A Race to Splendor (13 page)

“Why, yes, Mr. Thayer. That was our agreement.”

“But that was my plan also, and I secured your services first. How do you intend that both hotels achieve the same goal?” he demanded.

Julia smiled confidently. “I don’t see this as any sort of problem,” she assured him calmly. “No one understands the site at Taylor and Jackson any better than Amelia Bradshaw here, and since you wish to reconstruct the Bay View as it was, you couldn’t be in better hands. I, of course, will supervise both the concept, design, and actual execution of the construction each step of the way.”

“And how can you be in two places at once, Miss Morgan?” J.D. eyed her steadily for a moment and then spared a brief glance for Amelia. “Miss Bradshaw is a highly intelligent and well-trained young woman, and I’m pleased she’s helping you, but she’s a novice. Building supplies are extremely scarce. Workers, even more so. Both hotels are vast and complicated projects, built on extremely steep sites.”

Julia hesitated a moment and patted some drawings sprawled across the conference table. “After the collapse of your gambling club, Mr. Thayer, I am happy to see you
now
appreciate the potential problems of such a difficult site.”

Amelia could hardly suppress a gasp at her employer’s veiled insult, a practice Julia Morgan had never before been heard to employ with a client. To Amelia it appeared that her employer clearly was attempting to gain a psychological advantage over her agitated client.

“All the more reason that the Bay View requires your complete attention,” J.D. snapped.

“And it will
have
my attention, Mr. Thayer,” Julia said, abruptly switching tactics and now adopting a soothing tone. “Miss Bradshaw has an engineering degree
and
graduated from architectural school with the highest honors. I personally vouch for her advanced skills. And besides,” Julia added brightly, “she grew up in the building you wish to replicate. The two hotels are four blocks apart. Miss Bradshaw and I will live on the sites as soon as practicable, so as to be able to supervise every detail. You will have the benefit of
two—
in your own words—highly intelligent and well-trained architects building your hotel.”

What?
thought Amelia.
I am to live for ten months in a soot-filled basement with J.D. Thayer? I absolutely
refuse
!

She watched, dumbfounded by these rapid developments, as Julia indicated the large sheets of paper strewn across the conference table.

“We have already produced these preliminary drawings of the Bay View’s facade, which I think you will deem excellent, and will start on the final versions later today.” The architect appeared to draw up her tiny form and looked her six-foot client squarely in the eye. “And I assure you, Mr. Thayer, that I will sign off on each detail of the plans before a foot of foundation has been laid.”

J.D.’s expression revealed nothing, nor did he reply, a fact that didn’t seem to faze Julia in the slightest.

“You, sir,” she continued, “along with Miss Bradshaw, Ira Hoover, and I shall meet every other day to review the ongoing work. Together, we will rebuild your hotel to a very exacting standard.”

“By the anniversary of the quake? Just like the Fairmont?” challenged Thayer.

Julia did not immediately offer an answer. Amelia could practically hear the gears grinding in her employer’s head:
Two
hotels built in ten months’ time in a city surrounded by four hundred blocks of rubble, plagued by a shortage of skilled labor, and infested with the worst sort of political corruption?

Impossible!
Amelia wanted to shout.

Julia Morgan leaned across the conference table and gazed at J.D. through her owlish glasses. She tapped a forefinger on Amelia’s drawings.

“You have my word on it, Mr. Thayer. Barring another Act of God, the doors to the Bay View Hotel will be open on or
before
April 18, 1907.”

She turned toward Amelia with a smile, adding, “Won’t they, my dear?

Chapter 12

A characteristic summer fog flowed in waves up from the bay. Wisps of chilly mist cloaked the ragged remnants of houses that once lined California Street, turning the landscape ghostly and forbidding. At the foot of Market, only a few cable cars were back in service, so Amelia decided her fastest route to her first day at the Bay View site was to walk up to Nob Hill.

During the ferry ride from Oakland, she’d tried to steel herself for her first private meeting with Morgan’s client, J.D. Thayer, on the site of the former Bay View Hotel. She also tried to brace herself for her first full view of her former neighborhood’s collapsed landmarks and blackened piles of bricks, but nothing could have prepared her for the devastation scarring the cityscape in all directions. She could see that the damage to four hundred city blocks was nothing less than cataclysmic. Little wonder that more than two hundred thousand citizens were still homeless, camped out in green wooden “earthquake shacks” lined up in long rows across the Presidio.

Even so, Amelia marveled at the extent to which the principal thoroughfares had been cleared of rubble in a few weeks’ time, by an army of ordinary citizens, pressed into service by martial law. Businessmen in suits and laborers in overalls stood side-by-side throwing debris into carts that were hauled to the shoreline, its refuse dumped in the bay.

Amelia was shocked to note the way dynamite, as well as the fire, had disfigured this neighborhood reserved for the city’s loftiest millionaires. It looked to her as if explosives had done a lot more damage than Army officials and the fire department had thus far admitted. She’d heard rumors that the newspapers had been ordered by the city fathers to emphasize the fire damage over the havoc wrecked by the earthquake, thus glossing over fears that recurring temblors might hurt the business community’s rebuilding campaign. Would the municipal officials responsible for the recovery effort ever truly know whether the earthquake or the fire had done the most damage, she wondered. Without this intelligence, how would they reconstruct the city in the safest mode possible while planning properly for calamities that might threaten in the future?

Each block she passed revealed more shocking sights. She glanced over at Sacramento Street, one hundred yards to her right, and saw that Donaldina Cameron’s Mission Home was obliterated, a solitary chimney marking its former site. The “Angel of Chinatown” and her Chinese charges had been forced by the fire to flee from their first sanctuary, the Presbyterian Church on Van Ness. Word was that they’d escaped by ferry to the seminary at San Anselmo and now had moved again, relocating in Oakland’s burgeoning Chinatown. Someday, when she had more funds, Amelia vowed to donate to Donaldina’s cause.

When she finally reached the summit of Nob Hill, the backs of her calves were aching from exertion. Breathing hard, she took in a scene of such ruin that she realized suddenly she was clutching her portmanteau so tightly her knuckles had turned white. A lingering acrid odor of burnt cinders stung her nose.

“Oh… dear… God,” she murmured, glancing around.

A lone figure with a sack on his back trod gingerly among acres of wreckage, looking for some small souvenir of a world reduced to rubble. She’d heard scavengers were everywhere, combing the debris for anything that might be of use or value. Amelia stood, dumbstruck by the stark landscape where the Crocker, Huntington, Hopkins, and Stanford mansions of the city’s railroad and banking barons had once stood. Every one of the grand structures she’d adored as a child growing up on the hill had been leveled by the fire, to the extent that the six square blocks of the once-posh district looked like a battlefield in the heart of a city. Wisps of fog swirled around the occasional blackened chimney stack, decorative column, or a set of granite front steps leading nowhere. Except for these desolate remnants, millions of dollars’ worth of palatial grandeur had been reduced to powder.

Only two buildings in this part of the city were not obliterated. The Connecticut brownstone mansion that belonged to silver baron James Flood was a shell now, minus one wall and its roof.

And across the street stood the scorched granite citadel that had been the brand new Fairmont Hotel, three days shy of its grand opening, sooty eyebrows blemishing nearly every window of its six floors. The roof was gone and through the broken windows, Amelia could see that the grand lobby was littered with mountains of rubble. Given its derelict state, the notion that the Morgan architectural firm would restore this monumental edifice
and
the Bay View Hotel to their former splendor by April 18, 1907—only ten months away—seemed laughable.

Amelia didn’t stop there to greet her colleagues, who were ensconced—as of the previous day—in makeshift sleeping quarters in the basement of the Fairmont, a section of the hotel that had been made marginally habitable. The office all of the Morgan team would share was a hastily constructed shed built on what had been part of the Fairmont’s grand, terraced gardens.

She turned her back on the broken hotel and continued down Taylor Street, the littered roadway that ran along the spine of the hill. Methodically, she counted the streets, fearful that she wouldn’t recognize her former home, the Bay View at the corner of Taylor and Jackson. On her right, she spied the broken smokestack from the collapsed brick cable car barn that stood sentry over a block strewn with mountains of shattered brick. The fog was even thicker here, uncoiling tendrils in all directions.

Further downhill on the Jackson Street side, only the ragged perimeter of the foundation gave any hint that either a hotel or a gambling club had ever existed on the site.

Amelia stared at the remnants of her former life and grieved for every lost doorway and chimney of the grand Victorian lady. Somewhere in the charred ruins were the carbon splinters of a cherry wood bar and a couch where Ling Lee had met her end. The table and the lighting fixture that had broken her father’s back had since dissolved into ash. She scanned the cones of black and broken plaster, some ten feet high, which looked like extinct volcanoes. Next door, the crazy, trigger-happy old lady’s three-story house and back garden fence were reduced to cinders.

Near the Taylor Street side, a few scorched, broken walls of the subterranean stables marked the spot where the Winton had been garaged. Today, the motorcar was parked in front of a slagheap of bricks. The car’s doors still had painted red crosses on them, a reminder of the vehicle’s brief life as an ambulance.

Unlike the Fairmont, only a partial wall and some flooring remained of the Bay View’s basement. Amelia couldn’t be sure but thought she recognized the hallway that led to the stairs near the hotel kitchen where her grandfather’s impenetrable metal walk-in safe might still exist under all the wreckage.

“Oh my Lord…”

Her throat tightened at the sight of a barrier of bricks that had been part of the hotel’s foundation. Now, the rectangles were melted, misshapen blocks of clay. And no wonder. One of the firefighters she’d treated at the Presidio told her the inferno had generated temperatures up to three thousand degrees. It was as if a giant eraser had swept the Bay View Hotel and Gentlemen’s Gambling Club off the face of the earth.

Without warning, tears began to stream from Amelia eyes and spill down her cheeks. Through a blur of sadness, she saw the pitted field where her childhood home once stood and where she’d known every corridor and cupboard.

At length, she wiped her eyes with her sleeve. The game was truly over. Her father and grandfather were dead. The Bay View of her youth was no more. Three sequential cards did not a royal flush make, she considered with a sigh. It was time she got down to the business of helping to build a hotel for Julia Morgan’s client.

For a few more moments she absorbed the view, then squared her shoulders and picked her way past the heaps of wreckage in front of her, stepping down a short set of ragged cement stairs.

Amelia peered through the eerie gloom. Surely, Thayer couldn’t be living
in what was left of the hotel’s basement? Yet there had been no sign of a tent or shed on his charred property. And to Amelia’s educated ear, a series of thuds echoing from somewhere below ground told her someone was at work, already clearing rubble.

She eyed the structural support holding up what remained of the garage and judged it reasonably safe to enter. After a morning of inhaling briny breezes, the odor of burnt wood and pulverized concrete inside the ruins of the Bay View stung her lungs and prompted a fit of coughing. When it subsided, she cleared her throat several times and shouted into the ash-black cavern that had comprised the old hotel’s lowest floor.

“Mr. Thayer? Are you down here?” she called out. The steady reverberation was surely coming from someone with a sledgehammer or pickaxe. “Hell-ooo!”

The noise ceased.

“Who’s there?” barked a voice.

And then Amelia heard another bark—that of a dog.

Amelia advanced farther down the cement stairs. “Mr. Thayer?” she called again, suddenly apprehensive that the building might collapse if the anonymous excavator didn’t know what he was doing. “Is that you?”

“Who’s
there
?
Identify yourself at once.” The dog barked again, fierce and protective.

“It’s Amelia Bradshaw,” she shouted. “I’m trying to find Mr. James Thayer. Is he here?” She retreated a few steps. She had a sudden thought: what if the inquisitor was some wild-eyed scavenger who might not appreciate being disturbed?

A figure in tattered black trousers and no shirt appeared with a filthy handkerchief tied around his face, bandit-style. The late Charlie Hunter’s half-terrier half-unknown breed Barbary was by his side.

“What the—?” Then, “Oh, it’s you,” he said.

In one hand he held a pickaxe, in the other the butt of a pistol, its business end aimed straight at her. Amelia had a sudden, swift memory of the old lady next door pointing a pearl-handled revolver straight at her. Thankfully she recognized Thayer, or she probably would have let out a scream.

The upper portion of his face was blackened with soot—except for the scars on his forehead that stood out in lighter shades. His black hair was coated with plaster dust.

J.D. Thayer looked like a pirate, and a dangerous one at that, despite the fact he swiftly lowered his firearm.

“Hello, Mr. Thayer.” Amelia tried to avoid staring at his bare chest. “My goodness, must you brandish a gun? Are your ribs mended enough to be wielding a pickaxe?”

J.D. lowered the heavy tool and tucked the pistol into his waistband.

“Sorry, but it’s been necessary to take certain precautions around here. When I stopped by the Fairmont earlier, Miss Morgan said I might expect you today,” he said, voice muffled by the handkerchief. “Do you have the final drawings?”

“Designs, yes. We still have a lot of measuring to do once the site is cleared of at least some of rubble. Then you’ll get your buildable drawings.”

He leaned the pickaxe against the remnants of a wall, tucked the pistol deeper into his belt, and reached for a torn dinner jacket heaped on the floor near his feet. He buttoned its front until only a triangle of his bare chest showed. Then he removed the handkerchief from his face. His black mustache contrasted sharply with his plaster-dusted hair.

Amelia lifted her portmanteau. “May I leave them with you for your review?”

“I’d like to see them
now.
Please step into my humble abode, such as it is.

Amelia followed him and Barbary around the corner, down several more concrete steps, and along a subterranean corridor to the rear of the basement. They stopped at a cluttered area that once had been part of the furnace room. Sheets of melted tin lay about in piles. Recently discarded newspapers had been stuffed into holes where Amelia recalled ventilation pipes had once been routed toward the outdoors. The only light came from a substantial hole above their heads that opened to the sky. On the dirt floor itself, a makeshift pallet took up one corner, with J.D.’s moth-eaten cloak serving as a blanket. In another corner stood an up-ended wooden box and two smaller wooden cubes that provided a table and chairs. A kerosene lantern faintly illuminated a mound of neatly stacked bricks and jagged chunks of concrete and broken plaster.

“Not much like what you remember, eh?” He gestured for her to take a seat on one of the boxes. Barbary curled up on J.D.’s borrowed cloak.

Amelia nodded her agreement, for she couldn’t find the words to express the terrible sense of loss she was battling as she absorbed the devastation surrounding them. Finally she asked, “What were you excavating with such enthusiasm?”

“I decided I couldn’t sit around and do nothing until your drawings were approved by Miss Morgan and me or I’d go stark mad, so today, I’m trying to get nearer to the walk-in safe on the other side of that pile.” He gave a short laugh. “If I could get to it, I could make my first payment to your employer—and thus pay your salary.”

Amelia stared at a mountain of rubble. “Ah, yes. My grandfather’s old safe. I read in the
Call
recently about people in Chicago after the big fire there, opening their safes before they had cooled down sufficiently. Cold air rushed in and incinerated paper money and documents still hot enough to burn.”

“I read the same article.” He pointed to the newspapers stuffed into gaps in the walls to protect him from the elements. “But in my case, it’s taking me forever to get even this close to where the safe is buried. By the time I reach it, it’ll be stone cold.”