"Under Miss Nace's supervision and management,
Piedmont Canyon became beautiful Piedmont Park"
Overland Monthly 1915-06: Vol 65 Iss 6, p 525 - 528:
Florence M. Nace and Her Work
By Elma Kendall Conklin
Some women are rarely endowed. In addition to all the home-making, womanly qualities that are so appealing, they possess that peculiar mentality that goes toward the making of a financier. Where one painstaking man fails in business, another less painstaking perhaps succeeds, because he has in-definable something in him that gives the turn and twist necessary to the capture of that elusive god, success.
Indefinable as this something is, it has a distinct commercial value. Some men and a few women possess it.
When a woman does posses it, she is an enigma to her own sex, and usually a solver of enigmas for the opposite sex.
Such a woman is Florence M. Nace, who has been in the employ of the Realty Syndicate for twenty years. She has no office, no office hours. Her business time is unlimited, for so much does she enjoy her work that it overlaps her play time. Recreation is just another name for it, and the "twain is verily one." She has no title. Auditor nor adjuster does not fit. Perhaps it were better to call her Efficiency Expert—a comparatively new title in the business world for those upon whose desks, like Miss Nace's, are laid problems to be solved, difficulties to be overcome, leakages to be stopped.
Hers is a mind well adapted to such work, for she frankly admits that a project without obstacles has no fascination for her. With limited means and unlimited thought and originality she likes to turn out something better than another turns out working the other way 'round. Almost any one can get results by making sufficient expenditure, but it takes a good business mind to get the same results with half the output.
Under Miss Nace's supervision and management, Piedmont Canyon became beautiful Piedmont Park, with its rock bordered nooks, its uniquely housed springs, its children's play-ground, its art gallery and its amphitheater. This last was a rubbish heap when Miss Nace discovered its acoustic properties. She asked permission to turn it into an outdoor theatre. Men smiled at her project, but she had the dump heap and basin dynamited out, and here around the eucalypti trunks was built a beautiful rustic theatre to seat three thousand people. When it was finished and in demand for outdoor entertainments, the men still smiled, but this time with Miss Nace, not at her.
Since 1907 she has successfully managed the Key Route Inn properties, including the hotel and Arcade, with its numerous offices and stores. The same tenants have occupied these places of business during her entire eight years' management. When Miss Nace took charge of this property, the back rooms of the hotel overlooked an unsightly lot, which had been made the catch-all for all sorts of debris. This "efficiency expert" wanted income for her hotel. Why have any back rooms, she reasoned, when by parking the vacant lot they could all be made front rooms? It was done almost overnight. Full grown hedges and palms were planted, lawn turf set in and a children's playground made. When President Taft visited Oakland a few years ago, he was received by the officials of the city on this erstwhile rubbish heap, now a place beautiful.
Miss Nace believes with Browning:
"If you get simple beauty, and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents,"
for in the aesthetic aside from her personal love of it, she realizes a wonderful business asset and makes others realize it too when she changes a rubbish heap into a rustic theatre that brings in good money, and back rooms into front ones, overlooking a spot beautiful enough for the reception of the head of the nation. It is this characteristic of evolving something useful and beautiful out of the material at hand that gives to all her enterprises a different touch; and the fact that the thing is different always makes it welcome in this conventional world.
One of Miss Nace's comparatively late undertakings was a large rock quarry in the Berkeley hills which has been a failure for years, although the rock was the best to be found around the bay region. Where lay the trouble? This efficient expert was more than anxious to take charge and investigate. She found that the big force of men employed was consuming all the profits. In place of steam power, necessitating the employment of an engineer, she installed an electric power. Where rock had formerly been loaded on to tramways by hand, it was now blasted and loaded into gravel cars by machinery. Several tunnels, needed to facilitate work, were put in, and in a short time the quarry was on a paying basis. The great scenic Skyline Boulevard beginning at Richmond, skirting the Contra Costa hills, and extending on to Mt. Hamilton, will be made of the hard blue rock from this quarry.
The woman who has accomplished all this feels compensated if she carries her undertakings to a successful finish. She is never visionary. She never attempts a thing until she has thought it out and can see her way to the end—as she says: "Not unless I can get my arms around it and encompass it." The biggest armful she has had yet is her new enterprise, the Hotel Claremont.
As all California knows, or has known and perhaps forgotten, this place was built for a Hotel de Luxe. When the University acquired more land and brought the hotel property within the mile limit liquor law, the idea of a millionaire's hotel was abandoned; for whoever heard of moneyed men dining without wining? So for nine years this spacious building, with its large sunny rooms and porches overlooking the green hills and the bay, has stood a silent though emphatic confederate of John Barley-corn.
But along comes Miss Nace. She sees in it a splendid new problem to solve. The fact that no man would attempt it was itself an incentive. With "simple beauty" as her keynote, she planned a home place for that large class of cultured, refined humanity whose one exception perhaps from financial worry is the income tax, and whose thirst can be gratified by the drink the Lord provided for man and beast.
Back of the grove looms a song-caressed grove of eucalypti in that beautiful, soft, bluey-green dress that Mother Nature made for them and them alone. In this grove Miss Nace found an inspiration-not for a poem, but for something more useful.
Always a strong advocate of home industry, she saw in these trees a means to give employment to the workmen of her own State, and at the same time supply her hotel with furniture, simple in line and beautiful in tone. Why send money to Grand Rapids in this time of financial stress, when men, mills and material were available here?
Up in the hills the Realty Syndicate had a mill, and on hand was a goodly supply of eucalyptus lumber. Without waste of time, for Miss Nace acts quickly, it was loaded onto auto trucks and sent to a nearby factory, where everything was set humming to fill her big order. She has watched her furniture grow. She has seen her lumber cut, planed, ripped, sanded and glued. She has learned to recognize in unfamiliar bits of wood, familiar portions of everyday furniture; over there is a pile of smooth, velvety spindles that have just come through the sanding machine; beside them is another pile. These are cross-pieces with holes punched through them; ready to receive the same velvety spindles and to be made into the headboards and footboards of simple, quaint bed-steads. Next to these are chair backs that went into a contrivance as bits of straight wood and came out fascinatingly curved, ready for a human back to snuggle against.
In another portion of this factory all the quilts and mattresses, both wire and floss, needed in this big hostelry in the Berkeley hills, have been made. Chairs, tables, dressers, bedsteads, quilts and mattresses! Why, indeed, should this lover of home industry send to Grand Rapids?
Despite her public work, Miss Nace is not a hotel woman, but lives at home, and is a great home lover. She has built several houses and reconstructed many in artistic fashion for friends, merely as pastime. Like most people who achieve, Miss Nace likes solitude and loves the great out of doors.
Her first home was built in the interesting section on Ocean Beach where street cars formed the nucleus for unusual abodes; and where people who were doing things in literature and art were welcomed. Her present home is not in crowded mart, but on the Piedmont hills, and still another is her lodge near the eucalyptus lumber plant, and this is her joy.
Built entirely of eucalyptus logs, it it sits upon the crest of the Contra Costa hills, and commands a view of earth, sea and sky. Richmond, to the north; Oakland, San Francisco and the ocean to the west; innumerable hills and valleys to the south, and still more to the east. From early morning far into the waning day the song of the lark and the plaintive song of the quail are heard, and wild flowers of every description nod a welcome to the one who sees.
In this ideal hill home, Miss Nace solves many business problems and crystallizes many of her impressions into working plans. She might be able to tell you how to capture the "elusive god," but if she couldn't, a study of her would give you an insight into the process.
Wander into the Piedmont Art Gallery some day, and there you will find a portrait of this interesting woman by Richard E. Partington. Study it, and you will see that she possesses that dignity of character so essential to a woman in public life; you will see also that her whole personality is indicative of energy and determination; not the ironclad determination that tramples the beautiful flowers by the roadside in order to garner the grain in the field beyond; but a determination to take hold of whatever is at hand and make out of it the very best that can be made, conserving the flowers while she garners the grain.
Miss Nace has a happy way of forgetting those unimportant things termed failures. While her eye is still on the goal she treads them under foot, making of them just what they are—a stairway in the great construction.
Oakland Tribune - Sat - April 11, 1908:
Miss Florence Nace has successfully developed a most unique department of women's work, and under her guiding hand Pledmont Park in the foothills has taken on many new and attractive features-new forms of love-liness.
Under her direction the Art Gallery has been built-the picturesque
tea house has been constructed, and now a unique out-of-door theater is being planned.
Florence May Nace, was born in March 1865 in Maryland to John Alfred Nace and Sarah Rebecca Scarff, resided in Oakland, California and passed away on April 26, 1945, in San Francisco.
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