Books

What was urban life like 100 years ago? The technology we now take for granted was either absent or in its infancy: electricity, automobiles, telephones, radio, television. In my own mind I picture New York City or Chicago with its teeming immigrants, and still manage to conclude that urban life was much like it is now: huge numbers of people all trying to get ahead in the world.

Among the important social facts of urban life then: city dwellers were a minority. In 1908, 56% of Americans still lived in rural areas (by 1920 the urbanites were in the majority, and in 2008 only 17% of Americans were rural). Today we tend to think of city vs suburb, but in 1908 the distinction was city vs farm.

The Call of the City, Charles Mulford Robinson’s tribute to urbanity, is an unabashed love-fest of the creature comforts that civilization can offer. Robinson is careful never to directly insult the farmer. Instead, he compares the city man to the outdoorsman:

If now and then, on a wet day, the city does not seem attractive, one should draw up before his fire and read the journal of a lover of the country, of a hunter of a fisherman in his wilds. The writer will early tell how shabbily the weather treated him, and it is a safe guess that one will not be so saintly as not to smile when thinking of a contrast offered by the safe harbor of a city. … The journal rambles on, and before it is done with the weather one may be sure of a page or so on the delicious difficulty in making a fire; on the remarkable failure of this particular fire, when built, to warm both sides of the body at the same time equally; and of the early darkness and the consequent and admittedly, long and tiresome evenings when the weather is rainy. If you are human, you shift your feet on the ottoman and ring for William to turn on the steam heat.

(Lucky for our city dweller that he has a manservant named William!)

Charles Mulford Robinson (1869–1917) was one of the first urban planners and an advocate of the City Beautiful movement. He was Professor of Civic Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and wrote the influential 1901 book The Improvement of Towns and Cities.

My favorite chapter in the book is entitled “When Phyllis is in town”:

When Phyllis is in town the city is no longer austere and dignified. It becomes bewitching. Love is always full of sweet surprises, but at this time one may chance on a surprise at any moment and at any turn—for Phyllis may be there! … When Phyllis is in town, the windows of the florists tug at heart-strings and at purse-strings; the confectioners’ tempting trays plead sweetly for the little mouth; the windows of the milliners unaccustomedly attract, for in them are plumes, of which one may get on Phyllis’s hat … When Phyllis is in town, the music of her voice is in every tingle of the telephone, because—perhaps—she asked that it should ring … When Phyllis is in town, the world is such a great big funny spectacle for you and her to look at laugh at; and when she goes, it is such a dreary, solemn drama!

“Starr King” was a famous name when Paul Elder published this volume in 1917. Today, one might say he was one of the most important Californians you’ve never heard of.

Thomas Starr King (1824-1864) was a Unitarian minister who became very influential in California politics. He was born in New York, and despite being forced to leave school to support his family, studied on his own and became a minister at the age of 20. In 1849 he became pastor of the Hollis Street Church in Boston and soon became one of the most famous ministers in the country. In 1860 he agreed to come to San Francisco and lead the First Unitarian Church. He was a passionate orator on behalf of the Union during the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln famously credited Starr King with preventing California from becoming a separate republic (the California state flag, however, still retains the phrase “California Republic” under the grizzly bear). He often campaigned to raise money for the United States Sanitary Commission (a predecessor to the American Red Cross); the travel took a toll on his health and he died in 1864 of diphtheria, just 39 years old.

In 1913, Starr King’s fame was such that the California legislature enshrined him as one of California’s two honorees, along with Father Junípero Serra, in the United States Capitol’s Statuary Hall. In 2006, however, the California legislature voted to replace Starr King’s statue with one of Ronald Reagan. State Senator Dennis Hollingsworth, displaying remarkable self-irony, said “To be honest with you, I wasn’t sure who Thomas Starr King was, and I think there’s probably a lot of Californians like me.” He also pointed out that Starr King wasn’t a native Californian, somehow forgetting that Reagan was born in Illinois and Serra in Mallorca, Spain. Starr King’s statue was removed in 2009 and now resides in the gardens of the state capitol in Sacramento.

Two streets in San Francisco are named after him: Starr King St., adjoining his Unitarian Church on Franklin St (the current building was built in 1889, long after his death); and King St., which borders Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants baseball club.

I have been unable to find much information about author and historian William Day Simonds (1855-1920).

In 1979, Peregrine Smith republished Charles Keeler’s most famous work, The Simple Home. The edition included a new introduction by Dimitri Shipounoff. This brilliant piece of writing by Shipounoff, a Berkeley native who now lives in France, is nearly as long as Keeler’s own text. Here is Shipounoff’s opening paragraph:

The architectural development of the unique San Francisco Bay Region style left perhaps its most important literary legacy in Charles Keeler’s little book “The Simple Home.” This book, dedicated to the architect Bernard Maybeck, was largely a polemic against the architectural shams and gingerbread of the Victorian age, and apaean to “a simpler, a truer, a more vital art expression” then taking place in California. Charles Keeler, a Berkeley poet, naturalist, and self-appointed policeman of the arts wrote on architecure from the standpoint of a layman. As Maybeck’s first private commission in 1895, Keeler’s house at Highland Place helped set an idealogical precedent for a new kind of architecture in north Berkeley. Keeler’ subscription to this idealogy was partly a product of his experience of living in such a home. In initiating the formation of the Hillside Club, he urged his future neighbors to build houses in a style that would be compatible with his own. The Simple Home was written in 1904, during his presidency of the Hillside Club. As President from 1903-05, he extended the organization’s purview to include the greater Berkeley hills, in an effort to protect them from shoddy housing development. Bernard Maybeck became the club’s idol, Charles Keeler its high priest, and The Simple Home naturally became its bible.

The Simple Home is also the rarest book of significance that Paul Elder & Company ever published. Copies of the original edition are quite scarce and command high prices; I recently saw a copy priced at $600. In contrast, the Peregrine Smith edition (also out of print) can be found with a little patience, usually priced at $30-50.

Curiously, The Simple Home does not exhibit the usual traits of a book that is held in such high regard by the Arts & Crafts movement. Instead of handmade paper, the book contains coated stock. Instead of letterpress printing, the pages are offset. This may have been done in order to display the many architectural photographs in higher quality (later Elder publications would generally have photographs tipped-in). The cover is quite plain, with only a paper sticker over the cloth.