 I wrote about California's first licensed woman architect, Julia Morgan. And I know most of you know who she is and what she did. But let me just advance. It's so interesting. I wish we had more time because to talk about process and how we come up with these things and why you choose to write about what you write about. My background was, as you heard, I was a reporter for 25 years. And actually, I'm on my 13th book right now. I have to update my bio with the San Francisco Library. But I was drawn to this material because we moved from Los Angeles up here about 17 years ago. And I turned out we rented an apartment on Knob Hill that was one bedroom tiny apartment that it was a chopped up building that had been designed and built by Julia Morgan right after the 1906 quake. And the manager had a flower shop in the old Fairmont. And I was interested in Julia Morgan because as a kid, my father and I had gone to the opening week of Hearst Castle. And I remember walking through and I said to the guy, who designed this thing, this Hearst Castle? And he goes, Julia Morgan, now if you'll just step into this room, they didn't give her a sentence. And I remember thinking as a 16-year-old, I didn't know women were architects. So when I found out I was living in a Julia Morgan building, I got interested and my ears perked up. And the manager said, oh, yeah. And she restored the Fairmont Hotel after the quake. I said, I didn't know that. So intrepid reporter without a job at that point because we just moved to San Francisco, I went down and went into the PR office and found out all about it. And I was interested in just writing about the year following the quake that Julia Morgan and her little tiny office spent restoring the Fairmont Hotel to exactly the way it was before the quake. It was three days away from opening when the quake hit. No one had ever slept there. The quake hit, it survived the quake very well, but the fire roared up and it was 3,000 degrees and burned it out from the inside. So her job was to scrape it out, rebuild it and open it within one year of the quake. And she accepted the job and there were two other people racing to Splendor. One was the St. Francis Hotel and the other was the Palace Hotel. So this was a story about the one year it took this woman 34 years old. So that became a race to Splendor. And I of course, like Mark did, you have to find out who, what, where, why, when. And I use the same skills that I did as a reporter to kind of track a story that was 100 years ago. This is Julia Morgan's Carte Identité. She went to Berkeley. She graduated in 1894 and she decided it was learned geometry from another architect named Bernard Maybeck. And Maybeck had gone to Les Caldes Beaux Arts in Paris. A lot of American architects had gone and he thought she was so talented and she was the only woman in the engineering department at Cal and she graduated with honors and he said, you know what, you should go. So she applied and the story was that when she applied she didn't send this picture yet. She just applied as J. Morgan and they thought she was the son of J.P. Morgan and they let her in. But then she got there and they went, ooh, no, no, no. You're not gonna get in. So it took her a long time. She had to take the exam three times in order to get it. But that was her picture ID as she sailed. So she studied eventually and it's a long story and you have to read the book. And she is a secondary character in a race to splendor because she had a very peculiar focus life and she couldn't be really the heroine in the sense I wasn't writing a biographical historical but I was interested in that race, that period. So I have her have, she had a number of protégés although she never really helped them that much. She was a pretty much of a queen bee. So I was interested in her as a secondary character and I created a composite character based on the stories of the women who had worked for her. They said she was genius and she was held to work for. So she wasn't just this perfect little heroine that triumphed overall. She became very interesting to write about. But here she is standing on the balcony in Paris. And when at the L'École de Beaux-Arts it trained you in everything. We were talking about Frank Lloyd Wright. You had to like his style or forget it. Julie Morgan and Mae Beck and all these great architects were trained to do any style there was. Moorish, Mediterranean, classic, Beaux-Arts, whatever it was. You learned it when you were at the L'École. And you learned it through the Atelier system which was a studio system where you work beside other people. Now if you look there, I'm gonna show you. There's Julia. She's the only woman in the room with a bow tie there and the rest were guys. She was the first woman ever admitted. She was the first woman who ever graduated and no woman went through the architecture school at L'École for 40 more years. So she was pretty extraordinary. And she came back to California. Well anyway, of course I spent some time at the L'École de Beaux-Arts trying to understand what it felt like. The rumors were, and I could never identify it, but that they made her sit outside the door of the classrooms the first year and put her ear to the door so that she could hear the classes but she would distract the men and they wouldn't let her sit in class and then eventually they did. And she did join the atelier. But I wanted to see, you know, it's an enormous structure and it has all arts. It has painting, sculpture, architecture, fine arts of all kinds. It's an incredible arts school that's been, it's 250 years old. So I wanted to drop into the classes now and this was a painting class and there the girls were, you know, just like normal girls. I kept thinking, poor Julia. You know, here she was laced up and not welcome and nobody wanted her and she had to learn the metric system. She had to learn French. She, against all odds, she made it through. So it was fun just to get the sense of what it was. Well then she returned to San Francisco in 1902. And this was an image that was painted. This is not a photograph of the day of the quake. The quake happened as we all know, if we know our history, very early in the morning on April 18th and it was a clear, perfectly sunny day. And the fire, of course, was what did most of the damage. At least they tried to say that. Gladys Hansen, who was one of the librarians here for years has been trying to get an accurate death count and we're up to about 4,000. The official account was 478 and that was because of the fire. Well, it wasn't, it was because of everything that had happened. And the key to really understanding how do we real people and real places, I think, is that you have to ground yourself in the facts. So I spent a lot of time at various libraries in California and getting images as well as written material to try to understand what that day was like because it happens very early in my book. This is a street in Chinatown. Chinatown was absolutely devastated, as many of you know. And for a while, the city fathers said, we're not gonna rebuild Chinatown. There was tremendous prejudice against the Chinese. They, many were brought here to build the railroads and after they were completed, nobody really wanted them to say. They said, we'll just put them down at Hunter's Point, the Chinese. And the Empress of China wrote and said, I own four blocks in Chinatown and if you do that, I'm declaring war on the United States. So that's basically why they were able to rebuild and the Fairmont, as you know, is just up the street from Chinatown. So there was a lot of prejudice of hiring Chinese workers, but they were there and they could work. So a lot of my book deals with the whole issue of the Chinese during the quake and what was done and how they coped and how they lived because everybody else was evacuated. 250,000 people lived in Golden Gate Park but the Chinese were sent over to Oakland and segregated and then in the park itself, there was one section at the top which is sort of the road on the way to the Jiang Museum where the Chinese were allowed to camp, but it was a terrible kind of part of chapter and I deal with this quite a bit in the book. Well, Julie Morgan, when she first came back, she couldn't get much work. She built a lot of garages for her sorority sisters for their new cars that were just being coming out but little by little, she got a few commissions and one of the things she got was to build the Campanile at Mills College and she knew construction based on steel and reinforced concrete and after the quake, this thing still was standing. So even though she was a woman architect and nobody really, you know, she's a woman, can she really design, this thing was her calling card and all she had to do was say, go look at my building in Oakland, it's still standing. So she threw her hat in the ring and through a long story, which I can't go into, she got the commission to rebuild the Fairmont Hotel basically because this thing still stood and she eventually built a number of buildings over at Mills, it's very interesting to go see she built the library and in other places. So Morgan was in the race to try to rebuild San Francisco in order to prove that San Francisco would rise from the ashes. People said it was Pompeii, there's no point rebuilding it after New Orleans and the flooding. Remember how everybody says, oh, well, New Orleans, you know so it's gonna get flooded again, let's not rebuild it. Well, the city father said if we rebuild the fabulous hotels, people will come and so she moved her office which had been decimated in the quake over to her house in Oakland and this is the barn and she took all her draftsman there and they worked from there and they took fairies back and forth to all the different jobs and she did a ton of jobs during the rebuilding and we have her to thank for a lot of the merchants building the Fairmont, she did a lot of really wonderful building and here's where everybody lived because it was the jumping off spot for the war in the Philippines, Golden Gate Park of course, it was run at that time by the army and there were lots of tents left over and that's how we housed everybody. So I went over there and I saw the archival pictures and there are one or two earthquake shacks still there and you just have to sort of do the legwork in order to write a book that's set not in our own time. This was one of Julia's drawings that got her certificate at the Le Corbusage. She was an incredible draftsman and a beautiful designer. This was a beautiful pretend as a theater, it never got built but she submitted this as her final project and she had to get a gold. Otherwise she wouldn't have enough points to pass her exams before she was 30, that was the other thing. She had to pass everything before you're 30. So she was two weeks away from her birthday and she created this beautiful, beautiful creation and you submitted your things with a number only. If they'd known it was her, they would have dinged her but because it was just a number, she won her certificate and came back to California. Now this is a wonderful picture I found of the Fairmont Hotel and if you look on the left, you see the burnt out windows. The thing was designed originally by an American graduate of what they called the Bozards. He knew how to build in the Bozards fashion and it was a beautiful building and it stood, it withstood that terrible, terrible fire. So her job was to keep it standing while she gutted it and rebuilt it. And so the story of doing that became my story. Now this is another way you find out what's going on. These are archival insurance company pictures. It's blurry, it's not the greatest picture but you get an idea, that's the insurance agent apparently looking over the damage to decide whether or not they were gonna pay to rebuild it and give some money to the owners, who were devastated of course because they hadn't even opened the doors and it was ruined. And so these kinds of images and material is what makes our job work. Now this is, I love this picture because what Julia Morgan did in my story is they rebuilt the hotel that was. It's not Julia Morgan's design. This was the design of the original architects who I used to remember who they were. I think the Reed Brothers. It was owned by the Fair Sisters and the Reed Brothers were the architects. At any rate, Julia Morgan restored it exactly the way it is and I have other pictures that show her in this empty building putting these columns back but this then in the 50s, if you remember, Hollywood kind of set designer decorator came and transformed it into kind of a red bordello. Remember it was all red with red velvet and flocked wallpaper and all that. Well in the year 2000, the Fairmont was bought again and the people wanted to restore it so I interviewed all the architects doing the restoration and they were crawling all around the building. They found a dome ceiling that had been lowered and it was fascinating and it was all happening just after I got the idea. So I hung around with them and they explained how they restored it to the way Julia Morgan restored it to the way it was originally which was a fascinating story. So when the book came out, we had a fabulous party in the penthouse of the Fairmont Hotel. The hotel hosted it with my publisher and so I thought, well what the heck? It was on the 105th anniversary of the quake. We had it on April 18th and I said to everyone, put on your 1906 duds and come and 120 people showed up. Almost 90%, I would say, wore all their hats and everything and we had an absolute ball. At any rate, I am fascinated in what were the women doing and I've written about women politicians, women artists, women writers and I spent 20 years doing this. So in the last five years, I have worked on a series called The Four Seasons Quartet and the one I'm working on now which is called That Spring in Paris, it starts 100 years after a race to splendor and it's the great, great granddaughter. Okay, good, I'm right at the end. It's the great, great granddaughter of the character, the lead character who loves Julia Morgan and hates her and they have this big struggle in the course of my novel and she breaks away from Julia Morgan and builds another hotel down the street and they become rivals. So it was lots of fun. Well now, her great granddaughter is going to be the heroine of this new book where she goes to Paris because one of her friends has been felled in the November 13th terrorist attacks and there's a reason she has to go and she wants to be an artist. So it's funny how your mind works around. I thought, well, this book was so much fun to write. Let's do another one and a spin off. So that's what I'm going to do. So imagine in California using real people, real images and bless the libraries because without them and the archivists, we wouldn't be able to do our job. Thanks.