Morgan is credited with having designed the bronze eagle heads and exterior lamps of the Merchants' Exchange, the inspiring interior appointments, and restoration of the old Merchants exchange hall.

The architect's early association with Chinatown institutions is also in evidence in these commissions. Of particular note are the clinker brick Donaldina Cameron house and the Gum Moon Residence.

Of the residential designs, the Aurora Stull house at 3377 Pacific Avenue represents her earliest San Francisco contribution to the Bay Area Tradition. Also of interest are both of her houses in the Presidio Terrace subdivision, one for Mrs. Robert Watt and the other for William and Maria Mills.

• Merchants Exchange Bldg arcade
• William H. and Maria E. Mills house
• Fairmont Hotel
• Dr. Mariana Bertola house and office
• Dr. and Mrs. W. H. Kellog house
• Donaldina Cameron house
• Aurora Stull house
• Mrs. Robert Watt house
• Gum Moon Residence
• William H. and Maria Mills house

An interior, skylit arcade leads to the old Merchants exchange hall, attributed to Julia Morgan. Mimicking a Roman basilica, the hall is lavishly detailed and bathed in a natural light. The seascape paintings are by William Coulter. In the old days, merchants assembled in this hall where news about the ships coming into the harbor was transmitted to them from the lookout tower on the roof (Woodbridge & Woodbridge 1992: 28).

No observer bent on taking in the most glorious buildings in the city should overlook the Merchants' Exchange, at the southeast corner of California and Montgomery Streets. Built in 1902 on the design of Daniel Burnham and Willis Polk, it was one of the tallest buildings in San Francisco, standing out in post-fire photos as a gutted pile above the ruined financial district. Julia Morgan designed a handsome new interior after 1906, and the building was splendidly restored in the 1960s. In the bank at the end of the lobby visitors may enjoy the superb maritime murals by William Coulter, a leading artist of his time. The paintings had been plastered over for decades (Alexander & Heig 2002: 371).

By the summer of 1907 Morgan had moved into a suite on the thirteenth floor of the Merchants Exchange Building at 465 California Street in San Francisco.¹ This building, a pioneer high-rise of 1903 designed by Daniel H. Burnham of Chicago (with some drawings signed by Willis Polk), had stood firm during the earthquake and still stands today. Here Morgan established a vigorous practice that ranged all over the state of California and from Utah to Hawaii, always with the Merchants Exchange Building at its center. For six years she had as junion partner Ira Wilson Hoover, who had come west from Philadelphia with John Galen Howard and served as his chief draftsman until starting with Morgan late in 1904. For the brief period before he returned to the East Coast, Hoover did his share, especially in domestic work, and he signed the building permit for Saint John's Presbyterian Sunday School and other projects. After his departure in 1910 the Morgan office was always "Julia Morgan, Architect," with no other name on the door during her forty years of practice.2

The heart of the Morgan office was the library. Bookcases lined the walls of the 12-by-14-foot room, at the center of which was a table where Charles Adams Platt's Italian Gardens (1894) or huge leather-bound French volumes on art might be open. At least five hundred books related to architecture were available for study, and everyone in the office was expected to consult them. The larger area of the main drafting room, with long, broad tables around which the designers worked (nine or ten of them in good times), had a massive drawing file topped by a bust of Dante. Here for reference were the drawings for earlier Morgan buildings. A prominent bulletin board featured different architectural photographs from Morgan's collection each week, and every member of her staff had to be familiar with these. Morgan had a high-backed desk in the drafting room, where she made many sketches and conferred at each step with those who drafted the working drawings. There were also at least one separate office for a secretary-bookkeeper and one small room, its door frequently closed, where Morgan met with clients and made her own original sketches (Boutelle 1988: 42).

(Boutelle 1988: 250).

James G. Fair, a Comstock silver king, owned the property, but his daughter, Tessie Fair Oelrichs, built the hotel, which was on the verge of opening when the 1906 disaster struck. Julia Morgan restored and completed the interior, but Dorothy Draper is rumored to have designed the lobby appointments, including the wonderful carpet. The Fairmont and the Pacific Union Club are the two most complementary structures on the hill, the one huge and light, the other compact and dark. Despite the much larger size and Neo-Baroque grandeur of the hotel, its scale does not diminish the importance of the former mansion. Inquire at the hotel desk for the location of the Reid Brothers rendering of the hotel with terraced gardens that were never built. Ride the elevator in Gaidano's 1962 tower for an unforgettable view of the city (Woodbridge & Woodbridge 1992: 62).

Tessie Fair (daughter of Senator James J. Fair, one of the Comstock millionaires) and her husband Hermann Oelrichs built the Fairmont Hotel.

The Reid Brothers' Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill...almost ready to open when disaster struck, received new interiors and structural reinforcement; this was an important early assignment for architect Julia Morgan, recently graduated from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

The door of the new Fairmont had not even opened when flames swept through its unfinished marble halls during the 1906 disaster. After the fire, the property was purchased by the Law brothers, makers of a popular patent medicine. They held a grand ball there to celebrate the complete restoration of the hotel, just one year from the date of the 1906 conflagration. For many years, a number of former Nob Hill home owners displaced by the disaster made the Fairmont their new address. This restoration project was one of Julia Morgan's first large commissions.

During the Depression years there wasn't a single major hotel that wasn't operating in the red. Then, in 1936, architect Timothy Pflueger was commissioned to convert the Jackling penthouse at the Mark Hopkins Hotel into a cocktail lounge. The Top of the Mark was successful enough to pull the hotel out of the red. The Sir Francis Drake, the Fairmont, and the St. Francis soon followed suit with view rooms of their own (Alexander & Heig 2002: 210, 211, 366, 382).

When San Francisco suffered the disastrous earthquake followed by a devastating fire in April 1906, architects enjoyed an immediate bonanza. Morgan was no exception. The earthquake had so seriously damaged the luxurious six-hundred-room Fairmont Hotel that some experts thought it should be demolished. Designed three years earlier in Italian Renaissance style by James and Merrit Reid, it had recently been purchased by Herbert and Hartland Law and was being readied for a grand opening in the fall. After the earthquake struck, Herbert Law was determined to reopen the hotel within a year, so he commissioned Stanford White to come out from New York to renovate it. When White was shot and killed a few weeks later, Law turned to Julia Morgan, in private practice only two years and herself without an office as a result of the earthquake. Her experience with reinforced concrete while working on the erkeley and Mills campuses, plus her training in engineering, may have brought her to Law's attention.

Morgan supervised the Fairmont project from a primitive construction shack on the slope behind the hotel, where the "flowing terrace stairs" (as described on an early postcard) and Italian garden were to be. There she worked on engineering problems, with rats jumping over her feet late at night, until the hotel was in shape to provide an office for the rest of the year. Photographs published by the insurance company clearly show what a demanding reconstruction job confronted the young architect. An accompanying report noted: "Columns covered with wire lath and plaster were generally defective. Thirty-seven such buckled and a portion of the floors settled down about seven feet from normal position."⁶ What a triumph it must have been for Morgan and for Law to have the building ready to receive guests in time for the first anniversary of the earthquake (Boutelle 1988: 78,79).

Remodeled by Morgan, 1912 (Boutelle 1988: 250).

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1908, Chinatown, Donaldina Cameron house,
920 Sacramento St., San Francisco
Julia Morgan.

In 1873 the Presbyterian Church set up a foreign mission to serve San Francisco's Chinese. After the original hall burned in 1906, a new one was built on the present site and officially named for its famous director in 1942. The architect was rightly favored by many eleemosynary institutions; she knew how to design practical buildings that had dignity and presence (Woodbridge & Woodbridge 1992: 43).

Some of Morgan's San Francisco school buildings were for clients involved in missionary work. The Methodist Chinese Mission School (1907-10) and the Chinese Presbyterian Mission School (1908)--both built in Chinatown just after the earthquake--are examples. Both still flourish as Chinese centers.

The Chinese Presbyterian Mission School was started in 1894, but its building was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. Morgan's new center was known as Donaldina Cameron House in honor of a Scottish missionary who rescued young Chinese girls from the brothels and sweatshops of the flourishing child-slave trade. Cameron later moved the school to a farm in Oakland, which seemed a safer environment for her young charges (Boutelle 1988: 64).

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1908, Presidio Heights, Aurora Stull house,
3377 Pacific Ave., San Francisco
Julia Morgan; remodeled after WWII by George Livermore.

(Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 39; Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 97).

A clear example of an urban Crafts house is one in a distinguished area of Pacific Avenue on the Presidio in San Francisco, a neighborhood with houses by Bernard Maybeck, Willis Polk, Ernest Coxhead, and other prominent Bay Area architects. Morgan built a redwood-shingle house here in 1908 for Aurora Stull, whose daughter Florence had been a classmate of Morgan's at the university in 1894. Morgan created a geometric design that is symmetrical and ordered, composed to fit the streetscape and to take advantage of the site. With no sign of a pergola or any other facility for outdoor living, this is a restrained and decidedly urban townhouse, though profiting from a woodsy view of the Presidio. Central steps open to a hall leading to reception rooms at the front.

The interior of the house is paneled in walnut and gum, all quite formal and meticulously crafted, with fireplaces in the major rooms. Large windows with a window seat span the living room, which runs the entire width of the house, providing a spectacular view of the Golden Gate. The dining room is set off by sliding doors, usually left open, and it has a built-in china cabinet with leaded glass next to the fireplace. The rooms on the upper floor, originally four bedrooms and a bath, are also paneled, with built-in furniture in every room (additional bathrooms were added when the house was remodeled after World War II by architect George Livermore, the grandson of another Morgan client). The restrained discretion of Morgan's design means that it lacks the dash and drama of the asymmetrical windows, unorthodox details, and contrasting scales that Maybeck and Coxhead exploited only a few blocks away (Boutelle 1988: 135, 137, 251).

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1911, Presidio Heights, Mrs. Robert Watt house,
36 Presidio Terrace, San Francisco
Julia Morgan.

(Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 102).

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1912, Chinatown, Gum Moon Residence,
940 Washington St., San Francisco
Julia Morgan.

The Protestant missions in Chinatown were largely devoted to rescuing Chinese girls from prostitution. Dedicated women of enormous energy ran the missions. Their favorite architect, Julia Morgan, was of the same stripe. This understated Florentine villa was the residence for the original Methodist Church next door [Grant Ave. at Washington St.], also designed by Morgan, which burned in 1906, and was replaced by the present building, designed in 1911 by Clarence Ward (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 43).

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1912, Presidio Heights, William H. and Maria Mills house: alterations and repairs,
115 Presidio Terrace, San Francisco
Julia Morgan.

(Boutelle 1988: 254).

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