This page is under construction but will feature the people, places and events that you will encounter in Locke’s series of novels and short stories about San Francisco in the late Nineteenth century. 

The World of Maids of Misfortune:

Once upon a time I wrote a dissertation entitled “Like a Machine or an Animal: Working Women of the Far West in the Late Nineteenth Century.” For that monograph, I read books, articles, newspapers, diaries, memoirs, novels, and I did a thorough data analysis of the 1880 manuscript census for San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles. When I wrote the first book in my historical mystery series, Maids of Misfortune, I drew heavily on my academic expertise, but there was, of course, much that I had to leave out. I would like use this website to do some filling in the blanks; providing links, photographs, and additional information. I am hoping for those of you who have not read any of my work that it might peak your interest, and, for those who have, that it will provide a very fun way of learning more about the world that people like Annie Fuller and her friends lived in.

O’Farrell Street Boarding House

The main protagonist of my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series is Annie Fuller, a fictional character who owns a boardinghouse on the south side of the 400 block of O’Farrell Street, between Jones and Taylor. In the small downstairs parlor of this house, she runs a business as a clairvoyant. With much amusement, when I went to check out what this block is like today, I discovered that there was a psychic who was working at 434 O’Farrell, just about where, in my author’s imagination, I had placed Annie’s home.

In the 1870s, O’Farrell street would have been a mixture of older homes and businesses, with a number of homes located above businesses on the first floor. The street itself was named for Jasper O’Farrell, the Irishman who surveyed and lay out the original street plan for the city, creating its unique pattern of streets going up and down the steep hills that exist north Market Street. While the 400 block of O’Farrell was on a slight decline going down towards the four blocks to Market Street, if Annie looked up Taylor from O’Farrell, she would have been looking up the steep incline towards California Street and Nob Hill. After 1873, with the opening of the first cable cars, Nob Hill had become the home of the most wealthy citizens of the city.

San Francisco was known for its boarding house living, with travelers commenting on the number of people who lived in fashionable boardinghouses and hotels. Boardinghouse keeping was also the primary way that married and widowed women contributed to their household income. While the size of boarding houses varied, from my own work on the 1880 U.S census, I found that the average number of boarders that women cared for in their own homes was 5.6. Since single rooms in San Francisco rented for two to eight dollars a month, this represented income of $262 to $537 a year, a very respectable income for that time period. Annie rents out six rooms (although there were 9 boarders in total), which made her a very typical boardinghouse keeper. (By the way, the link up above to boardinghouse keeping was something I wrote years ago for the Women’s Studies Encyclopedia.)

Annie Fuller’s boardinghouse was built in the late 1850s, by her Aunt Agatha and Uncle Timothy, from whom she inherited the home. It is two stories—actually four if you count the attic, which has three usable rooms, and the basement, with the kitchen, laundry and Kathleen’s room. The building is in the Greek Revival style, which was very briefly popular in San Francisco in the 1850s, before the Italianate and Second Empire styles began to dominate. Few of these style homes survived the Earthquake and Fire of 1906, which would have destroyed Annie’s House. Here is a link of a photograph from Jones Street, looking down O’Farrell towards the 400 block of O’Farrell.

Residential houses in the Greek Revival style included a front porch and a pitched roof over the attic, as well as a symmetrical floor plan. In Annie’s boardinghouse, the front door is in center of house, with small parlor and study on left (which has been turned into Madam Sibyl’s domain) a formal parlor and dining room on the right, and stairs going up to a landing then on up to second floor. The usual door to the back of the house (the servants realm) leads to a short passageway, including the back stairs, and a short flight of stairs down to the basement kitchen.

On the second floor on the right-hand side is a suite of two rooms, occupied by the Steins. On the left is Annie’s room, one of the largest in the house, and a bathroom. There are two rooms at the back of the house on that floor, one occupied by Miss Pinehurst, the other shared by the two clerks, Mr. Chapman and Mr.Harvey. In the attic the two spinster seamstresses, Minnie and Millie Moffet, share a room, Barbara Hewitt and her son Jamie share another, and Beatrice O’Rourke, Annie’s cook and housekeeper, has her own room.

Laurel Hill Cemetery

Laurel Hill Cemetery, which is featured in both Maids of Misfortune, and the sequel, Uneasy Spirits, is one of the first cemeteries built in the City of San Francisco. Originally named Lone Mountain Cemetery, its name was changed to Laurel Hill in 1867. Built on one of the many sand dunes to the west of the city, the cemetery soon became a place where residents came to get a little bit of relief from the growing city development. The landscaping and carriage drives made this cemetery part of the “Rural Cemetery Movement.” Located on a hill between Geary to the south and California to the north, and Presidio to the east and Parker to the west, it provided wonderful views of the Bay.

San Francisco Financial District

Nate Dawson’s law office (Hobbes, Haranahan, and Dawson) is located in the heart of the financial district, on the 300 block of Sansome Street. This financial district, founded in the 1850s out of reclaimed land from the Bay, stretched from the Bay to Montgomery Street to the west, and went from Market Street north to Pacific Street. Like most of downtown, few buildings survived the Earthquake and Fire of 1906, in fact this part of town suffered from a series of fires throughout the 1850s, but each time the financial district rebuilt. In the 1870s the stock brokers, banks, and attorneys could be found clustered on Montgomery, Sansom, Pine, California, and Clay.

The Palace Hotel

While in Maids of Misfortune, Annie and Nate simply walk by the Palace Hotel, located on the corner Market and New Montgomery Streets. In the second novel of the series, Uneasy Spirits, Nate Dawson actually has a meeting in one of its dining rooms, the Gentleman’s Grille. This hotel, when it was completed in October, 1875, had seven floors and nearly 800 rooms, and was advertised as the largest hotel in the American West, if not the largest hotel in the world.

The Palace Hotel was the vision of William Ralston, co-founder of the Bank of California, but he did not live to see its opening. The Bank of California, weakened by the 1873 depression, the dropping value of the Comstock Lode mining stocks, fraud, and Ralston’s over extended debt, collapsed after a run on the Bank. The day after Ralston was ousted by the Bank’s Board, he died during his daily swim on the Bay. While the autopsy said is was a stroke, rumors of suicide were very prevalent, which of course would remind Annie of her own husband’s death.

Not only the size, but the architecture of the Palace Hotel made it a particularly impressive structure. There were reported to be 7000 bay windows on the outside of the Hotel, which was built around a huge courtyard, the Grand Court, where carriages could drive right in to drop off guests. This courtyard was overlooked by seven stories of balconies, and was topped by a dome of glass.

“It was intended to be the height of luxury and to contain the newest technologies. It had five hydraulic elevators (reputedly the first in the West), electric call buttons in each room, plumbing and private toilets, shared baths every two rooms, closets, telegraph for staff on each floor, a pneumatic tube system throughout the hotel, air-conditioning in each room, and fireplaces and bay windows in each room.

In addition, the Palace Hotel had an elaborate and state-of-the-art defense against earthquakes and fire, including a cistern and four artisan wells in the sub-basement, a 630,000 gallon reservoir under the Grand Court, and seven roof tanks holding 130,000 gallons of water. Everything in the hotel was new, modern, and luxurious.” Charles Fraccia, Encyclopedia of San Francisco 

Of course, none of this saved the Palace Hotel when the Earthquake and Fire of 1906 ravaged the city.

Domestic Service

As will be quite clear to anyone who reads Maids of Misfortune, or any of my historical fiction, domestic servants are very important characters in my stories. In fact it was an entry in the diary of a San Francisco German servant, Anna Harder, that provided the inspiration for the main mystery in Maids of Misfortune. In addition, my purpose for writing my series of Victorian San Francisco mysteries, besides providing entertainment, has always been to illuminate the kinds of occupations held by women who had to work during the late 19^th century. Not surprising, given the title, Maids of Misfortune was intended, from the beginning, to introduce the reader to the world of 19th century domestic service.

What follows is some background on domestic service as a female occupation in general and as it was experienced by young women working in San Francisco in the late 19th century. The information is primarily from my dissertation (Like a Machine) and the Women’s Studies Encyclopedia (WSE) article I wrote on domestic service.

“Although domestic service was not a new occupation, by the mid-nineteenth century the nature of the job had been transformed. Previously, most domestic servants worked for the nobility of Europe and the wealthiest families of America where large, complex staffs of servants had been the standard, and males servants usually outnumbered females.” (WSE) For example see this picture.

The social and economic changes that transformed western industrializing societies, including the United States, dramatically changed the nature of domestic service. Servants in the United States were no longer neighbor girls of native birth and heritage who were hired by their neighbors as “help,” or members of large domestic staffs for the very wealthy. Instead servants were increasingly found living and working in the expanding number of urban middle class households. These servants were still young women, but they were primarily immigrants, or the daughters of immigrants, with Irish and Scandinavian girls predominating. See these two Scandinavian servant girls.

In addition, unlike the large domestic staff pictured above, most American domestic servants at the end of the 19^th century worked alone, or at with no more than one other servant, usually a cook or nursemaid. Women who worked as domestic servants in San Francisco were no exception.

“Ninety percent of the young single servant women in San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles were listed as general domestics, and over eighty percent of these young general domestics lived at their place of employment.” (Like a Machine) Over sixty percent of domestic servants in these cities were the only live-in servant in the house. Their ethnicity followed national patterns as well. 70% of young single Irish women in these far western cities, young women like the character, Kathleen Hennessey, worked as domestics.

However, there was an interesting difference in the experience of young domestic servants in far western cities like San Francisco, when compared to national patterns. Nationally, by 1870 no more than ten percent of domestic servants were male, so very few female domestic servants worked in households with live-in male servants. In the urban far west, like San Francisco, for the 40% who did work alongside another servant, over half worked with a male. In most cases this was a Chinese male servant, like the character, Wong, in Maids of Misfortune. See two San Francisco Chinese males from this period.

Domestic service entailed long hours, being “on call” 24/7, limited afternoon or evening’s out, and a variety of difficult tasks in which the young servant girls had little or no prior training. To make matters worse, in San Francisco at this time nearly two-thirds of them were the only live-in servant in the house and therefore they cooked, did the dishes, cleaned, did the laundry, mended the clothing, and cared for their employer’s personal needs, as well as tended the children, all by themselves.

It is no wonder that young women in this period would often take jobs that actually paid less than domestic service because they “would rather ‘starve genteely’ making neckties than work as a servant.” (Like a Machine)

 

 

Golden Gate Park

In my first Victorian San Francisco mystery, Maids of Misfortune, my main protagonists, Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson, take a ride through Golden Gate Park to get to the Cliff House Inn, located on the western side of the San Francisco Peninsula.

As my series progresses, this won’t be the last carriage ride through this park because the Golden Gate Park was one of the few places close to the center of San Francisco where people could rides horses, take carriage rides, picnic, or even sit on benches and hug, if this newspaper article from August 1881 is at all accurate!

Golden Gate Park was in its infancy in the late 1870s, and it had already been the object a great deal of controversy. First, the innovative plans of the New York Central Park designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, who envisioned a series of small urban parks for the city of hills, were rejected by city leaders in favor of a single western park between the Western Addition and the Pacific ocean. Then, it took a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court to establish San Francisco’s right to the acres of sand dunes that would eventually become the park we know today.

Next, there was a division over how best to reclaim the land from the dunes. A proposal to flatten the land was eventually defeated by the plan designed by engineer William Hammond Hall, who chose maintain the natural contours of the land and lay down a series of roads that wound around the dunes, while planting trees and native grasses to anchor the shifting sands. Yet controversy struck again when Hall, the target of political retribution by a local politician, resigned from his Park position and money for further improvements was cut.  Nevertheless, the Park continued to flourish, as the trees and other landscaping grew, and the roads and paths continued to attract crowds, particularly on sunny Sundays.

As I wrote this piece I remembered that one of the few times a reviewer has questioned my historical accuracy came over my portrayal of the Golden Gate Park. Writers of historical fiction have to develop a fairly thick skin in this area since readers will sometimes find fault based on their own perceptions of the past, rather than fact. In this case the reviewer wrote near the end of her review of Maids of Misfortune that I presented the Park “…as though it was completed, a feat not fully accomplished until thousands of trees had converted the area into the park as it is known today.”

Since all I had done in Maids of Misfortune was mention the heavy traffic of other carriages on the Park road that Nate and Annie were taking to get to the Cliff House Inn, I never understood where this reviewer got the idea that I thought the Park was completed, unless she believed that in 1879 Golden Gate Park was still a desolate place of sand and not much else. However, there is ample evidence that by that year the basic landscaping of the park had been well established. Over 155,000 trees had been planted, grass and shrubbery covered the hills, and the roads were crowded with vehicles.

Here are two excerpts from newspaper clippings from February 1878, (over a year prior to when Maids of Misfortune took place) from which I drew my descriptions of Annie and Nate’s drive.

“It was a lovely day, and I knew that if I could get a good vantage point I would be treated to an equine panorama, such as no one ever gets anywhere else, outside of Central Park, New York… Meantime the procession of equipages began to fill up. Team after team went by, and the glitter of harness and spirited champing of bits showed that the park drive was a favorite with those who had the means to take their airing as becomes the aristocracy of the Golden Gate.

“Presently we reached the look-out point and sat down. It was a pretty sight–the bright green grass, cut-down so it looked like tapestry–the budding trees, the singing birds, and finally the winding drive studded with its long line of handsome turnouts.” (San Francisco Memoirs, Malcolm E. Barker, 255-258)

While there wasn’t a lot that had been done with the Park besides landscaping and road building by 1879, the Conservatory of Flowers, completed in 1878, would probably have been a favorite destination for a young man who wanted a reason to take a young woman out for a drive.

Greenhouse conservatories were very popular among the wealthy in the late 19th century and the Golden Gate Park’s Conservatory of Flowers, which still exists, started its life as a kit bought by James Lick, a wealthy real estate speculator and philanthropist who died before it could be erected. San Francisco businessmen bought the kit (in huge wooden crates) from his estate and donated the kit to Golden Gate Park.

In the fall of 1879, when my sequel, Uneasy Spirits, takes place, the Conservatory of Flowers, with its glittering panes of glass and white painted wooden arches and domes, was one of the largest conservatories in the Unites States. I had no trouble imaging Nate hiring a carriage from a local livery stable (there was one located just a few blocks from Annie’s O’Farrell Street boarding house) and taking Annie to picnic on the grounds of this imposing edifice. I hope these pictures and additional detail make the scenes featuring the Golden Gate Park from both Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits just that much more real for those of you who read my books, while simultaneously convincing you of my historical accuracy!