The Golden Gate Hotel – Utilitarian Italianate
Emeryville’s Golden Gate Hotel is a workmanlike example of Italianate architecture, one of the earliest styles of the Victorian period. Patterned after the villas of Tuscany, the Italianate style arrived in California during the 1850s, just as the rage for revivalist architecture was reaching full swing.
Although their genuine Italian prototypes were built of stone, most California Italianates were built of wood, which was cheaper and far more plentiful. Despite this obvious incongruence, West Coast builders became extremely adept at imitating traditional stone details in wood, and such mock-masonry features became a hallmark of Italianate architecture.
The wooden “drop siding” so commonly seen on Victorian buildings, for example, was originally intended to resemble horizontally coursed masonry joints. Wooden quoins (commonly called cornerstones) were often included as well to further enhance the masonry look. And many Italianates featured windows with segmental arches topped with obviously nonfunctional wooden keystones, suggesting the arched windows used in brick and stone construction.
The most ubiquitous feature of Italianate buildings are the heavy brackets used under the eaves and rake, which gave rise to a common synonym for Italianate-the “Bracketed Style.”
The Golden Gate Hotel represented a stripped-down form of Italianate common to many utilitarian structures of the 1860s. While it featured drop siding and brackets, true Italianate features such as quoins and arch-topped windows were omitted for the sake of economy. Such buildings could be quickly and cheaply constructed from materials readily available at lumberyards.
By the late 1860s, however, with Victorian tastes clamoring for even more ornament, the relatively sedate Italianate had already been superseded by flashier Victorian styles such as Mansard, Stick, and finally Queen Anne.
This story originally published in 1996 for the Emeryville Centennial Celebration and compiled into the ‘Early Emeryville Remembered’ historical essays book.
