Category: Architecture

By Amy O’Hair
With research and collaboration by Kathleen Laderman

The second of a two-part article about San Francisco architect Ida F McCain. Read the first part here.

Having covered Ida F McCain’s early and professional life in the first part of this article, I’ll now trace her later years and death. With her older sister Eda, she became part of a unique religious movement, and they both changed their names, as so many of the followers did. For a few years, the sisters remained in California, while their niece Dorothy Darling, and other relatives, travelled to the headquarters of Father Divine’s Peace Mission movement in Philadelphia. Eventually Ida and Eda would join them there.

How did they come to the point of finally leaving their beloved California? What did the movement mean for Ida McCain? I start at a singular moment toward the end of Ida McCain’s life.

A Deed for a Higher Purpose

After a lifetime of buying and selling property, and designing beautiful buildings, it is perhaps apt that the last public act of Ida F McCain’s life should to sign her name to a deed for a beautiful building.

At the end of 1948, Ida F McCain and her sister Eda H Walters, under their Peace Mission names, appear on an extraordinary document: the deed to the grand and luxurious Lorraine Hotel in Philadelphia. This enormous structure, built in 1894 and designed by Willis G. Hale, would become not just the showplace of the Peace Mission movement, but the first hotel of this standing in the US to be fully racially integrated. The price was $485,000.^[1]

Not that the sisters bought this hotel on their own; their names are third and fourth on a list that comprises five hundred co-signers, all followers of Father Divine. This was the way that the movement acquired properties, making cooperative purchases of hotels and rooming houses, which would then be occupied by followers or anyone agreeing to the code of conduct and paying their dollar a week. Communal living and working was at the center of the movement. Continue reading “‘And then the vision starts to form’: The Life, Work, and Death of Ida F McCain, Part Two” →

By Amy O’Hair
With research and collaboration by Kathleen Laderman

The first of a two-part article about San Francisco architect Ida F McCain. Read the second part here.

The life of an artisan is a compelling subject for me. The worth of some famous lives may suffer under the weight of a subject’s shortcomings. But for the creative worker even faults and breaks can cast new light on the mysterious, even transcendent, process by which that person was able to bring something completely new in the world, something separate and enduring.

“It is interesting to watch the progress of your work through all the stages. First a thought—from this thought a vision comes—and then the vision starts to form—first a mere skeleton frame, but day by day it grows and, like the acorn that sends forth the mighty oak [that] no man’s hands fashion mere material to conform to the thought, the idea—until a day comes and behold—before us our vision materialized—our completed home.”^[1]

Speaking to an audience of women in the 1920s, architect Ida F McCain aimed to communicate her process of creation—the exhilaration, the awe, the satisfaction of working from the originating idea to the completed structure.

But the course of a life is more like an oak tree than a house—full of twists and asymmetries, buffeted by wind or drought, hampered by disease or predation—but often magnificent nonetheless.

West Coast architect Ida F McCain designed hundreds of houses in the 1910s and 1920s, in San Francisco and elsewhere—a woman prominent in her time in a profession almost entirely dominated by men. Her bungalow plans, with their thoughtful interiors, are distinctive and interesting. She boldly promoted herself, took on her own building projects as she pleased, and spoke freely about herself and her work. Her life deserves a full telling.

Continue reading “‘And then the vision starts to form’: The Life, Work, and Death of Ida F McCain, Part One” →