the pipeline, clamoring for attention.

Taylor’s appointment in 1897 to this post surprised many. It was usually a political patronage job and the designs produced by the Office were generally considered lackluster (one critic at the time called the work “excretable”). But Taylor had worked as an architect himself – albeit one who couldn’t make a living at it. Although he wasn’t the Treasury Department’s first choice, he was selected because he had been a draftsman there for three years and knew how the large Office functioned, and also because he wrote a convincing essay that outlined his philosophy: That public buildings shoud have a dignified style, be beautiful, and be pleasant to work in. Taylor quickly transformed the Office into a true architectural studio that turned out designs that might not have been the best of the day, but were certainly nothing to be ashamed of. He also awarded commissions to top architects for prominent buildings in major cities, which earned him high praise from top architects. Alas, that policy proved his undoing, and he resigned in 1912 amid a scandal that he gave one of these valuable contracts to his former partner from their failed architectural firm.

But did James Knox Taylor design the building that’s now the Sonoma County Museum? Unless unpublished correspondence turns up that proves authorship, assume the answer is no. The primary reference book on the Supervising Architect’s Office, “Architects to the Nation” (my source for background on Taylor) explains that during his tenure, “…modest government buildings, usually post offices, located in small communities…were designed by the Office staff.” Architectural database archINFORM similarly notes, “As the head of a sizable government office, Taylor’s direct involvement with any of these projects is open to question.” And then there was Taylor’s own essay that won him the position, where he stated that he believed the Supervising Architect should be a manager and leave designing to others, so “…[the Supervising Architect] could devote his attention to seeing personally that the three general considerations stated in the beginning of this thesis were studied, and that the actual work of construction was honestly done.”

In sum: It can be claimed James Knox Taylor was the designer of hundreds of public buildings in the same sense that hundreds of cartoons were “made by Walt Disney.” The man with his name on the title signed off on the final product, but likely didn’t do much of anything to shape the work; it was his talented employees who were the real creators.

So who does deserve our thanks for that beautiful building? The only full name on the blueprints is Taylor’s Supervising Architect stamp, and the actual draftsman is anonymous draftsman’s name can be read as “Smith” on some pages of the blueprints. The only other name associated with the building’s creation is one William N. Collier, and he was an engineer sent to oversee construction, not an architect.

Perhaps the true architect’s name might be found somewhere in the cavernous National Archives, but it’s useful to compare Santa Rosa’s old post office to other California post office/federal buildings that were in the works at the same time: Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and Stockton. I was unable to find any image of the historic Stockton building, but photos of the others reveal they share Santa Rosa’s Beaux Arts-Neoclassical-Spanish Colonial mashup. All have a low-pitched hipped roof with red tile; strong cornices under the eaves; masonry walls; a portico with a colonnade; an entryway filled with windows. Each building has slightly different tweaks. Santa Rosa’s Corinthian columns became Doric columns in Santa Cruz, then arches with pilasters in Santa Barbara. The post office in Santa Cruz is a single story, but has a larger footprint than the other two. (Only Santa Rosa is well proportioned, in my opinion, and the steps on the other buildings are not an integral  part  of the design, looking more like afterthoughts.)

Does that mean the same unknown architect designed all of the 1909-1910 California post offices? Possibly, but if they look enough alike to be a set of fraternal triplets, the East Coast federal buildings of the same vintage can be recognized as their first cousins. You’ll spot the same Beaux Arts-Neoclassical look – particularly in the shape of the oversized windows and doorways – at Saratoga Springs, NY, Selma, Alabama and Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, among others. Slap a hipped tile roof and a portico-colonnade on any of these buildings and they’d fit right in with the “California” style of architecture coming from Taylor’s office. (UPDATE: On further study, even the hipped tile roof can be found on post offices in the South and Southwest from this period – one example is Bessemer, Alabama.) I think the best conclusion is that the designer/architects were following the Office pattern book and not their muse.

Our treasure of a federal building was officially completed on March 1, 1910 for a total cost about $60,000. And so everything remained for 55 years, until the current post office was built in 1965 on Second street. The government sold the old building to Sonoma County, which used it as a data processing center. In 1977 it was sold again to the Santa Rosa Urban Renewal Agency, which was itching to get rid of it to make room for a shiny new mall that guaranteed lotsa’ renewing would follow. The building was slowwwwly moved from its original location at 405 Fifth street (on the corner of A street, an address now obliterated by the mall parking structure) about 750 feet to Seventh street. We should be very grateful that Santa Rosa didn’t just rip it down, as it recklessly demolished most of the rest of its history.

The old post office deserves to be better appreciated. If a drama were written about the history of Santa Rosa (R-rated, for sure), the first act would be set in a downtown saloon, sweaty, dank and thick with the grit of the Old West. But the scene for act two would be on the sunshined steps of the post office, because that’s where you bumped into everyone every day during the decades when Santa Rosa bloomed. This was the heart of the charming place that Alfred Hitchcock loved and immortalized. Venerate today that quiet lobby, which remains a perfect time capsule of memories not your own.

Contrast that with our present underwhelming main post office, which is notable for having a complete set of walls, floor and ceiling. Every time I’m in there – waiting at the back of a mile-long line – I think back to my aunt Ethelyn, who in the 1960s had a repulsive “modern” sofa with plastic upholstery. When anyone in the family teased that it was remarkably ugly even for the low standards of the day, she’d huff defensively, “well, it’s very easy to keep clean.”

HANDSOME NEW BUILDING FOR THE POSTOFFICE FOR THE CITY OF SANTA ROSA

The new Santa Rosa postoffice building, which is to be erected on the corner of Fifth and A streets in this city, has been admirably designed to harmonize with our history, climate, and natural surroundings. The building will be of Spanish design and will present a pleasing contrast to our other public buildings in the city. The building proper has a frontage on Fifth street of eighty-two feet, and a depth on A street of fifty-two feet. In addition to this main building there is a portico across the front fifty-one feet wide by thirteen feet deep. The general construction of the building is brick masonry, laid in pure cement mortar, no lime whatever. To the height of the first floor the building will be faced with cut stone laid as “coursed ashlar.” This stone will probably be “Indiana Buff Bedford Limestone,” the finest building stone now obtainable in the United States. From the cut stone line to the rafter extensions, the plain brick work will be stuccoed in a rough cast “stipled” surface and nicely paneled and ornamented in mouldings. The roof of the building will be covered with the best grade of Spanish terra cotta tile, including ornamented tile hips and ridges. All of the lintels over the portico and door and window openings will be of cast reinforced concrete, and all sills will be cut stone of same as base course. The portico floor is reached by a set of massive solid granite steps forty-six feet wide. The roof of the portico is also Spanish tile, and is held up by two heavy masonry corners, and four stone columns, twenty inches in diameter, with heavy base and carved caps.

The cornice of the entire building is overhanging with darkened beams and huge rafters. In all, the effect is one of massiveness and solidity. Each buttress on either side of the granite steps is surmounted by a heavy cast iron lamp standard, of highly ornamented design, and with five large opalescent glass globes to each standard. These lamps stand about ten feet high.

The first floor is given over entirely to the use of the postoffice, the public lobby extends across the entire front of the building and is thirteen feet deep, with high ceiling and heavy plastered arches and cornices. At the left end of the lobby is a fine solid oak stairway leading to the internal revenue offices on the second floor. Another passageway at the left leads to the private offices of the postmaster and assistant postmaster.

The workroom occupies all the central portion of the first floor and is practically two stories in height, as is the public lobby. The money order and registry department is at the right of the double entrance, and is separated somewhat from the general workroom. Large roomy vaults of reinforced concrete and steel are provided for all purposes. The floor of the portico and public lobby is of marble terrazzo laid off in panels. All of the base and plinths of the lobby will also be of marble. The second story at the left is arranged into a suite of offices for internal revenue officers with private vaults, toilet, etc. On the right of the second story are arranged a store room, “swing room,” and toilet room.

All of the toilet rooms have terazzo floors and marble wainscoting. The large toilet rooms on the second floor have exceptionally fine facilities, including shower baths for employees of the postoffice. There will be a basement with ten-foot ceiling under the whole building given over to the heating plant and fuel storage, etc. The mechanical equipment of the building, including heating, plumbing, and electric installation, is superb and of the latest types throughout. The heating will have an automatic oil burning plant to operate a hot water heating apparatus.

The plumbing embraces some of the finest fixtures made, most of which will be the John Douglas manufacture. All heating and plumbing pipes and fittings will be jacketed with asbestos pipe coverings. There will be four distinct electric installations, one for lighting, one for power, one for vault protection service and one for telephone service within the building. All electric work will be run in metal conduits.

The inside finish of the building will be almost entirely of quarter sawed whiteoak for all doors, trim, fixtures, counters, desks, etc. All glass will be plate or ornamental opalascent glass. Wood floors will be of white maple. Artistic metal grilles at all screen openings and front doors.

As a whole our new Federal Building compares favorably with other like [illegible microfilm] and while not so large and pretentious as some, it is fully adequate to serve its purpose.

The building was designed by James Knox Taylor, supervising architect of the treasury, and its construction will be under the personal supervision of Mr. William N. Collier, superintendent of construction of public buildings, who is now in Santa Rosa. Hoyt Brothers have the contract to erect the building.

– Santa Rosa Republican January 14, 1909

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IS IT HOOD MANSION OR HOOD HOUSE?

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

About 15 minutes from downtown Santa Rosa is a mansion that’s not a mansion, and a treasure that’s hasn’t been particularly treasured at times. It’s the William Hood House (AKA Hood Mansion).

Now tucked behind the county’s Juvenile Justice Center, the old house has lost the commanding view of northern Sonoma Valley that it possessed when it was built in 1858. The talking points (PDF) prepared for an open house a few years ago provide the best overview of the history of the building: Hood, a house builder and grape grower, bought a half interest in the nearly 19,000 acre Rancho Los Guilicos in 1850, obtaining complete ownership a few years later. In 1858 he married and began construction.

(ABOVE: The William Hood House c. 1898, courtesy the Sonoma County Library/Sherman Boivin Collection

BELOW: Hood Mansion today, from approximately the same viewpoint)

Most of Hood’s original house is architecturally unremarkable; it’s a nice Victorian-era farmhouse, as seen in the historic photo. Most notable is that it’s made of brick, even including the downstairs interior walls, which are finished with plaster. The talking points explain why this was unusual:


At the time, brick was a very expensive building material. Very few manufacturing kilns had been established in the area, and their weight made them costly to transport. Therefore, most brick buildings from this period were made from clay deposits found nearby and fired on site. The somewhat uneven appearance of the bricks on Hood Mansion are a testament to the handiwork of the local craftsmen. In all likelihood, the bricks were manufactured on site by Native American workers.

The Hood family lost the property through foreclosure, as also happened to the wine-making family that followed. In 1905 the lender sold it to Thomas Kearns, a Utah silver tycoon and former U.S. Senator. Kearns had an opulent home in Salt Lake City and hobnobbed with the rich and powerful, including President Teddy Roosevelt. For him, a simple farmhouse would not do, so he hired someone to enlarge and modernize the building. Thanks to a small item in the Press Democrat, we now know that someone was architect William H. Willcox.(Another article with greater depth about Kearns and his years of ownership is available here.)

Willcox has been mentioned several times in this journal (read an introduction here) and had been an nationally-esteemed architect since the 1880s. In Santa Rosa, he was planning to build a auditorium large enough to host state and national conventions, as well as providing a civic center; he also proposed creating a water park between Main and E street, which would have transformed the town’s focus. Alas, the 1906 earthquake struck when he was apparently just weeks away from having enough funding to begin the big pavilion, and in the disaster’s aftermath, the money men were interested in rebuilding what they had personally lost, not investing in their mutual future.

Willcox was really the only logical man for Kearns to hire. The scope of the project went beyond what could be entrusted to a carpenter-builder, and Willcox was about the only experienced architect who could keep an eye on the construction. Other qualified architects working around Santa Rosa at that time lived farther away. Brainerd Jones was busy in Petaluma, John Galen Howard (who designed the Empire Building) was in Berkeley, and J. W. Doliver (the new county courthouse) and Victor Dunkerly (a Frank Lloyd Wright collaborator who built the Overton Hotel) were in San Francisco. While Willcox mainly lived and worked in San Francisco, he kept an office in Santa Rosa that he shared with a civil engineer (another bonus, considering that the project involved a unreinforced brick building in the Santa Rosa Plain, where the occasional aftershock still made people twitchy).

Sadly, the Hood House modifications are the only works of Willcox (currently known) to survive in Sonoma County. (UPDATE) Some of the additions were quite modern; other work blended so well with the pre-Civil War building that there are questions about what details were part of the original construction. Thanks to the county Facilities Department, myself and a handful of architects and historians were given a chance to examine the building. Here’s my guess on what Willcox completed in 1908:

Viewing the front (Hood House faces west) it’s immediately apparent that the building was widened by about 30 feet, as seen by comparing the historic and current photos above. (CLICK or TAP on any photo to enlarge.) The seams between old and new brickwork are easily noticed in person. To expand the house on the north side, Willcox had to only add a second floor to the original one-story extension of the main house, which might have been Hood’s dining room.


LEFT: North view, with the original roof line visible above the ground floor windows. The single story section with the three doors was likely a utility room (a boiler for the heating system, a boiler for hot faucets, and probably a backup electric generator) added by Willcox

MIDDLE: East view, with the Kearns-era kitchen at the south (green door), directly behind the new dining room. The northern section of the utility building with the door closest to the camera was added, and its proximity to the boiler room suggests it was a laundry room

RIGHT: South view, with the new formal entrance into the dining room

Willcox gets credit for the entire south side of the house, which he turned into the new formal entrance. The roof of the portico is supported by the same cornice brackets as found on the front of the house. Thankfully the county left its original brown shingle when a new roof was put on the rest of the house; these shingles were a favorite material of the Bay Area Arts & Craft movement, and serve to introduce visitors to the spectacular dining room behind the door.

Nearly everything in the dining room is oak: The enormous table, floor, beamed ceiling, paneled walls, and the huge sideboard that nearly fills the inside wall. Above the table, an array of lights illuminate the room as well as the ceiling beams, all fixtures in the Craftsman style. In 1908, this room would have been considered ultra-modern design.


LEFT: Upper shades of the elaborate center fixture point towards the simple ceiling rose

MIDDLE: Along the sides of the room are pendant lanterns, suspended from an ornamental post and chain

RIGHT: The underside of a lantern reveals that each could hold four candles on the exterior, plus one inside. Only very narrow candles could be used in these holders, suggesting they were used only for decoration

The dining room commands half of Willcox’s addition on the southern ground floor; the southwest side is an equally large reception room. The modern touch here is the cove ceiling; the rest of the room is unadorned, except for a nice fireplace with a Roman-themed break front portraying a woman’s head and grape leaves. Willcox also placed fireplaces in each pair of upstairs bedrooms on the north and south walls as well as in the dining room, giving the house a total of eight fireplaces (I think).


LEFT: Fireplace in the reception room

MIDDLE: Fireplace in the northeast bedroom

RIGHT: One of the fireplaces in the original part of the house

Where else did Willcox leave his fingerprints on the William Hood House? An architect on our tour proposed that fancy moldings in some of the old rooms were too opulent for a mid-19th century farmhouse, and suggested that Willcox made a pass through the entire home to update details and unify the design. I disagree; the trim work upstairs is modest, particularly in the rooms Willcox created. But I agree that these downstairs moldings probably were not part of the original construction and were added sometime during the late Victorian era. Perhaps the investor who owned the property between the 1893 Hood foreclosure and the 1905 purchase by Kearns brought in a contractor to put some lipstick on his white elephant.


LEFT: Several of the rooms in the original house have extremely elaborate crown molding-picture rail

MIDDLE: Many downstairs door jambs, unusually thick because of the interior brick walls, have moldings on all sides

RIGHT: Multipart crown moldings are even found on storage cabinets

The history of the house after the Willcox changes is detailed in the talking points linked above. Briefly: Kearns sold it after WWI, and the property was subdivided. The home became part of a compound owned by a men’s organization, then the state, then finally Sonoma County. The house is lucky to have enjoyed good stewardship: Had the Fates been unkind, the bricks of Hood Mansion could just as easily be melting back into the local mud from which they came (see: Carrillo Adobe). The county deserves full props for its earthquake retrofit and stabilization of the building in recent years.

(RIGHT: Something awful lurks in the dark rooms of Hood House)

The county does, however, deserve shame for the darkest moment of Hood House: Turning the place over to a clique of interior decorators for a Bicentennial Decorators’ Showcase (“a display of more than 20 historic rooms decorated by leading designers!”) that left many interiors in the esteemed old building defaced – and possibly, damaged – with mid-1970s crap-ola. Woodwork was painted in trendy colors; avocado green linoleum was glued to antique counter tops and cabinets; room after room has wallpaper competing for the most frenetic design and clashing colors, some of which can be glimpsed in the photos above. One interior room has a wall covered in wood shingles, with other walls (and ceiling!) papered in a cartoon-y floral orgy that looks a plea for help from someone who’s watched way too many episodes of the Partridge Family.

Most of the damage done by the showcase can be undone, but that The Ugly is still around more than three decades later attests that the work won’t be easy or cheap – it’s another big project in a house that has a list of big projects crying for attention. There’s a measure of irony that Willcox was available to accept the Hood House project because post-quake Santa Rosa was too distracted to see the best interests for its future. Then exactly 70 years later, his work there was defaced because the county likewise failed to weigh the long-term impacts of a poor decision.

Architect William H. Willcox is at the Overton from San Francisco. Mr. Wilcox says the new residence on Senator Kearns’ place at Los Guilocos [sic] is about completed.

– “Around the Corridors”, Press Democrat, June 5, 1908

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SANTA ROSA’S LOST FIREHOUSE

Jeff Elliott Leave a comment

Not long after the 1906 Santa Rosa Earthquake, plans were underway to build a replacement courthouse and firehouse downtown, both critical buildings destroyed by the quake or fire. For the courthouse, which also held the offices for county officials, no expense was spared; financed by a whopping $280,000 bond, the building was artistic and grand, even palatial. For the firemen, an adequate replacement building would have to do.

Plans for a state-of-the-art firehouse and adjacent City Hall were drawn up by John Galen Howard, one of the most respected architects on the West Coast, who had recently designed the Empire Building (then the Santa Rosa Bank) downtown. From the drawing that appeared in the newspapers, the design was in the same style as that building – sans the out-of-scale retro clock tower.

Alas. Santa Rosa went on the cheap. John Galen Howard’s buildings were to be funded by a $75,000 public bond, but a bond issue was never placed before the voters. The City Council quietly decided instead to build a modest firehouse at the old Fifth Street location, using only the $11,000 in the town’s building fund.

As explained by the Press Democrat, selling firehouse bonds was actually Plan B. The original idea was that local banks would jointly provide a special loan to the city to be paid back through the general fund over many years. But lenders everywhere turned skittish after the Bank Panic of 1907, which nearly brought about the collapse of the U.S. economy.

There also may have been political problems. The new firehouse/city hall was to be on the corner of Third and Main Street – now the B of A building, but at the time it was the former location of the Grand Hotel, and owned by the Savings Bank of Santa Rosa. This bank was controlled by the current mayor (J. P. Overton) and Con Shea, who separately owned much of the prime real estate downtown. The bond called for paying them the rather large sum of $18,000 for a parcel that nobody else apparently wanted; in 1908 it was still mostly a vacant lot, with a small Salvation Army chapel. Buying the land and building there became somewhat of an issue during the 1908 city election campaigns, when reformers trying to oust the “good ol’ boys” questioned the wisdom of bonding the town for another $75,000 and purchasing overpriced land when the city already owned the old firehouse site on Fifth St. and the former City Hall site on Hinton Ave.

Another factor might have been that some felt the Third and Main Street location was also on the “wrong” side of town, adjacent to the little Chinatown on Second and the red light district on First Street. And directly next door, the unsightly earthquake wreckage of the Eagle Hotel still remained, despite complaints to the City Council.

But the John Galen Howard plans were abandoned sometime in early 1908, becoming yet another of Santa Rosa’s lost opportunities. The new firehouse/city hall would have been kitty-corner from Howard’s Empire Building, and the three buildings together would have given the neglected side of downtown something of the elegant feel of UC/Berkeley, which was being created by Howard at the same time.

SANTA ROSA’S PROPOSED NEW CITY HALL AND FIRE STATION, SOON TO BE BUILT

The above picture shows the proposed new city hall for Santa Rosa and also the proposed new fire station from the plans adopted by the City Council and prepared by Howard & Galloway, engineers and architects of San Francisco. Both buildings are to replace those destroyed in disaster of the memorable morning of April 18, 1906.

Both buildings are confessedly much needed, and the City Council has decided to submit the question of voting bonds in the sum of $75,000 for the purchase of the site, erections of buildings etc. The buildings will cost not to exceed $60,000. The matter of issuing bonds will be submitted to the voters of Santa Rosa at the municipal selection to be held in this city in April.

The city hall will be a commodious building, two stories high, and will be built of steel and reinforced concrete. The steel frame will be a massive one. It will contain the offices for the several city officials, police department, Jail, council chambers and public hall. The public hall will be located in the second story. The Mayor, members of the council and the architect in the consideration of the plans have arranged to have the building modern in every particular and one of which the citizens and taxpayers will be proud.

The fire department building (the smaller of the two shown in the picture) will be located on the same site as the City Hall. The ground floor will be used for the firefighting apparatus, and the stabling of the horses. The upper story will be devoted to the sleeping and living quarters of the firemen. Like the city hall the new fire station is an absolute necessity and much time has been spent by fire chief Frank Muther, the mayor and council and the architect in having the department housed in a building that will be second to none in point of usefulness and modern equipment in the state.

As is well known it was first planned that the financing of the erection and equipment of the municipal buildings should be undertaken by a combination of banks in Santa Rosa, and when completed the city was to pay them back in yearly installments from the general tax fund. With this idea in view the city council is making the tax levy for this year set aside $10,000 which is now in the building fund. Owing to the recent financial flurry, however, the banks did not feel at liberty at this time to assume the obligation.

– Press Democrat, February 2, 1908

Councilman Forgett stated that he had expected to have the plans for the steel frame of the new fire house on hand, but one of the firms had failed to come through and he desired that the matter go over. Mr. Kirby had was present and explained his plans for an all-steel frame building. The building on these plans was not to cost over $11,000.

– “Council has Long Session,” Santa Rosa Republican, June 4, 1908

CALL FOR BIDS FOR NEW FIRE STATION
Plans Adopted for Building on Fifth Street at Last Night’s Meeting of the Council

Plans and specifications have been adopted for the fire department station on the city slot on Fifth street. Action was taken at last night’s meeting of the city council. Bids were also invited for construction of the same. The building will be of steel and brick.

Separate bids were invited for the supplying and erection of the steel frame and for the brick work and completion of the building. Mrs. Sadie McCann prepared the plans under the direction of the structure committee of which Councilman Forgett is chairman. They provide for a neat and imposing building.

– Press Democrat, June 17, 1908

Chairman Forgett of the structure committee declared flushes were required in the fire department houses for the stalls. Is necessary to flush these stalls frequently and cause fresh water to remain in the traps to be sanitary. He reported good progress being made on the fire house structure. The council deemed the flushes a necessity and referred the matter to the structure committee with powers to act.

– “Business of the City Council,” Santa Rosa Republican, October 7, 1908

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