Craftsmen restore
Encina’s glory
BY LISA TREI
Crawling around in the
dark inside the massive wooden fireplace in Encina
South/Central, Bob Gillispie felt more like a spelunker
than a carpenter on the job. He had just wriggled through
a small vent at the top of the 18-foot-tall fireplace to
find out how the structure was built so that carpenters
could restore it while causing as little damage as
possible.
"It was like a cave
adventure," Gillispie says. "We shined our
flashlights and [found] there were scaffolds
inside."
As Gillispie discovered
the secrets of the Port Orford cedar fireplace in the old
dining room, Michael Urge pondered how to restore the
black ash staircase in Encina East to its once-soaring
grandeur.
"It's very difficult
to use these old parts and make it structurally
sound," the veteran wooden stair builder says about
the 55-foot-tall structure. "Very difficult."
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Both Gillispie and Urge,
and many skilled carpenters, have spent months restoring
these historic features of Encina, parts of which are
reopening today as the new home of the Institute for
International Studies. The staircase has been rebuilt for
everyday use, but the fireplace, due to fire code
restrictions, has been restored for ornamental purposes
only.
Encina Hall, an imposing sandstone building on Serra
Street, first opened in 1891 as the young university's
undergraduate male residence. At the time, it was
considered one of the most modern dormitories in America.
Among other amenities Encina offered a new-fangled device
-- electrical lighting -- although many students
preferred candles because it was so unreliable.
Encina remained a heart of undergraduate life until
the 1950s, when growing complaints about deteriorating
living conditions prompted the university in 1956 to move
students out to make way for campus administrators. The
building housed offices until a 1972 fire gutted the top
floors of Encina East, causing more than $1 million in
damage. The wing was abandoned for the next quarter
century.
More than a year has passed since this once quiet,
gloomy wing started to thump and rattle back to life.
With support from the Stephen D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation,
$27 million has been spent restoring and seismically
reinforcing this Stanford landmark. The reopening of
Encina East and parts of South/Central marks another step
in the university's ongoing strategy to save its most
important historic structures -- from Memorial Church to
the museum -- while ensuring the old buildings meet the
demands of their modern-day occupants.
"We want to continue the legacy" of the
founders, says Ruth Todd, assistant university architect.
"The university was built with quality. So many of
the character-defining elements of the East wing were
left, and we wanted to make sure these were
preserved."
To carry out both projects, the university searched
for skilled craftspeople. Cahill Contractors Inc., the
lead contractor for Encina, hired Gillispie's employer,
Mission Bell Manufacturing Co. of Morgan Hill, to do the
general wood work, including restoration of the windows,
wainscoting and the fireplace. Mission Bell in turn found
Urge, one of a handful of people in the Bay Area who
specializes in custom wooden staircases.
Jeff Dachauer, Cahill's superintendent, worked closely
with Urge and Gillispie on both projects. He also has
helped to restore historic sandstone buildings 40 and 50
in the Quad and Geology Corner. "You do stuff in
these buildings that you never do in new ones," he
says. "You don't know what you're getting into when
you start tearing things apart and you have to make
decisions on the spot. It's a big challenge having to
work the old and new together."
Such projects have brought a range of artisans to
campus, including stonemasons, glassblowers and wrought
iron workers. Urge, a stair builder for 40 years, started
learning his trade when he was 12 years old from his
father, who owned a shop called Santa Rosa Cabinet Works.
But even with so much experience behind him, Urge says
the Encina staircase taught him new lessons.
"You could go to any school for 20 years and you
would never get the experience you got on this stair in
six months," he says. "It's a one-of-a-kind
project. Where are we ever again going to get a stair
like that, built in 1891, on the West Coast? It just
won't happen."
When Urge first looked at the open staircase, he saw a
sagging structure in danger of collapse. His job was to
make it safe without changing it visually, and reuse as
much of the original wood as possible to maintain its
historic character and value.
"Ruth Todd, she was very insistent on using every
piece of old material and if it wasn't usable, to patch
it," Urge says. About one-third of the original
staircase was saved. University researchers say it was
probably tooled on the East Coast and shipped in pieces
to campus and assembled.
The restoration project faced obstacles from the
start. Tests from the Forestry Department at the
University of California-Berkeley revealed that the stair
was made from black ash, a wood that Urge says is never
used in this part of the country. After several aborted
searches, a supplier with matching wood was found in
Wisconsin, where the original wood was logged. Urge says
he doesn't know why black ash, which wasn't used
elsewhere on campus, was chosen for the staircase.
"You have to look at it like this," he says
matter-of-factly. "Maybe Leland Stanford at the time
got a helluva deal on the wood, or he worked out a deal
with the railroad that shipped all this material from the
mills. Who knows?"
As the old staircase was taken apart, Urge discovered
that it would have failed eventually because it was too
heavy. To resolve this, specially manufactured steel
parts were placed beneath the steps and anchored to the
walls. Urge says that incorporating the steel and seismic
bracing without changing the stair's character was
difficult. "The hardest thing was using the old
[wooden] parts and making them fit together with the
steel," he says. "There was only so much room
to work with."
Beyond such hidden modifications, Urge says, he did
not work much differently from the original craftsmen.
"Folks already had this worked out 100 years
ago," he says. "The way the handrail was
attached to the posts was superb. These were intelligent
folks."
Urge made and restored the staircase's wooden parts in
his own workshop in San Francisco before bringing them to
campus for assembly starting last April. The addition of
a fifth floor to Encina, the former attic, demanded
additional parts, including new stair posts. A carpenter
was brought in from Seattle to do fine hand carving for
parts that could not be machine-tooled.
The end result is what Todd says the Planning Office
envisioned. Many of the original parts, which are
slightly battered or have names carved into them, add a
touch of history. Today, the honey-colored staircase is
an open, elegant structure, a piece of art that Urge
guarantees will last another hundred years.
Similar to Urge's initial reaction to the staircase,
Gillispie's first impression of the dark green fireplace
was less than memorable. "It just looked like a
wall," he says. "You couldn't see the
craftsmanship."
Nevertheless, the Mission Bell carpenters set about
dismantling the 18-feet-tall, 16-feet-wide and
6-feet-deep fireplace without the aid of original
blueprints. Not knowing how it was built, carpenters
started taking off the trim and discovered two small
vents at the top. After crawling through one to get
inside, Gillispie discovered that the upper panels of the
fireplace were held in place by wooden blocks that could
be turned to release them. Working from inside, the
carpenters found it possible to take apart the fireplace
in sections, including one piece 16 feet wide and 8 feet
tall that weighed about 800 pounds. The skill of the
original craftsmen impressed Gillispie, a carpenter for
12 years.
"It's probably the single most exciting thing
I've done in my career," he says with a smile.
Painters stripped the pieces, revealing the
fireplace's dark golden wood and detailed carving.
"Then we started putting it back together again, and
it connected right back to the original trimwork,"
Gillispie says. "It went together like a
dream."
While working inside the fireplace, Gillispie and
co-worker Keith Peters discovered that the two original
craftsmen had left something behind.
"They signed it at the bottom when they started
it in December 1890, and at the top when they finished it
in February 1891," he says. "It took them three
months to build it, and took us three days to take it all
down."
Before the fireplace was closed up, Gillispie and
Peters added their names next to the carefully scripted
initials MMT and JER. No further record of the two men
exists. "It was kind of eerie being in there in the
dark," Gillispie says. "There we were, working
on the same thing two other men did a hundred years
ago." SR
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