Triumph and Trials at a Hillside Monument (part 1)
Father then son guided Sunset Mausoleum through its first four decades
This is part one of a two-part article delving into Sunset Mausoleum (today Golden Gate Mausoleum and Columbaria) during its first 50-plus years, under its founder, Arthur F. Edwards Sr., and then his son, Arthur F. Edwards Jr.
Seen from below in the 1920s, the hills of El Cerrito and Kensington, largely tree-less and sparsely populated, beckoned -- so much empty land, such spectacular views. By the start of the decade building commenced, the sedate, Tudor-styled Berkeley Country Club in the northern El Cerrito Hills, fine mansions and small subdivisions in unincorporated Kensington and the El Cerrito hills.
But how about something grander? Something like the Taj Mahal – only a Taj Mahal topped with neon and incandescent lights?
By 1927, Arthur Francois Edwards (1880-1950), who’d arrived in California only 20 years earlier as a journeyman marble worker who had never graduated from college, was completing the concrete foundation for a “massive above ground temple of entombment,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
An original rendering of the proposed mausoleum.
The price tag? $7 million, the paper reported that May, and the initial section of Sunset Mausoleum would provide 2,400 crypts. Edwards vowed “to give San Francisco bay region residents a memorial to the dead that will be comparable to permanent monuments of ancient civilization.”
Sunset Mausoleum Association was incorporated June 13, 1927, as a California nonprofit corporation. From the start it was nondenominational.
The San Francisco Chronicle published this photo of the mausoleum under construction on July 10, 1927.
Two years later, when the mausoleum was opened to serve “people of the Caucasian race,” the Chronicle praised the structure as a “community memorial that has been likened to Campo Santo in Italy, Taj Mahal in India, and other world-renowned edifices.”
Early photos show how the mausoleum, which was built behind Sunset View Cemetery, dominated the El Cerrito skyline – complete with an immense illuminated sign atop the building that could be seen from San Francisco.
The illuminated Sunset Mausoleum sign can be seen among the trees on the hill above the former dog racing track in El Cerrito. Photo El Cerrito Historical Society collection.
(Sunset Mausoleum and Sunset View Cemetery have always been separate institutions, sharing only the word “Sunset.”)
Today, Golden Gate Mausoleum and Columbaria – a 2022 name change – presents a quieter profile. A canopy of trees allows only broken views from the streets of El Cerrito of the 96,000-square-foot building, which occupies two and a half acres of the mausoleum’s nine-acre site.
But the story behind the mausoleum is worth pondering as it approaches its 100th year as an important community institution and landmark that remains too little known. Indeed, some of what is “known” about its history, as recounted in literature and online by the mausoleum itself, turns out to be untrue.
The mausoleum’s true history is dramatic enough without the need for mythologizing, from its sudden appearance on a hillside overlooking a small, mostly working-class town to its subsequent success.
The mausoleum soldiered on past challenges posed by the Great Depression and a world war, then financial woes, personal scandal, the threat of bankruptcy – followed by new ownership led by a now-legendary religious leader the Los Angeles Times called a “flamboyant and plain-speaking pastor and television preacher.”
It’s not surprising that the tale of Sunset Mausoleum that has come down to us blends truth with myth. The man who owned the mausoleum from 1950 to 1970, expanded its footprint, and promoted it widely, was a showman by avocation, an actor, co-author with his wife of a play about a zebra, and a sometime song-and-dance man.
Arthur Francois Edwards Jr. (1914-1994), who took over the mausoleum after the death of his father in 1950, was a fabulist in real life as well as on the stage – a character flaw that later destroyed his career and marriage.
The story of Edwards Sr., which is fabulous enough, got embellished by his son in the mid-1950s, as Edwards Jr. expanded both the mausoleum and the business.
Now his father was described as an architect, the architect of the mausoleum, and as a man who had traveled in Europe studying mausoleums before undertaking to build his own. The mausoleum website states that Edwards became a licensed architect in St. Louis, where indeed he lived around 1906, according to census records.
A portrait of Arthur F. Edwards Senior from a 1950s brochure for the mausoleum.
In fact, Edwards was not a licensed architect – none of the press coverage from the early days of the mausoleum ever identifies him as such, though he would clearly have boasted of the professional achievement in his many interviews with the press.
Instead, he was identified as “a journeyman marble worker” in his Chronicle obituary, and variously as the director of the California Builders Exchange, head of the Building Trades Employers Association, a leader of the Marble Contractors Association and owner of the American Marble Co. in San Francisco, “of which he was president for 43 years, and pioneered California’s marble industry,” the obituary says.
Edwards is not listed in the Pacific Coast Architecture Database, which attempts to track architectural and related professionals and their work on the West Coast.
Missouri’s Division of Professional Registration has no listing for Edwards as a licensed architect. There is also no record of his attending the St. Louis School of Fine Art, which was the city’s only architecture school at the time.
In 1940, Edwards Sr. told the census that his education ended at the eighth grade; a decade later he told the census he had left college before graduating. Yet he clearly styled himself an architect. That’s how at age 20 he described his profession to a different census taker in 1900, when he was living with his father in Hartford, Connecticut.
Census records in subsequent years identified Edwards’ profession as a marble contractor or marble merchant.
Edwards Sr. came from a middle class background. His father was a wholesale baker, according to census records, then a real estate agent. Edwards lived in St. Louis briefly before arriving in San Francisco in 1907.
In 1953, as Edwards Jr. prepared to expand the mausoleum, he spread another myth: that his dad had toured Europe to visit marble quarries for the stone for his new building.
“To search for the costly marble, granite and stained glass which will go into the new hall,” the paper wrote, “Edwards (Jr.) will shortly leave on a trip through Europe and Africa. During the trip he will retrace the route that Sunset’s founder, the late Arthur F. Edwards Sr., took over 25 years ago to buy materials for the original Cathedral Hall.”
Edwards Jr. and his wife Helen, who was lead author of the zebra play, may have made this trip but it’s not likely his dad did; Edwards Sr. would certainly have mentioned such an adventure to reporters during one of his many interviews in the 1920s and ’30s.
What is clear is that Edwards Sr. prospered in the marble business and won prominence in his industry and in society. (Though, unlike his son, he never became a fixture in the society columns.)
Born and raised in Hartford, Edwards came to California a year or two after the 1906 earthquake to find work rebuilding San Francisco.
In San Francisco, Edwards joined, or perhaps helped found American Marble Co. A 1956 Chronicle obituary for John Fabbris credits Fabbris as founder.
The firm provided marble to such San Francisco institutions as the Palace Hotel.
By 1939 Edwards Sr. was doing well enough to buy three properties in one of the city’s most attractive residential parks, Forest Hill, including 85 Sotelo Avenue, built a few years earlier, where he and his wife Ethel Grace raised their son. Ethel died in 1947.
As director of the Builders Exchange, Edwards Sr. often spoke before organizations, including on the topic “controlled inflation” in 1939 and 1940.
It’s not clear why a marble and building contractor would enter the mausoleum business. According to the Golden Gate Mortuary’s website, it was all about altruism:
“During his lifetime, he gained no personal profit from the mausoleum, and it may be said that the creation and building of Sunset Mausoleum was his contribution to the community in which it stands.”
Edwards certainly knew marble, which bathes the interior in a wide range of colors and patterns. A brochure lavishly illustrated with Rembrandt prints published by Edwards Jr. in the early 1950s, as he prepared to expand the mausoleum, describes the marble.
The walls were primarily of Roman travertine. The floors a “mosaic pattern of the most beautiful of imported marbles.” Other marbles included “Italian travertine embellished with French Levanto, Verde Antique and French Escallette.” The brochure bragged of the use of costly Italian Paonazzo marble.
In the brochure, Edwards Sr. is said to have financed the mausoleum out of his earnings in the marble business, bringing in no investors. Considering the cost of the venture, this seems unlikely.
It is clear that Edwards hired an architect: Wallace H. Hubbert, whose name can be seen on architectural renderings for the structure, and who wrote about it in a cover story for the November 1927 issue of the magazine Architect and Engineer.
Identifying it as “Sunset Mausoleum, Berkeley Hills” (most coverage placed the mausoleum in Berkeley, undoubtedly because Berkeley is more identifiable to out-of-towners than Kensington), Hubbert quoted H.L. Mencken on the virtues of mausoleums over cemeteries:
“Ground burial … is out of date and barbarous. Mausoleum entombment is modern, progressive and humanitarian.”
“You have the choice of just two things: one typifying death in the darkness, looking down, always down, into the grave; the other typifying light, death in sunshine and brightness, death in hope of resurrection.”
Hubbert, who worked in San Francisco and died in 1948, made a specialty of mausoleums, designing them for San Rafael, Oakland, Eureka, Santa Monica and Merced. Not all were built. Hubbert also designed churches, office buildings and homes. The Pacific Coast Architecture Database lists several of his buildings in Modesto.
In June 1927 Edwards described the future building’s look to the Chronicle as “Classical Italian Renaissance architecture.”
“Statues and works of art will adorn the corridors,” the Chronicle reported. “Space for 2400 crypts, including private burial chapels, is provided on the two terraces, Lawn and Sunset, now being built.”
“Marble from all parts of the world covers the floors, walls and many of the ceilings in Sunset Mausoleum,” the paper went on. “Reinforced concrete, bronze and glass are the only other permanent building materials used.”
Edwards may not have been the mausoleum’s architect, but he clearly played a major role in the design. Not only did he lay out the vision, choosing the site with its awesome views of the bay and determining the program for the architect to follow, but he focused as well on detailing – or lack thereof.
Hubbert’s renderings show intricate detailing both exterior and interior – decorative capitols, ornamental coffering, what appear to be carved wooden or perhaps hammered metal doors – all of which would have produced a pictorial, almost medieval feeling.
Instead what we have is a kind of stripped down classicism on the exterior and in the interior of the original mausoleum, retaining the forms of Hubbert’s design but rejecting the flourishes. Was this to save money? Or because Edwards preferred a more modern look?
The latter seems more likely, though the client’s motivation might have included a bit of both. By the late 1920s what has come to be called Art Deco had emerged as an architectural movement, where elements from historical styles were often simplified, or otherwise adjusted for effect. Sunset Mausoleum is far from Deco in its look, but the simplification is there.
In discussing the building’s form and size, Edwards reached back to pre-Renaissance days for inspiration.
“It has been the universal custom before the time of the Pharoahs to honor the departed by entombment such as in pyramids,” he told the Chronicle. “Mausoleum entombment now is recognized in this country, and practically every city of any importance, and even some of the smaller centers, have monumental buildings of this character.”
The building focused on function as well as monumentality, as the early 1950s mausoleum brochure explained:
“The foundations are deeply embedded in the rock of the hillside, and the building has been so designed that all crypts and niches are separate and free from the walls of the building by a two-foot space that is an inaccessible vault-tight air and ventilation chamber.”
The original plan called for six “terraces” (long hallways housing crypts) on two levels. Four were built in the original phase, as well as Cathedral Hall inside, with a lobby, offices, and two large fireplace niches.
But it would be years before the full plan could be carried out, in part due to the Great Depression of the 1930s and by World War II materials restrictions for builders.
News reports show that the mausoleum played an important community role during the late 1920s and 1930s, including hosting Memorial Day events.
By Dave Weinstein. This article appeared in the January 2024 issue of The Forge.
