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Looking back, the first Saturday of February in 1957 was a newsy day on the international front, but not much was happening around this country. According to OnThisDay.com, the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for Israeli troops to leave Egypt. And the play “Candide” closed in New York after just 73 performances.
But somehow the New York Times managed to overlook the death of one of this country’s most famous architects, Julia Morgan, the designer of the legendary Hearst Castle.
This week, the newspaper of record made amends for that oversight.
As part of its “Overlooked No More” series, the paper has published an extensive obituary feature on Morgan — 62 years after her Feb 2, 1957, death in San Francisco.
The introduction reads: “Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With ‘Overlooked,’ we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.”
The article by Alexandra Lange chronicles Morgan’s life and career, from her birth in San Francisco and upbringing in Oakland to her civil engineering studies with Bernard Maybeck at UC Berkeley and the challenges she faced as a pioneering architect.
“As the first woman to receive an architect’s license in California, in 1904, Morgan early on was used to skepticism about her abilities,” the article says. “But she came to allay those doubts by building a sterling reputation with projects now known around the world, including the Asilomar conference grounds on the Monterey Peninsula and, most notably, the Hearst Castle at San Simeon. By the time she retired in 1951, at 79, she had designed hundreds of buildings and sites.”
One early challenge came after the 1906 earthquake left the Fairmont Hotel in ruins just days before its opening. The owners hired Morgan, based partly on her success with an earlier project in Oakland.
“Only three years earlier she had built a bell tower on the campus of Mills College, and it had withstood the earthquake unscathed — proof that Morgan was as experienced in reinforced concrete as she was in European design,” Lange wrote.
But skepticism about her work persisted, and the San Francisco Call sent reporter Jane Armstrong over to the building site in 1907 to talk with the foreman.
Lange quoted the Call article: “Yes, the foreman answered, it was in the charge of ‘a real architect, and her name happens to be Julia Morgan, but it might as well be John Morgan.'”
A decade later, Morgan was designing buildings at Asilomar for Phoebe Apperson Hearst, when she undertook the commission of her career, the Hearst Castle project with William Randolph Hearst, which would last 25 years.
Besides those landmark projects on the Central Coast, she notably designed the Berkeley City Club, San Francisco’s Chinatown YWCA and hundreds of other buildings. In the South Bay, a piece of her legacy is currently on the market. The 1910 home-turned-office, located at 1650 The Alameda in San Jose, has been listed for $3.4 million by Cushman & Wakefield.
So why did the Times fail to write about her death? “In the 1950s, the emphasis was on the new, the modern, and the heroic — not to mention on architecture to house the masses,” Lange wrote. “Morgan was largely forgotten.”
Thanks to the efforts of biographer Sara Holmes Boutelle and other architects, Morgan’s “reputation was restored” years after her death, the obituary says. In 2014, she was posthumously awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal — a first for a woman.
Morgan is buried with other California luminaries at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.
