By Ross Eric Gibson

William Weeks (1864 to 1936) was a Watsonville architect who became known throughout California, Nevada and Oregon for his beautifully designed homes, businesses, churches and civic buildings, making a specialty of school and library architecture.

Weeks was born in 1864 to architect-builder Richard Weeks in Charlottetown, the capital of Prince Edward Island, off Nova Scotia. That year, Charlottetown held a conference proposing Prince Edward Island form a nation with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The mainland Canadian Colony (consisting of Ontario and Quebec) also thought this was a good idea and joined their conference. This was during the American Civil War, and it was believed nationhood would prevent either U.S. or Confederate attempts to annex Britain’s Canadian colonies, thus Canada was born July 1, 1867. William Weeks’ father found himself much in demand as an architect and contractor, and the family business highly influenced the children, Will, Hammond, Ida and Jean.

The family moved to Denver, where William Weeks graduated from the Brinker Institute in 1885, then became part of his father’s construction business in Wichita, Kansas, with brother Hammond. William Weeks fell in love with an Indiana girl, but she died before their wedding, so in 1891 he married her sister instead and moved briefly to Tacoma, Washington. But California was experiencing a building boom, so the family relocated to Oakland, where they attended the Christian Church (also called Disciples of Christ). Through church connections, Weeks learned Watsonville needed an architect to design their Christian Church. This might have been a quick job, but prior to the new church’s dedication, it burned down in 1892, keeping Weeks in Watsonville longer to rebuild it. He moved his family into a cottage he didn’t design for the duration of the project.

But Watsonville was experiencing a boom of its own. A thriving apple industry was producing an affluent business climate. So Weeks opened a Watsonville office in 1894 and designed his first Watsonville house for Judge Jullius Lee. It was a Queen Anne “mansion” on a small lot, with cameos of bas relief maidens painted white, a concept inspired by Wedgewood porcelain. This prominent example of his work led to Weeks designing over 100 Watsonville homes. Most were designed like aggrandized bungalows, in a deceptive scale, making it hard to tell if his cottages seemed like mansions or his mansions seemed like cottages.

In 1895, Weeks was chosen to design Watsonville’s first high school. It was palatial, and its photo graced the school’s sheet music that year. Many other school commissions would follow, until he became known as the leading school architect in the state. Even in budget projects, he sought to make his buildings a point of pride for the community. Except for downtown businesses, he placed most of his buildings in a park-like landscape or campus, to emphasize a naturalistic garden setting.

When he designed his 1898 McDougall Building in Salinas, he opened a branch office in that building, commuting to Salinas two days a week from Watsonville. Sugar king Claus Spreckels employed Weeks to build the town of Spreckels two miles south of Salinas, with 40 homes, a school, various buildings and the largest sugar beet factory in the world.

Library

Santa Cruz had a vagabond library, shifting locations so often, it was sometimes hard to find. The town felt it was time to put the library in its own building. They noted steel magnate Andrew Carnegie had funded his first California libraries in 1899, four in Oakland, plus one each in San Diego and Alameda. The library committee hoped to receive a $25,000 to $50,000 grant, but Carnegie gave them $15,000 in 1903. Five architects from Los Angeles to Sacramento submitted eight proposals for the library. William Weeks proposed two of them, a Mission-esque style building facing west, or alternately a Romanesque style building with entrances on streets north and south. The committee found the Romanesque design the most beautiful and practical, but it exceeded their budget. Library board member Samuel Leask went to New York at his own expense to confront Carnegie.

This was brazen, but Carnegie and Leask had grown up in extreme poverty in Scotland, yet found early advantages from rare private libraries and schooling. Leask and Carnegie turned out to have more in common than they thought, for Leask’s mother-in-law was Mrs. Donald McLean, Andrew Carnegie’s niece living in Watsonville. Thanks to Leask’s plea, Carnegie raised the library grant to $20,000. Andrew Carnegie came to Santa Cruz in 1910 to visit his library, enjoyed a banquet in the redwoods, then went south to tour the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory he had funded, met John Muir and visited the Long Beach Carnegie Library. California built over 20 Carnegie libraries designed by Wm. Weeks, five of them in Santa Cruz County: Main Branch, Watsonville, Garfield Park, Seabright and Eastside Branch at El Portal Park.

In 1901, Watsonville High School burned down. Weeks was starting to look for less combustible building materials and took inspiration from plaster and Spanish stucco. Yet this was 10 years before mission style had been codified. So he essentially transposed his neo-Colonial Queen Annes into stucco-and-tile-roofed Queen Annes, along with his unique ornamental strap-work and cameos, creating “Weeks Mission-esque” versions of mission architecture. Sixty years later, the high school housed the original Cabrillo College while its Aptos Campus was being built, and when the main campus opened, the Weeks high school was demolished in 1964. Other Weeks buildings also show a free use of non-Spanish features in his Spanish stucco compositions. Weeks was a Watsonville Sunday School teacher when another fire struck the Watsonville Christian Church, so they moved to a new site, and Weeks designed a substantial stone church in 1904 with Mission-esque features.

The Widow Margaret Moreland lived on four acres across the street from St. Patrick’s Church in Watsonville. Her only daughter Josephine was about to graduate from Notre Dame College in San Jose when she died of pneumonia in 1888. As a memorial to her daughter, Margaret hired Weeks to build Moreland Notre Dame Academy on her property in 1899. It was a source of community pride, with a chapel so beautiful, Father Mahony of St. Patrick’s decided to move their wooden church to the back of the lot for a social hall, with Week building a red-brick cathedral in 1903, with a magnificent sanctuary. The entrance to town was between the parklike church and academy grounds, making a stately gateway to Watsonville.

Growing pains

As Weeks’ business grew, he set up branch offices in Palo Alto, San Jose, San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Oakland Tribune tower. Weeks moved his San Francisco offices to the new Flood Building on Market Street in 1905, while staying at the 10-story Hotel California. When the 1906 earthquake struck, the hotel showered glass and bricks onto the street. From his window, he viewed a city crumbling to rubble, shaken by frequent aftershocks. Weeks intended to escape onto the roof of the neighboring fire station, but before he left the window, a rain of hotel debris descended on the fire station and destroyed the building.

Weeks quickly evacuated and went to see the condition of his offices at the Flood Building. The first lesson of the earthquake was that wooden buildings survived the shaking better than rigid masonry ones. Yet upon arriving at the Flood Building, he was astonished at its undamaged appearance, lauding the virtues of steel reinforced concrete, of which he had only recently become aware. From his window at the Flood Building, he saw small fires break out, a result of ruptured gas lines, which sometimes caused gas built up in a house that would suddenly explode. He was impressed that some people had chemical fire extinguishers, a vital resource when there was nothing in the ruptured water pipes and hydrants to fight the blaze. Yet small fires grew into an inferno, and the militia resorted to dynamiting firebreaks through the architectural gems of the town.

Having heard nothing from Santa Cruz County, Weeks expected the worst. Instead he arrived to find there was minor damage, with five unreinforced masonry buildings in Santa Cruz the worst hit. And yet he was gratified to discover his Carnegie Library was called the strongest building in town and made headquarters for the local quake recovery effort. Thomas Beck repaired the Cooper Street Courthouse, and Weeks helped stabilize the fallen courthouse tower and reinforce the unreinforced walls. Samuel Leask hired Weeks to construct a neo-Colonial Leask’s department store, to stand opposite the courthouse on Pacific Avenue. Having seen masonry parapets crash to the streets in the earthquake, Weeks built his parapets and bracketed cornices out of lightweight tin.

In Watsonville, the earthquake had awakened girls at Moreland Academy to find one wall of their room was gone. As Weeks made repairs, his experience with both fire and quake spurred him to become a leader in developing structural standards in public buildings, especially in his school designs. Banks of windows not only offered plenty of natural light, but through louvered banks of window, plenty of fresh air was instantly available, especially to vent toxic fumes. Chemical fire extinguishers became mandatory. He wanted quick pedestrian circulation, allowing all students to reach their classrooms in quick order, but equally able to evacuate the building in case of emergency, without crowding in the halls. Yet he ornamented all buildings to encourage community pride. (To be continued.)

Further reading

The late Watsonville historian Betty Lewis, published an excellent 1985 overview of the architect’s work called “W.H. Weeks—Architect.”