of those kitchens which seem designed exclusively for defrosting by microwave and compacting trash . It is a house built for a family of snackers .
And yet, appliances notwithstanding, it is hard to see where the million-four went . The place has been called, by Jerry Brown, a “Ta j Mahal . ” It has been called a “white elephant,” a “resort,” a “monument to the colossal ego of our former governor . ” It is not exactly any of these things . It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego, a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities, insistently and malevolen tly “democratic,” flattened out, mediocre and “open” and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn . It is the architecture of “background music,” decorators, “good taste . ” I recall once interviewing Nancy Reagan, at a time when her husband was governor and the construction on this house had not yet begun . We drove down to the State Capitol Building that day, and Mrs . Reagan showed me how she had lightened and brightened offices there by replacing the old burnished leather on the walls with the kind of beige burlap then favored in new office buildings . I mention this because it was on my mind as I walked through the empty house on the American River outside Sacramento .
From 1903 until Ronald Reagan, who lived in a rented house in Sacramento while he was governor ($1,200 a month, payable by the state to a group of Reagan’s friends), the governors of California lived in a large white Victorian Gothic house at 16th and H Streets in Sacramento . This extremely individual house, three stories and a cupola and the face of Columbia the Gem of the Ocean worked into the molding over every door, was built in 1877 by a Sacramento hardware merchant named Albert Gallatin . The state paid $32,500 for it in 1903 and my father was born in a house a block away in 1908 . This part of town has since run to seed and small business, the kind of place where both Squeaky Fromme and Patricia Hearst could and probably did go about their business unnoticed, but the Governor’s Mansion, unoccupied and open to the public as State Historical Landmark Number 823, remains Sacramento’s premier example of eccentric domestic architecture .
As it happens I used to go there once in a while, when Earl Warren was governor and his daughter Nina was a year ahead of me at C . K . McClatchy Senior High School . Nina was always called “Honey Bear” in the papers and in Life magazine but she was called “Nina” at C . K . McClatchy Senior High School and she was called “Nina” (or sometimes “Warren”) at weekly meetings of the M añana Club, a local institution to which we both belonged . I re call being initiated into the M añana Club one night at the old Governor’s Mansion, in a ceremony which involved being blindfolded and standing around Nina’s bedroom in a state of high apprehension about secret rites which never materialized . It was the custom for the members to hurl mild insults at the initiates, and I remember being dumbfounded to hear Nina, by my fourteen-year-old lights the most glamorous and unapproachable fifteen-year-old in America, characterize me as “stuck on herself . ” There in the Governor’s Mansion that night I learned for the first time that my face to the world was not necessarily the face in my mirror . “No smoking on the third floor,” everyone kept saying . “Mrs . Warren said . No smoking on the third floor or else! ”
Firetrap or not, the old Governor’s Mansion was at that time my favorite house in the world, and probably still is . The morning after I was shown the new “Residence” I visited the old “Mansion,” took the public tour with a group of perhaps twenty people, none of whom seemed to find it as ideal as I did . “All those
And yet, appliances notwithstanding, it is hard to see where the million-four went . The place has been called, by Jerry Brown, a “Ta j Mahal . ” It has been called a “white elephant,” a “resort,” a “monument to the colossal ego of our former governor . ” It is not exactly any of these things . It is simply and rather astonishingly an enlarged version of a very common kind of California tract house, a monument not to colossal ego but to a weird absence of ego, a case study in the architecture of limited possibilities, insistently and malevolen tly “democratic,” flattened out, mediocre and “open” and as devoid of privacy or personal eccentricity as the lobby area in a Ramada Inn . It is the architecture of “background music,” decorators, “good taste . ” I recall once interviewing Nancy Reagan, at a time when her husband was governor and the construction on this house had not yet begun . We drove down to the State Capitol Building that day, and Mrs . Reagan showed me how she had lightened and brightened offices there by replacing the old burnished leather on the walls with the kind of beige burlap then favored in new office buildings . I mention this because it was on my mind as I walked through the empty house on the American River outside Sacramento .
From 1903 until Ronald Reagan, who lived in a rented house in Sacramento while he was governor ($1,200 a month, payable by the state to a group of Reagan’s friends), the governors of California lived in a large white Victorian Gothic house at 16th and H Streets in Sacramento . This extremely individual house, three stories and a cupola and the face of Columbia the Gem of the Ocean worked into the molding over every door, was built in 1877 by a Sacramento hardware merchant named Albert Gallatin . The state paid $32,500 for it in 1903 and my father was born in a house a block away in 1908 . This part of town has since run to seed and small business, the kind of place where both Squeaky Fromme and Patricia Hearst could and probably did go about their business unnoticed, but the Governor’s Mansion, unoccupied and open to the public as State Historical Landmark Number 823, remains Sacramento’s premier example of eccentric domestic architecture .
As it happens I used to go there once in a while, when Earl Warren was governor and his daughter Nina was a year ahead of me at C . K . McClatchy Senior High School . Nina was always called “Honey Bear” in the papers and in Life magazine but she was called “Nina” at C . K . McClatchy Senior High School and she was called “Nina” (or sometimes “Warren”) at weekly meetings of the M añana Club, a local institution to which we both belonged . I re call being initiated into the M añana Club one night at the old Governor’s Mansion, in a ceremony which involved being blindfolded and standing around Nina’s bedroom in a state of high apprehension about secret rites which never materialized . It was the custom for the members to hurl mild insults at the initiates, and I remember being dumbfounded to hear Nina, by my fourteen-year-old lights the most glamorous and unapproachable fifteen-year-old in America, characterize me as “stuck on herself . ” There in the Governor’s Mansion that night I learned for the first time that my face to the world was not necessarily the face in my mirror . “No smoking on the third floor,” everyone kept saying . “Mrs . Warren said . No smoking on the third floor or else! ”
Firetrap or not, the old Governor’s Mansion was at that time my favorite house in the world, and probably still is . The morning after I was shown the new “Residence” I visited the old “Mansion,” took the public tour with a group of perhaps twenty people, none of whom seemed to find it as ideal as I did . “All those
Similar Books
