421 Fairmount is a house designed by Julia Morgan for c.1912 for Dr. Charles Henry Rowe (1875 – 1959) and his wife Elizabeth Griswold (Rowe) (1875 – 1961).
According to Karen McNeill:
He was a well-known physician. By the time she died in a freakish car accident at Hawthorne and Broadway in 1961, she was known as "the wife of", "the mother of", and "well-known socialite". Earlier in her life, though, she was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley (class of 1898), where she was captain of the women's basketball team. She and Rowe married in 1900, and at least into the teens, she was a pretty prolific and locally celebrated fiction writer. Her stories were published mostly in illustrated magazines like Overland Monthly. The Rowes lived in the house on Fairmount until Dr. Rowe died in 1959. Then Elizabeth moved to Piedmont. 1
Links and References
- discussion on Facebook
- Greater Oakland by Evarts Blake
