The Long Arms of Zayda Zabriskie

Zayda Zabriskie, 1914

It’s surprising to see Romer Shawhan’s name listed as one of the ushers at Zayda’s first wedding in 1911. She would marry and divorce thrice before they took their own vows 25 years later in the marriage chapel of New York City’s Municipal Building, a wedding-cake structure in lower Manhattan.

And that was just 11 days after she secured a divorce from husband #3, in Reno.

Later on, Romer said they were childhood sweethearts. So you have to wonder what happened during the years between.

It reminds me of Rhett Butler’s line in Gone with the Wind: “I can’t go all my life waiting to catch you between husbands.”

After marrying in 1936, Romer and Zayda were together until her death two decades later.

The pair probably met in the Bay Area where both grew up. His father left the family a few years after Romer was born in 1888. His mother, Ada Romer Shawhan, a painter and illustrator, worked out of a studio on Sacramento Street in San Francisco. And his beautiful, ethereal sister, Violet, pursued a career as a modern dancer.

Romer attended Lick-Wilmerding High School and graduated with technical and college preparatory degrees. At age 17, he submitted a plan to redesign the city’s Dolores Park, on the western edge of the Mission District. Romer’s design clearly was inspired by the work of the landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.  The city fathers chose it but before anything could be done, the earthquake happened.

Ada, Romer, and Violet all were bold, creative, and enterprising.

In 1910 Romer went to New York City to study architecture at Columbia University. Zayda Zabriskie already lived there with her parents. She attended Brearley and Miss Porter’s before heading off to Bryn Mawr.

Her father, Christian Brevoort Zabriskie, made his fortune as vice president and general manager of the Pacific Coast Borax Company. Zabriskie Point in Death Valley is named for him. The company’s 20-mule teams hauled the borax from the mines to the nearest railroad in Mojave, California.

Zayda stayed just one year at Bryn Mawr before marrying Frank Buck, heir to a California fruit company, who inherited great wealth and invested it well. The ceremony took place in New York at the Little Church Around the Corner on 29^th Street.

Zayda Zabriskie Buck in her wedding gown,
pictured in the New York Sun, April 30, 1911

After the wedding, and after Zayda had been presented in her wedding gown at the Court of St. James, the couple moved to the West Coast where their four children were born.

Meanwhile, Romer studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Returning home, his projects included various office buildings around the country.

The U.S. entered World War I in April 1917. In August, Romer enlisted in the Air Service and became a lieutenant and fighter pilot. He served as Assistant Operations Officer on the staff of General William Mitchell, Chief of Air Service in the American First Army. Romer’s fellow pilots included Eddie Rickenbacker and Theodore Roosevelt’s son, Quentin, who was killed during a dogfight in the Second Battle of the Marne.

Romer received the Pershing Army Citation, the Croix de Guerre, and the Distinguished Service Medal.

Romer Shawhan, circa 1917

Through the 1920s, he worked with several prestigious architectural firms, living in Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Indianapolis. Building materials especially interested him. He published articles about slate, terra cotta, and marble.

Out in California, Zayda stuck with Mr. Buck (who later served in the U.S. House of Representatives as a New Deal Democrat) until the mid-1920s. Then they divorced and she married Scott Springer Hendricks, who also ran for the House (as a Republican) but lost.

In 1927, Zayda and Scott testified on behalf of a friend in a custody case before the New York State Supreme Court. The cast of characters included a deceitful father, an adulterous mother, a blind aunt who stated the child always looked dirty, a maternal grandmother whose Garden City home was said to lack sufficient yard space, and a governess who was ill or told to be ill whenever a dashing real estate developer came around . . .  largely played out against the backdrop of dozens of dinner parties in San Mateo where liquor flowed freely.

Zayda displayed some wit on the stand but she definitely stayed with her story.

Sometime in the early 1930s, Zayda and Scott divorced, and she married a lawyer named Mark Daniels. A few years later, she divorced Daniels in Nevada and within two weeks married Romer.

He was working for the Federal Government so they lived in Washington. During World War II, he served four years as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S.A.F. The man must have adored flying.

After the war, they bought a house in Mount Vernon, N.Y., where family antiques, art, and relics were arranged throughout the spacious rooms. Subsequently, Romer helped found the Marble Institute of America. This organization brought together quarriers, wholesalers, importers, finishers, and contractors to create standards for quality and craftsmanship of marble.

After Zayda died in 1956, Romer stayed in the house with his sister Violet. They lived out their days painting and reading. Romer died in 1970 and is buried with Zayda at the Lone Mountain Cemetery in Carson City, Nevada, surrounded by Zabriskies.

Shawhan House, Mt. Vernon, N.Y.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/the-long-arms-of-zayda-zabriskie.html 

See also April 13, 2016 + December 29, 2015 posts.

Miss Violet Romer

Violet Romer, 1910

It made complete sense that they lived in a quintessential American house: an elegant Foursquare with generous bay windows that overlooked the sidewalks lined with elm trees.  

The elderly brother and sister at 108 Forster Avenue filled their home with art, antiques, and such memorabilia as a broken plate pulled from the rubble of the San Francisco Earthquake.

While we trudged to school through sunshine and snowstorms, Violet and Romer Shawhan moved about in rooms hung with the portraits of ancestors. A few of these men had accumulated tremendous wealth before and during the Gilded Age.

Their paternal grandfather, descended from a Kentucky family whose money came from whiskey distilleries, moved West after the Civil War and invested in mining, streetcars, and stocks.

John E. Shawhan had everyone living in grand style at the Palace Hotel until the State of Virginia defaulted on its “consols” (consolidated annuities). Then he became known for “Shawhan’s Folly” – the California Street property where he built a stable to house his collection of splendid horses and carriages.

The horses drank from marble troughs and occupied stalls carved of birds-eye maple. In a private room at the stable, Mrs. Shawhan entertained friends and reporters. She showed off her gold-tipped harnesses and whips.

After the bankruptcy, the Shawhans decamped to Nevada where the missus filed for divorce. But their son James made a bit of a recovery when he married Ada Romer, a free-spirited painter whose father had arrived in California during the Gold Rush.

Ada’s father, John Lyons Romer, made his fortune in real estate and as a founding director of the San Francisco & North Pacific Railroad Company and vice president of the Sausalito Land & Ferry Company. Her portrait of him won a silver medal at the 1909 Alaska Yukon Exhibition in Seattle.

Sometime around 1890, Ada’s husband took off and left her with their two children, Violet and Romer. She turned to art full-time, set up the Shawhan Studio, and earned money illustrating books and painting society portraits. She became well-known in California and often was written up in the San Francisco Call, where a woman reporter followed the art scene closely.

It’s evident that Ada nurtured her children, who developed confidence and worldliness. In 1896 Violet wrote to her grandfather Romer, who was visiting Colorado:

I think we are going to San Francisco and I am glad for I am just getting so I hate the sight of Los Angeles, business is so poor here I don’t know how it is. I guess you have lots to tell about Denver. I guess it is a nice city. Of coarse those big citys all are.

Violet Romer's letter to her grandfather, "Parmer," 1896

Within several years, Violet was dancing her heart out. She never took formal lessons or studied classical ballet. Like Isadora Duncan, Violet danced interpretively and free form, eschewing ballerina costumes. Isadora, also raised by an artistic single mother in the Bay Area, had long gone to France by 1904 when Violet performed as a hamadryad in a redwood forest grove for members of The Bohemian Club.

Violet’s career really took off when The Papyrus Club, a San Francisco woman’s group, decided to sponsor her. She danced at the city’s Columbia Theatre accompanied by a 6o-piece orchestra and returned a week later by popular demand. Soon after, Ada took Violet to London and Paris where the young dancer’s “inspirational” performances drew acclaim.  

That same year, Violet caught the eye of an impresario named Marc Klaw who co-controlled the Theatrical Syndicate, which monopolized theater bookings nationwide during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. By 1910, the powerful syndicate was losing its influence to the Schubert Brothers of New York, but Klaw and a former drama critic, Harrison Grey Fiske, were producing the Arabian play Kismet. They cast Violet as “the Egyptian Girl.”


Kismet ran for two years on Broadway and made Violet’s reputation. She stayed in New York to star “sans hosiery” in Joseph and His Brethren, a pageant by a British playwright named Louis N. Parker. A critic wrote: 

It may shock a number of persons in the present generation to see graphically depicted on the stage the disreputable bunch of crooks from which sprung the whole Jewish race of today, but they will find comfort in the immaculate qualities of the Joseph of Mr. Parker’s play.

Violet turned 30 years old in 1916. The following year she returned to California, moved in with her mother and taught dance at a studio into the early 1920s. Thereafter she dropped her stage name and became Violet Shawhan. The two women lived together until Ada died in 1947, with Violet working in a library. 

Romer, who married in 1936, had bought the Foursquare in Mount Vernon, N.Y. just before World War II. His sister crossed the continent for the last time to live with him and his wife.

1910

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/04/violets-story.html

See also December 29, 2015 + January 12, January 16 + April 27, 2016 posts.

Turn the Hourglass

Forster Avenue, Mt. Vernon, N.Y.

It’s the 1960s and we live in a house styled after an Elizabethan cottage, built in 1917. Ivy creeps up the stone chimney and twirls around an iron lantern at the front door. 

The house sat on a corner lot. The street it faced, which inclined slightly toward the next block, felt dim and mysterious yet wide and bright. A straight, quiet street with huge elms arching overhead and a slate sidewalk of many hues, crippled in places where the tree roots had pushed through.

The sidewalk lilted up the sunny side of the street and darkly down the other, shaded in part by a granite precipice on which two homes were perched. It extended expectantly in front of a double lot.

It felt like an important street. To begin with, it was perfectly composed. It had the habit of seeming to rise up before you, with the houses and landscape flowing in all directions. Sometimes an imaginary mist floated around.

The massing of slate, stone, and greenery beneath tall trees was such a strong symphony that you invariably thought you heard a clap of thunder or the first chord in the history of the world when you came upon it.

I’m not making this up. This is how it was.  

We kids thought the street belonged to us, but it went back 3/4 of a century. Even during the late 1950s, gas sconces remained in a few of the homes.

So it was that Violet Romer – gorgeous flapper & actress, acclaimed interpretive dancer –

& her brother Romer Shawhan – an architect who flew at St. Mihiel with the Lafayette Escadrille and married the heiress to Pacific Coast Borax, for whose father Zabriskie Point was named –

would interrupt our ball game when their 1938 “Woodie” station wagon rounded the corner and rolled halfway up the block, turning into the driveway of their white frame house.

Did we step back impatiently when they drove by, eager to resume our play? Or were we blown to the curb in space and time?

Of course none of us children had any idea about the vivid places that Violet and Romer had occupied.

I’m always chasing that street into the past.

Drawing by Claudia Keenan
http://www.throughthehourglass.com/

See also April 13 + 27, 2016 posts.