The Alfred E. Clarke Mansion , also known as the Caselli Mansion , Nobby Clarke's Castle and Nobby Clarke's Folly , is a mansion at 250 Douglass Street on the corner of Caselli Avenue in Eureka Valley , San Francisco, California . Built in 1891 by Alfred "Nobby" Clarke, it has been a hospital and is now an apartment building. It became a San Francisco Designated Landmark in 1975.
8-469: The house is a four-story structure in Baroque - Queen Anne style; it has several towers and the roof has bands of scalloped shingles alternating with plain. It stands on a site at the head of Eureka Valley and originally had 45 rooms; The interior features an impressive foyer with grand staircase, carved fireplaces, mantels, and wood paneling, and fine stained glass. Alfred "Nobby" Clarke, who had it built,
16-843: A hospital during World War I . Unlike many other Victorian mansions in San Francisco, it survived the 1906 earthquake and the subsequent fires. In 1909 it became the Victor Apartments, the first apartment building in the neighborhood, with 14 units. In World War II it was leased for employee housing by Standard Oil . The Alfred E. Clarke mansion was designated San Francisco city landmark number 80 on December 7, 1975. Baroque Revival architecture The Baroque Revival , also known as Neo-Baroque (or Second Empire architecture in France and Wilhelminism in Germany),
24-512: A medical degree there, the first medical degree awarded to a Chinese person in San Francisco. The building was used for two more hospitals, including the California General Hospital in 1904. In August 1903, heiress Edith Irene Wolfskill, the daughter of John Wolfskill, had been a patient of California General Hospital and she escaped out a window before they could perform a lobotomy . The building may have been again used as
32-405: Is said to have based it on a French lakeside chateau whose plans he bought. Clarke, who came to San Francisco from Ireland as a cabin boy in 1850, had amassed a fortune of some $ 200,000 by dubious means while working for the police department from 1856 to 1887, for much of that time as clerk to the chief of police and later as the department's legal advisor. He bought the lot in 1890 and completed
40-623: The city and his creditors and was repeatedly jailed before dying at age 69. He lost the house in 1896 when he defaulted on the mortgage; his wife had declined to live in the then largely rural area, preferring to remain on Nob Hill . The mansion was purchased by the California Medical College as a teaching hospital. The building subsequently became the Maclean Hospital and Sanitarium , headed by Donald Maclean, which taught eclectic medicine ; in 1900 Law Keem earned
48-403: The house in 1892 for a reputed $ 100,000. Clarke engaged in an expensive legal feud with a neighbor over water sales, and soon after completing the house lost his fortune in a nationwide economic depression; in 1892 he declared himself insolvent after signing his real estate holdings over to his wife and a friend in an attempt to conceal them. He then brought a series of unsuccessful lawsuits against
56-635: The second half of the 19th century, and are integral to the Beaux-Arts architecture it engendered both in France and abroad. An ebullient sense of European imperialism encouraged an official architecture to reflect it in Britain and France , and in Germany and Italy the Baroque Revival expressed pride in the new power of the unified state. There are also number of post-modern buildings with
64-517: Was an architectural style of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The term is used to describe architecture and architectural sculptures which display important aspects of Baroque style, but are not of the original Baroque period. Elements of the Baroque architectural tradition were an essential part of the curriculum of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the pre-eminent school of architecture in
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