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Overview

A Queen Anne Style landmark, Miss Lake's School for Young Ladies operated for about six years. It was built by a mining millionaire, who was estranged from his family, to have his daughters live near to him in San Francisco. It has served many uses, but since 1980 has functioned as a well-preserved bed and breakfast,

Building History

The Miss Lake's School for Young Ladies was a day and boarding school for girls located in an ornate Queen Anne Style building in San Francisco's Western Addition. Comststock Lode silver baron, James Graham Fair (1831-1894), bankrolled the school to enable his daughters, Theresa Alice Fair Oelrichs (nicknamed "Tessie," 1871-1926) and Virginia Graham Fair Vanderbilt (nicknamed "Birdie," 1875-1935), to move from NV and resettle in San Francisco, and to provide employment for his mistress, Mary Lake, who served as the school's namesake and principal. Married in 1861 to Theresa Rooney, a boardinghouse keeper, Fair had four children with her. His relationship soured with Rooney after his repeated liaisons with other women, and she divorced him in 1883. His extramarital affairs soured his relationships with his children, and this school was his attempt to provide a stable environment for his daughters away from his ex-wife in San Francisco.

Initially, Fair's money paid for the Miss Lake's School to advertise itself aggressively, in newspapers up and down the Pacific Coast. An advertisementf for it appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on 12/11/1890 with the following text: "Boarding and day school for girls, 1534 Sutter street, corner Octavia, San Francisco, Cal. Admirable location, new and beautiful building, exceptionally strong faculty, superior equipment and comprehensive character." Seattle did not have an upper-class etiquette school at the time, and San Francisco was the center of culture and refinement on the West Coast.

Miss Lake's School for Young Ladies closed in 1896, two years after Fair's death, and amidst a prolonged financial depression that lingered in the US between 1893 and 1897. It was sold to a men's club for use as its clubhouse. Mary Lake left San Francisco, and his two surviving daughters and son, Charles Lewis Fair (d. 1902), shared in an astronomical $45 million trust bequeathed to them.

In 1980, after various uses, the building became the Queen Anne Hotel, a posh bed-and-breakfast.

Building Notes

The school occupied the northeast corner of Sutter and Octavia Streets, a lot, in 2016, measuring 9,453.13 square feet. It had a roughly rectangular foot print, its long axis running north-south. It covered half the block on Octavia between Sutter and Bush Streets.

The hotel and its land had an assessed value of $2,687,061 in 2016.

As many have noted, Miss Lake's ghost haunts rooms of the hotel.

Alteration

The candle snuffer roof over the corner tourelle was removed, perhaps due to earthquake damage.

PCAD id: 19939