Presented here are three, small articles written in the spring of 1966 that reacquainted the people of San Diego to the Villa Montezuma as well as informed them of what the current situation was concerning this great house during the mid-sixties.
The above image from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), 1964.
The author Lew Scarr, a long-time reporter for the San Diego Union, purported to have no prior knowledge of the Villa Montezuma and encountered the mansion quite by accident. Whether this is a literary device or the actual truth did not take away from the purpose of these articles – to re-introduce the Villa Montezuma to San Diego.
The article's format has been slightly changed from the original for ease of readability.
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From The San Diego Union, February 13, 1966
Lew Scarr
Houses are like people. They don't have to be pretty to be attractive. And like people, if hey live long enough they've got character no matter how they started out. Take the house at 20th and K.
This house, by almost any standard, is not a pretty house. I'm sure that even when it was a young house, it wasn't pretty. But now it is old and it is interesting. As they say about potato chips — provocative.
The day I stopped it was cloudy over the house on K Street. And it is that kind house —as if it is always cloudy there. But that is ridiculous right in the middle of San Diego. Still . . .
The house is two stories and a cupola. It is white, or it was. The white has turned to gray and I don't mean anything bad about that. The change in color is more of a patina, which more and more is being considered desirable. But not on old cars. Old cars—classic cars—must shine brighter than new ones. I don't know why, but that's the rule.
The House on K Street has five turrets. One is onion-shaped like something from old Russia. The others are sharp cones like something from Normandy.
On top of the onion-shaped turret is a black, iron pole, four feet tall, and clinging to the pole is a black, metal dragon with stubby, scalloped wings.
On top of the biggest cone turret is a pole five feet tall. It has various knobs and out-croppings on it and at the top, a spray of four metal flowers which could be lilies of the valley. Only two flowers remain. The others are just stems.
Also on this pole is a metal flag to tell anyone who wonders which way the wind is blowing — from the west and smartly.
Right in the middle of the spine of the roof is a red brick chimney with two tall, buff-colored pots on top to carry the smoke away. Back farther another one, and back still farther, another.
Among the chimneys is the tallest pole of all — 25 feet, I'd say — and that is the TV antenna.
The house has wooden sides, laid on in perfectly rounded sculptures like the scales of a fish.
The windows on the east side are stained glass with most of the color gone now. If you look closely you can see they once were mostly roses and greens and purples. Now they are the color of slate.
Just to the left of the biggest stained glass window is something I've never seen on a house before. It is a bas relief of a bearded man wearing the wrap-around cloth hat of the desert. His face is tilted slightly upward and underneath is inscribed "Asia."
This art work, two feet in diameter, has not been hung there. It was build in and has been there from the start.
Atop each gable on the House on K Street are gargoyles, sitting on their curled tails. Their mouths are open and they have their arrow-shaped tongues stuck out at all the cars and the people who pass.
Around the house is a low cement wall and on top of the wall is a low black , iron fence, made by the same man who did the gargoyles and the dragon on the roof, no doubt.
Who lives in the House on K Street? A lady. She has lived there a long time.
I climbed the wooden steps and rang the doorbell, which is the kind you turn stiffly, but I got no answer. A neighbor said she never comes to the door.
The man in the Square Deli Market across the street said he hasn't seen the lady in more than a year. He said he thinks she is trading at another market now.
He said that is her privilege, and he wasn't angry or anything. He said that she likes to keep to herself and I can understand that.
Maybe I've told too much already.
***
From The San Diego Union, February 18, 1966
Lew Scarr
On the same day that I told you about the house at 20th and K streets, a neighbor knocked at my door and asked me if I really wanted to know about it.
Of course I did, so he invited me over to his living room, sat me in a leather chair and told me quite a little about it. He and his wife know about the House on K Street because they would like to buy it. They want to have the house moved to Old Town where they would refurbish it in the style to which it once was accustomed.
And, while the exterior of the house has been taken advantage of by the elements, the interior is much the same as when Jesse Shepard built it.
Jesse Shepard was a pianist of renown and talent who built his house on the gently sloping hillside of 20th and K in 1887. It is funny about the passage of time. It can reduce a sloping hillside to a flat intersection just by adding houses and concrete pavements.
Anyway, Jesse Shepard built (actually friends built it by subscription) his house on the hillside and furnished it in much the same style as the Hotel Del Coronado, which was built about the same time. He called his house Villa Montezuma.
"Everything," a writer then wrote, "has the appearance of riches, art and love for the beautiful, the dark shades here modify and subdue the light one there — everything is strictly in keeping with artistic intention, the furniture being selected with a special view to the arrangements and designs o floor and ceiling."
In the drawing room there was a splendid bay-window, 18 feet deep, and there still is. The upper sashes contained life-size heads, in art glass, of Shakespeare, Goethe and Corneille, and they are still there.
In the music room art windows again were "most wonderfully life-like. . . .In the first moments of day, the rays of the rising sun illumine a life-size portrait of Sappho, the Greek poet. Reclining on a couch an with a wrap thrown loosely about her form, she sits idly picking a lyre. Beside her are two cupids, who accompany Sappho's playing with flutes. . .
"Reluctantly the eye leaves the marvelous figures constituting the windows, and looks about to observe the next surprise. Art, pure and simple is found in everything. No two chairs in the room — or in the building, in fact — are alike in either shape or hue."
There are five fireplaces in the house, rising from floor to ceiling. Each is framed in hand-carved wood. And stained glass is everywhere:
One of the finest art glass windows in the villa is that of St. Cecilia," the writer wrote, "situated so as to catch the last rays of the setting sun. . . . Indeed, one could almost imagine that this beautiful window possesses the power of the 'Vocal Memnon' at Thebes, which is reputed to have awed the entranced spectator by its production of sweet music."
And so it goes. Not many callers are allowed in Villa Montezuma these days. My neighbors were admitted one day after the owner, Mrs. Amelia Jaeger, told them they seemed like nice people.
Vandals have meant to do harm to the old house. Some have tried to throw rocks through the stained glass windows. There is as pane of clear plate glass in front of every stained panel and it is difficult to throw a rock through this and the art window, but some people have managed.
Some have come right inside the house uninvited. Mrs. Jaeger has managed to shoo them away.
There have been may offers for the house. Some have come fro out-of-town bidders who apparently want to dismantle the interior art and take it away. Some want to raze the house and build something else there.
My neighbors want to preserve everything. They want to move the house away gently and re-establish it in Old Town.
"We want to bring it back to what it was," they said. "We want to live in it and work slowly. It may take us the rest of our lives."
I can't help but hope they get what they want, even if it means losing good neighbors.
***
From The San Diego Union, April 21, 1966
Lew Scarr
I called on Mrs. Amelia Jaeger in her magnificent house at 20th and K. She showed me around and it is all they say it is, the finest example of period-living in the city.
But she isn’t always so hospitable and she showed my why. In the music room, in an alcove, are three smooth rocks the size of potatoes. They lie where they fell on a dusty table. They came through the windows and the broken panes of glass lie where they fell, too.
“I leave them there on purpose,” the doughty 80-year-old widow of Karl Jaeger said. “The people who threw those rocks through my window want me out. They want to get the house for nothing and charge admission. I leave those rocks there to remind me that I’ll never get out on their say-so.
“But they’re not all hoodlums. I’ve met some wonderful people in San Diego. We used to entertain a lot. I don’t any more. I don’t even clean the house. There is dust everywhere. See?
“When the doorbell rings, I look out the side curtain.” Mrs. Jaeger walked to her side curtain and peered through it as if someone were ringing the bell. “If I like their looks I let then in.”
Mrs. Jaeger lives alone in her big, old house. She spends most of her time in a back bedroom where she has a chair and a lamp that stands on the floor. On a glass-topped table beside the lamp and chair is a stack of Reader’s Digests and a sack of lemon drops.
On another table is a stack of 78 r.p.m. records including “In the Valley of Sunshine and Roses” sung by Henry Burr (Tenor) with bird voices by Sybil Sanderson. On top of the records is a box imprinted “Mother.” The wooden box has no significance. She bought it because it was the right size to hold her bills.
“One night here in my bedroom,” Mrs. Jaeger said, “I woke up and there were two men standing by my bed. I screamed and they ran out. I called the police, but the officer couldn’t find anyone. I said, what’ll I do if they come back? He said get a gun. So I did, a 38-caliber Smith and Wesson.”
She opened a drawer in the bureau by her bed and there it was, a brute of a weapon which she said she used once.
“Two other men came I the yard one day and I told them to get out. I told them I would shoot if they didn’t, but they just laughed. I went and got my gun and fired a shot at their feet. I never saw them again. Do you have a cigarette?
Mrs. Jaeger never smoked before Mr. Jaeger, a civil engineer, died in 1956. “Karl always smoked English Ovals. I never smoke but I thought if I smoked English Ovals it would be like having Karl around a little. You can’t find English Ovals everywhere, but Mr. Gaubil at the store has ordered some for me.”
Mrs. Jaeger doesn’t leave her house much. Last year she visited her daughter in Burlingame and fell down and hurt her leg. “I was lying in the hospital up there and I saw a plane flying by and it occurred to me that I might be going to San Diego. I said why don’t I go home, too, so I did.
“Now I go downtown about once a week and over to the store, but there are so many things to do around the house. Feed the cats. Some kid comes along and sics his dog on my cats. A great big one. That dog caught my yellow cat – I call him Big Yellow – and bit his leg.
“Some people want to by the house and move it. I think the house belongs where it is. That’s where it was built. If the right person came along with the right price would I sell? I don’t know.
“I love my house. The question is, would I be happy in another house? I just don’t know. I’ve lived in a lot of houses in my lifetime, but I’m old now. I’m not so sure I could move again.”
***
Taken together these pieces presage the unfortunate events surrounding Mrs. Jaeger and the ultimate disposition of the Villa Montezuma. The fate of Amelia Jaeger, the couple that wanted to purchase the Villa to save it, and the Villa Montezuma itself were all played out a few short years after the publication of these articles
But that is a story (or blog post) for another day.
To find out more about the early days of the Villa Montezuma, please see my work on newspaper accounts of the Villa Montezuma at:
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