May 04, 2005

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Palo Alto Online

Stanford's reminders of the past

by Jennifer Deitz Berry

Along about 1910 a Stanford professor of botany named Robert Allardice was riding his horse alongside a stream that ran through the southwest hills and on into campus. The frogs were singing and cattails were waving as horse and rider passed through a grove of oak trees. Making their way up a gentle slope, horse and rider came upon a lone deciduous valley oak. Its broad twisted branches and weeping sprays appealed to the botanist. A few years later, he and Douglas Campbell, a professor of mathematics, arranged to have their house built next to the tree.

Or at any rate, this is the story of how one landmark Stanford home was built according to the garden writer Albert Wilson. His recollections are included in the latest volume on historic houses put out by the Stanford Historical Society. The first volume was published in 1995 and is out of print, while the second appeared in 1998. More volumes will follow.

The book takes a detailed look at the history behind 17 noteworthy homes built in the San Juan neighborhood of the Stanford campus between 1915 and 1930. At the time, Stanford was going through a moderate housing boom as the university expanded. With new departments opening and new faculty being hired, Stanford was under pressure to come up with additional housing, so the university opened up the southwestern side of campus for construction. The area bounded by Alvarado Row, Campus Drive and Junipero Serra Boulevard was known as San Juan Subdivision 3.

Most of the homes highlighted in the book were built by three prominent Palo Alto architects of the day: Birge Clark, Charles Sumner, and John Branner. This period in architecture was known as "eclectic" and the houses in this volume live up to that name. Houses of very different styles -- Spanish eclectic, English cottage, Italian Renaissance, and French country -- all went up within a few blocks of each other. The differences in designs can be seen in the great sketches and old photographs included in the book, which show off the houses both inside and out. The book also traces renovations made over the years as the houses were passed on from one family to the next.

The volume begins with three Tudor-style homes on El Escarpado Way, all of which were designed by Sumner. The houses were built on a quiet cul-de-sac circling an old California oak. The street soon earned the nickname "Biz Hill," since most of the houses were owned by faculty from the new business school.

The house at 445 El Escarpado Way was originally built for J. Hugh Jackson, a professor of accounting, at a cost of $28,000. The house has all of the classic Tudor elements: beige stucco walls, timbered exteriors and steeply-pointed roofs. But it also has touches that are uniquely "Stanford." There are built-in file cabinets and card catalog drawers in the first-floor library, the Stanford "tree" is carved into the sconces beside the fireplace, and inside the gun cabinet is a replica of the Ax. This was also the house where Frederick Terman, the famed engineering professor and provost, lived for many years with his wife Sybil. After her death, Terman donated the house to the university in order to establish a fund in the School of Education in her honor.

The volume also features a number of houses designed by Birge Clark. Clark grew up in Palo Alto and made his career here. He is credited with having had a hand in the design of 450 buildings in Palo Alto. His Spanish eclectic designs -- the stucco-like walls, tile roofs, iron grilles and arches -- have come to define Palo Alto. And yet the most interesting Birge Clark house included in this book bears little resemblance to his trademark designs.

Clark built the house at 548 Gerona Road for a friend. The two squirrels he has drawn into the architectural plans are suggestive of the spirit in which it was built. The writers of the book uneasily classify the design as "Tudor period style" and then go on to describe the house as "picturesque with elements of simplified Gothic revival and medieval cottage." They also note that the original homeowner, Graham Stuart, paid his way through college playing the nickelodeon for silent movies. This seems to be a telling detail given that the house looks less like something out of real life and more like it belongs in the Adventures of Robin Hood or along the road to Camelot.

The windows are oddly-shaped, the front door is wooden and heavy and curved into a point at the top. Steep-pitched roofs and gables of different heights jut out from all sides, and the cedar-shingled roofs are curved and joined together at funny angles, giving it a sunken and aged quality of a fairy-tale cottage.

The house Allardice and Campbell built next to their oak tree could not have been more different. The style of their house is described as Italian Renaissance eclectic. It is formal and stately with wrought-iron grilles accenting the windows and ornate pillars and archways lining the patio out back. Before moving to this house, Allardice and Campbell had lived with two other professors in a house on 33 Alvarado Row where they had started a club called "The Bachelors."

It was a club that Allardice and Campbell would, unofficially at least, belong to for the rest of their lives. Architect Walter H. Ratcliff Jr. designed the house so that each of them would have their own separate "chamber" with a bedroom and bathroom. Allardice planted an elaborate garden replete with fig and almond trees and as many as 250 plants and bulbs from around the world, and they settled in for a permanent stay. Both men would live in the house until their deaths: Allardice in 1928 and Campbell -- who by then was the last of the pioneer Stanford faculty -- in 1954.

Jennifer Deitz Berry is a freelance writer and former Weekly education reporter. She is now working at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

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