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Edgar Aschael MathewsJohn S. Wurts, Pedigrees of the Barons (1942), Philadelphia: Brookfield, 1945, repr. 1964, , p. 2777. (September 8, 1866 – December 31, 1946) was an architect who worked in the Bay Area of California, particularly in San Francisco. He primarily designed houses but was also responsible for some Christian Science churches and commercial and government buildings.
In San Francisco, houses by Mathews include 2361 Washington Street (1898, for William Gerstle) and 2421 Pierce Street (1897 "2421 Pierce St., San Francisco", Business, San Francisco Chronicle, September 2, 2009. or c. 1903, for James Irvine), both in the Tudor style,Anne and Arthur Bloomfield, Gables and Fables: A Portrait of San Francisco's Pacific Heights, Berkeley, California: Heyday, 2007, , pp. 94, 148. and 2505 Divisadero Street (1899), former home of rock musician Kirk Hammett, in Georgian style.Anna Marie Erwert, "Pac Heights mansion, once home to Metallica's Kirk Hammett, rocks the MLS", On the Block blog, San Francisco Chronicle, May 25, 2015. Two houses designed by Mathews in Berkeley are city landmarks: the Cornelious Beach Bradley House (1897) and the Benjamin Ide Wheeler House (1900; remodeled by Lewis Hobart).Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny, Berkeley Landmarks: An Illustrated Guide to Berkeley, California's Architectural Heritage, rev. ed., Berkeley, California: Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, 2001, , pp. 187, 252. Of his apartment houses, those at 1390–1392 Page Street and 200 Central Avenue are in a characteristic Shingle-Craftsman style;Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny, An Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area, Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2007, , p. 74. the row of flats at 2100 Lyon Street is typical of his shingled apartment houses in Pacific Heights,Cerny, Guidebook, p. 66. and the row at 100–114 Walnut Street (the Stein apartments) also has an unusually varied roofline.Cerny, Guidebook, pp. 64–65. As a Christian Scientist, Mathews was commissioned to design the First Church of Christ, Scientist in San Francisco (1912); for this and again for the similar Third Church of Christ, Scientist (1917) he used a Byzantine-Romanesque style in variegated brick with polychrome terracotta decoration.Paul Eli Ivey, Prayers in Stone: Christian Science Architecture in the United States, 1894–1930, Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois, 1999, , pp. 56–57. Writing in The Architectural Review, William Winthrop Kent singled the Third Church out for special praise.William Winthrop Kent, "The New San Francisco: Part III: Churches and Clubs", The Architectural Review, 8 (1919) 127–28. It has now been converted into housing for seniors. "Haight St. Church Converted to Housing", San Francisco Heritage Newsletter, 2007."Historic Haight church now senior housing", San Francisco Examiner, October 18, 2007. "A neighborhood treasure in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district gets a second act as affordable senior housing" , FHLBank, San Francisco, retrieved May 14, 2016. "Buena Vista Terrace - 1250 Haight Street", Tenderloin Neighborhood Development, February 3, 2012.
Later in his career, Mathews was a proponent of Renaissance revival architecture; an example of his commercial designs in this style is the highly ornamented 447 Sutter Street (1916), for Pacific Gas and Electric.Cerny, Guidebook, p. 28. He also designed government buildings in Sacramento; in 1919 he won the $500 prize in the competition to design a new courthouse for Santa Barbara, but it remained unbuilt for lack of funds, and after the 1925 earthquake, a design by William Mooser, the second-place entrant, was built instead.Neal Graffy, Historic Santa Barbara: An Illustrated History, San Antonio, Texas: Historical Publication Network, 2010, , p. 72. The base of Douglas Tilden's 1907 monument to Padre Junipero Serra in Golden Gate Park is also by Mathews.United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California, National Register of Historic Places, Section 7, Page 22.
Mathews was vice-president of the San Francisco Chapter of the American Institute of Architects from 1913 to 1916 and president in 1917. He was president of the California Board of Architectural Examiners in 1915–18.
Private life and death
Mathews married Katherine Carlton Dart on December 8, 1891, and they had two daughters. "Edgar A. Mathews (Architect)", Pacific Coast Architecture Database, University of Washington, retrieved May 14, 2016. In 1935 they moved to 1956 Great Highway, which he had also designed. He died there on New Year's Eve 1946.
Lawsuits
Mathews was involved in two lawsuits. In 1908 he was sued by a former client in San Rafael for twice designing a similar house to be built close to the client's, which the client had wanted to be unique. The judge ruled in favor of Mathews, saying: "If this injunction were granted it would have the practical effect of putting architect Mathews out of business, because his personality expresses itself in a certain type of house, and this injunction seeks to restrain him from constructing that type.""Court Rules That an Architect May Duplicate His Plans to Different Clients", Current News Section, The American Architect and Building News 94, July 1, 1908, p. 19. The Ohio Architect and Builder 12 (1908) 45–46. In 1914 Mathews sued the Board of Trustees of the San Francisco Public Library for $11,900, his fee and time in entering the competition to design the main library; he argued that the winning design by George W. Kelham (the building now the Asian Art Museum) plagiarized Cass Gilbert's Detroit Public Library. The judge threw out the lawsuit, pointing out that Gilbert had been on the competition jury."Architect Charges Plagiarism", The California Outlook, May 23, 1914, p. 9.Peter Booth Wiley, A Free Library in this City: The Illustrated History of the San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco: Weldon Owen, 1996, , p. 129.
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