Angelo Fraschina, San Francisco Architect: From Bedano Switzerland to San Francisco via West Virginia 1878-1906

                                                 

                                                    Angelo Fraschina, circa 1912, age 34
                                                 

   Architect Angelo Fraschina was born March 13, 1878 to Luigi Fraschina and Teresa Fumagalli Fraschina in a three hundred year-old, two-­room stone house in the tiny hamlet of Bedano, near Lake Lugano, Canton of Ticino in Switzerland, where, legend has it, Julius Caesar camped in his final campaign to conquer the native Swiss Celts,. The oldest of four surviving children, Angelo was expected to help feed his impoverished farming family, which subsisted on dairy, homegrown produce and trout fished from the local alpine river.

An unidentified photo, found after Angelo's death, possibly of his mother and sister

                                                                           

When he wasn't taking care of all the necessary daily chores, he was able to attend school, where he showed an early talent for mathematics, reading and design. His desire to see the bigger world and his natural gifts fed a dream to attend University.

             The original building of the Università Politecnico di Milano circa 1890

 His townfolk were inspired enough by his capabilities to pool money in order to send him to the Politecnico University of Milan, Italy  where he also received a scholarship (borsa di studio) to study Architecture.  Even today, the Politecnico of Milano is considered the finest architecture school in Italy

The inner courtyard of the old Politecnico, a former abbey

                                     

Angelo was fortunate in that his years at the University, 1896 - 1900, coincided with the construction in Milan of the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, known as Casa Verdi:

The Casa Verdi, at the time that it opened to residents in 1903, two years after the composer's death.

 As a scholarship student having to work for his room and board, Angelo learned the many facets of architectural drafting and design in Milan at the grand construction zone of the Casa di Riposo Per Musicisti, a sweeping project envisioned by the composer Giuseppe Verdi. 

Designed in the neo­-Gothic style by Italian architect Camillo Boito (brother of the composer Arrigo Boito, a close friend of Verdi's), this ambitious complex, funded by Verdi, was built to house older and impoverished Italian opera singers, musicians and musical artists in their retirement.

During its four year construction (1896 - 1900), Angelo honed his skills in masonry, woodwork, plaster, stucco, painting and fine finishing work. He even had the unforgettable honor of shaking the great composer's hand in 1898. It was here that Angelo's lifelong love of opera began.

Verdi's Tomb is in the Crypt at the Casa Verdi, along with that of his wife, Giuseppina.

Public Spaces in the Casa Verdi

La Gascogne, the ship that carried Angelo to America on his first crossing from Italy

 In 1901, unable to find work in Italy or Switzerland, Angelo and a cousin booked steerage passage on the steamer La Gascogne out of Le Havre, France and arrived at Ellis Island, New York on May 20th. He was 23 years old with $25 in his pocket.

Their destination was the Pocahontas coal fields in Virginia and West Virginia.  To quote Wikipedia, "[here] lay the largest and richest deposit of bituminous coal in the world - the soft burning coal which was ripe for fueling the industrial machines of the developing world. The first seam was discovered in ...Pocahontas, Virginia ...[and] was, in the words of President Frederick Kimball of the Norfolk and Western [Railroad], the "most spectacular find on the continent and indeed perhaps of the entire planet."

Immigrants from Italy, in particular, poured into the coal-mining towns that had sprung up along the coal seam. They were recruited to work there and by 1910 there were more than 17,000 Italian immigrants in the state of West Virginia.  In fact, so many Italians entered the state that for over a decade before the First World War, the Italian government had a consular office in West Virginia to be near the coalmines.

Bluefield, West Virginia

Angelo and his cousin settled outside of Bluefield, West Virginia, the largest and wealthiest of the boom towns that had sprung up along the Pocahontas coal seam.

The miners lived in rough tent camps on the outskirts of the towns near the mines. Angelo remembered sleeping on hard wooden pallets in canvas tents and the freezing winters and mosquito-infested summers of the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia.

Coal camp near Bluefield, with slits in tent for ventilation and access--notice the many children's heads poking out!--and a hole to let in light.

                                   


 Conditions were harsh with primitive sanitation and grueling, dangerous work.  The Italian miners did pick and shovel work in the mines and worked twelve-hour shifts.

                                                West Virginia Mine Entrance (c.1908)

 Disease was rampant and Angelo and his cousin contracted Yellow Fever from mosquito bites and almost died from it.  When they recovered, they decided to return to Italy with the money they had earned.


 But Angelo did not give up the idea of living in the United States.
 In 1906, hearing of the tragedy of the San Francisco earthquake and fire that occured on April 18 of that year, Angelo determined to return to the U.S. and use his skills to  find work in the rebuilding of the downed city, eighty per cent of which had been destroyed.
 So he crossed the Atlantic again, this time on the steamship St. Louis.

 He came with $200, which in today's dollars is equal to $5000. Whether these were earnings from the coalfields or from subsequent work is unknown. But the money allowed him to survive when he discovered, upon his arrival in early July, that most of the skilled work positions had already been filled by people who had come from all over America and the world looking for work soon after the catastrophe.

Downtown San Francisco soon after the Earthquake and Fire.

The corner of Mason and Ellis Streets

                                

  But Angelo did have one piece of luck.  His actual destination in San Francisco, as written on the Ellis Island Documents, was 61 Greenwich Street. Amazingly enough, this was the Italian Swiss Colony building, now a National Landmark.  It was saved by its proximity to San Francisco Bay--the only source of water to fight the fires that ravaged the rest of the city.

The Italian Swiss Colony Building today

               

 From here, Angelo went into the City of San Francisco to begin his new life.

Ida Galli Fraschina: A San Francisco Italian-American Childhood, 1886-1906

Ida Galli, circa 1903




Ida Galli Fraschina was born Leonida Galli in San Francisco in 1886 in the small private back room of her parents' tiny grocery store where they lived:

The grocery store, still standing, at the corner of Clay and Taylor:

Lois Cohen Lieberman, Noel Lieberman and Bennett Lieberman.  Lois is the granddaughter of Ida's sister, Elisabetta Galli.

Ida had one older brother, Ismene, born in Lucca, Tuscany, Italy in 1873 before the family immigrated to San Francisco in 1883, an older sister, Elisabetta, born in 1885 and a younger brother, Joseph, born Giuseppe in 1888, the latter two also born in the back of the grocery store.

By 1890,  the family was living in the country outside Grass Valley in Nevada County, California. Ida's father, Emilio, had not liked city living and wanted to be a farmer again, as he had been in Lucca.  In Grass Valley, he acquired a tract of land that he farmed with a horse and plow, near the quartz mine he had bought, that he named the Ida Mine.  Sadly, the mine proved worthless and the farm, too, failed when their horse was fatally injured.  When Ida was about fourteen, her father died and the family moved back to San Francisco.  In order to help them all survive, Elisabetta and Ida traveled to Portland, Oregon to find work as seamstresses and milliners.  Throughout her life Ida continued to make beautiful clothes and hats for herself and her family, as did Elisabetta.

Elisabetta Galli, circa 1903, Ida's older sister and best friend

Another photo of Elisabetta, wearing one of her milinary creations

       Ida and Elisabetta in Portland with other seamstresses, circa 1904

             Ida and a friend, above in Portland sitting by a joke sign that reads "MAN WANTED"

 Joseph Galli, brother of Ida and Elisabetta, in the straw hat at the left, around 1904-5.  Joe eventually moved to Los Angeles in the 1920s and worked as a butcher there.

 Both had returned to San Francisco by April 1906, when the Great Earthquake struck.  Ida remembered that they were all thrown out of their beds by the force of the quake and that the potbelly stove fell off its feet causing the flaming coals to fly out and set fire to the room where they lived.

They ran for their lives with their mother and brother Joe, everyone in their nightclothes, first to the north on Polk St, through what was known as Polk Gulch, where to their horror they saw that the brick produce market, where their Galli cousins came to work in the very early hours of the morning, had collapsed and knew that they were probably fatally injured. But they could not stop; they had to keep running west, along with hundreds of others fleeing the fire that was consuming the eastern part of the city.

It took days before they found out that their brother Ismene and his wife and child had survived and were safe. By that time Ismene and his family were in one of the refugee camps by Ocean Beach on the Pacific Ocean, whereas Ida and her mother, sister and younger brother were housed in the vast tent camp in Golden Gate Park. They all lived in the tent camps for well over a year--there was nowhere else for people to live.

Life in the tent camps was very difficult. Sanitation was poor and there were epidemics of typhoid and even bubonic plague. The photo above shows a cleaned-up version of the reality of the camps.

Finally the camps closed in late 1907 and early 1908.  Ida and her widowed mother, Caterina found a small apartment at 1763 Greenwich in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of Italian immigrants, which had escaped the fire.  Elisabetta married in 1908; her new husband Francis Blanchard, who had come to San Francisco from Virginia, was a teamster for the Spring Valley Water Company, which in those days meant he drove a team of horses.

Joseph found employment at the Lorenzini Fruit Company on upper Sacramento St. in the Laurel Heights neighborhood and moved in with his older brother Ismene and Ismene's wife Laura and their daughter Irene, who lived in the neighborhood (later two more children were born to Ismene and Laura, Stanley and Lorraine).  The Galli family's life was hard, but they had survived.

Angelo Fraschina, Draftsman, 1909 - 1920

In 1908, the first record of Angelo in San Francisco shows him living at 2832 Franklin Street,  His occupation is listed in the city directory as "laborer:" 

Probably this refers to the work that was being done by so many of those who had come in search of employment to San Francisco after the earthquake: clearing the thousands of tons of debris left by the 28,000 buildings that had been destroyed and the arduous work of rebuilding, not just structures, but the infrastructure as well.

A notable fact is that he lived just a few blocks away from his future wife, Ida Galli who was living with her mother, Catherine Galli at 1763 Greenwich Street:

At some point, in the tight-knit Italian community, their paths crossed, they fell in love, and in 1909, they married.

By the time the 1909 city directory was issued, another momentous change had occurred in Angelo's circumstances: he was now working as a draftsman for the most famous architect in America, Daniel Burnham.

Daniel Burnham was not only the most renowned architect in America, by 1909, he had the biggest architectural practice in the world.  He was famed as the chief architect, designer and organizer of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, the "World's Columbian Exposition," as well as the creator of Washington, D.C.'s Union Station and Capitol Mall; and the Flatiron Building in New York.  

In San Francisco, his firm designed the San Francisco Chronicle Building in 1890 (then the tallest building in San Francisco due to its soaring clock tower that reached 280 feet) and the Mills Building in 1892, one of the very few buildings in the downtown financial district that survived the 1906 quake more or less intact.  The other two were the Kohl Building designed by Willis Polk and the Merchants Exchange Building designed by Daniel Burnham in 1904.

The Merchants Exchange Building at 465 California Street and Montgomery in 1904.

And the Merchants Exchange at the same address today:

Daniel Burnham reserved a suite of offices on the 13th floor of the Merchants Exchange for his new offices in San Francisco, with Willis Polk in charge when the Building opened in 1903.  Later, the offices of archtect Julia Morgan joined them on the 13th floor

The Merchants Exchange Building, after the 1906 quake, at the rear second from the left. On the right is the other Burnham building that survived the quake, the Mills Building and on the far left is Willis Polk's Kohl Building. 

Because it was one of the very few buildings left standing and more or less intact after the quake, and one of its only skyscrapers, the City decided to quickly repair the Merchants Exchange Building as a symbol of hope for San Francisco. The Building supplied water and power to adjacent properties throughout the rebuilding process.

By 1909, the rebuilding of San Francisco was in full swing and Angelo finally was able to put his education and professional training to work as a draftsman for Daniel Burnham & Co., with Willis Polk at the helm.

An amazing photo of Angelo at work at DH Burnham & Co. in about 1910, third  from the left, with Willis Polk in the foreground.

In 1910, Angelo began working with Willis Polk on the development of West Clay Park, an Arts and Crafts residential development off Lake Street (bounded by 22nd and 24th Avenues) in the Richmond District of San Francisco. Each home had a unique architectural plan. These grand, beautiful structures on  landscaped streets were largely built between 1910 and 1920

West Clay Park today

Meanwhile, Ida had found employment as a bookkeeper for the Golden Gate Macaroni and Paste Company, conveniently located around the corner at 2930 Octavia Street, in a building that still stands today:

 Golden Gate Macaroni Factory in the 1920s:
        

 And the building as it stands today:

2930 Octavia Street

Angelo Fraschina, Architect: A Portfolio of His Indepedent Designs

Angelo's Drafting Tools and Paper

Angelo's buildings, which span a quarter century, cluster mainly in the Cow Hollow and Marina Districts of San Francisco, because they were two of the principal neighborhoods where the Italian immigrant community lived and worked.  

Stylistically, they include his interpretations of craftsman, italianate, and art deco styles, and display signature elements such as curves and arched windows and garage openings; decorative eaves; mosaic work, both in the outer entraces and lobbies; terrazzo and ceramic tilework; wrought iron; patterned, multi-toned brickwork; decorative stucco and plasterwork inside and out; and stained glass and multi-paned windows.

3060 Pierce Street, built in 1913:

1717 Mason, built 1927:

2102 Filbert Street, built in 1932:

2361-2363  Greenwich built 1932:

Angelo's close friend, Pilade Carmignani and his son Silio Carmignani,were the proprietors of the famous Balboa Cafe on Fillmore and Greenwich where Angelo often went to join other friends for card games and socializing:

The Balboa Cafe as it looked in the early 1920s, when Angelo was hanging out with his pals

The exterior of the Balboa Cafe today, looking much the same as it did in Angelo's day.

Pilade and Silio asked Angelo to design a garage and a new facade for their two-flat building at 

171-173 Magnolia St. where they lived with their respective families:

Angelo's distinctive brickwork and arched garage are notable here

1836-1838 Greenwich Street, built 1932.  This two-flat was built for A. Ramazzotti, who had planned to put his plumbing business on the street level where the garage is now, and to live in the flats above

Unfortunately, the city turned down Ramazzotti's request and he was forced to sell the building and find another structure that would permit him to have his business below his residence.  Ramazzotti Plumbing Compay began in the 1920s and is still in existence today.

1737 Chestnut, built 1932

Mosaic Wall to the other side of the Front Door


 

Below  are views of the rear of the building which is on Magnolia St.

Below, the ornate lobby of the building

Plaque in the lobby

The ceiling design:

A lighting fixture in the lobby

3115 Gough, built 1929:

3160 Lyon Street, for many years the Spanish Consulate, now a private residence, built 1931:

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1466-1468 Greenwich, built 1911:

 

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  1662-66 Lombard St,. built in 1914 for Louis Figoni, the founder, in 1907, of a San Francisco North  Beach landmark, Figoni's Hardware, which was at 1351 Grant St. for 90 years until its closing in  1997:

And in 1922 the upper flat at 1666 became the permanent residence of Angelo, Ida, Keeno and Fifi, with Angelo and Ida living there for the next half century. Below them, was another family of Swiss Italian immigrants, the Maestretti family.  All three families became good friends.

The bottom right originally housed a garage.  The peaked pseudo-eaves above the former garage opening were added by the Japanese restaurant that now occupies that space.

The bricks were orignially a soft buff color and were only painted recently

Above is the original dwelling at 1666 Lombard where the Figoni family lived before they commissioned Angelo to build the three-flat building on the large parcel of land in front of it.  At one time the space between the two structures, currently the parking area, was a huge vegetable garden with a rabbit hutch and a profusion of Cecile Brunner baby pink roses.

Figoni's Hardward was one of a number of businesses that sprang up after the 1906 quake to provide supplies for the rebuilding of the city.  Eventually the middle flat was occupied by Louis's nephew Mel Figoni who later inherited the hardware business from his uncle.

Figoni's Hardware as it looked in the 1920s

And Figoni's as it looked in the years before it closed in 1997

2149-2153 Union Street.  In the late 1920s or early 30s, Angelo designed and built a new facade and entry for this building, which features a storefront below and two flats above.  For many years it was the site of Lorenzini's Mens Apparel.

Angelo's Architectural Tools and His Pocketwatch.