Tag: schmeiser building

old east davis, the day before new year’s eve

3 Comments

I Street Davis 123024

A few more left from the last days of 2024. We are already into the most 2025 part of 2025 so far and I’m already looking back on 2024 wondering what the hell happened. The way I’m getting on with each day is by furiously drawing in the sketchbook as if my sanity depends on it, because of course it does. I am making good on my mission to draw all of Davis, though I get frustrated by the old adage that I’ve drawn it all. I haven’t drawn all of Davis, just enough of it so you get the general idea. I don’t go into Old East Davis that much, partly because it’s not that big, partly because I don’t really have a need to since I live in a different direction. For a number of years after first moving to Davis, this was my route home from downtown, though that time of life is so long ago now (of course it still exists in the archives of this sketchblog). It’s 2025 now, so that means I’m going to start approaching the ‘Twenty Years in America’ mark. The thought of that overwhelms me. The thought of everything overwhelms me really, which is why I focus on the sketchbook page, I guess. Anyway, this sketch above is one of those big historic houses that were built in the early years of Davis (or Davisville as it was then), the Schmeiser House. It was built in 1911 (so it is older than the Watling Estate where I’m from, in Burnt Oak, though we do have a Roman Road, Watling Street). When I say this is a sketch of the Schmeiser House, it’s only the porch and the front yard, most of the sketch is the view looking up I Street (which sounds like it might be Roman, like “I, Claudius”). I have drawn the Schmeiser House before, ironically that was on Dec 31, 2016, which was a time with a lot of parallels to now in many ways, except this time we know what’s coming, or we think we do. Now feels a bit shitter. It’s funny that I should draw this building at this same time of year in this same historical moment though, like its the subconsciousness telling me something. Incidentally this house has another nickname, a bit of an unfortunate one, ‘the Swastika House’. Theodore Schmeiser, who built the house, was a pioneer whose father Gottfried had emigrated from Stuttgart, Germany, and the brickwork on the chimney features a pretty big swastika motif. Now I know what you’re thinking, especially this week, and no it’s not just a ‘Roman salute’. In this case though it genuinely is a bit more innocent, the house was built in 1911, when you-know-who was still just a crap painter in Vienna, and the swastika was generally seen as a good luck charm, especially among Germans. Good luck with that now. Honestly though, it was not a big deal then because nobody thought it would become what it became. You see swastika motifs in a lot of old American civic buildings, and even here in Davis there was a local football team called, wait for it, the Davis Swastikas. They even wore big swastikas on their shirts. Like I say, good luck with that. Apparently they disbanded after a player broke his neck, probably not from mental gymnastics though like nowadays. The big swastika on the chimney here is hard to actually spot because it’s low down, and I didn’t draw it in this sketch anyway. The house is on the City of Davis Historic Pedestrian and Bike Tour, and of that list, I must have drawn almost everything now? 

4th st old east davis 123024<

I also drew this house on 4th street, because I have to draw picket fences, and that tree was really quite the shape. I don’t know if there’s any particular historical story with this house, don’t know if there are any unusual embarrassing historical symbols in the chimney, it just looked nice. Then again I look at that list, and indeed this house is there: it is the McBride House, built in 1912 by E.S. McBride, a local councilman. By the way, back in 2017 for the centenary of the City of Davis I held a special sketchcrawl with a map showing all the pre-1917 buildings or places left in Davis, or as many as I could find anyway. I don’t know if I’ve drawn them all yet, but I’ve got to be close now. I must write a book some day, to celebrate twenty years in Davis. Now there’s an idea…

old east davis on new year’s eve

5 Comments

4th & I on new years eve
The last sketch of 2016. What a year that was. 2017 will be a year too. On New Year’s Eve we don’t really do all the partying. When I was a kid though, my family and neighbours always had big New Years parties, either at ours or another house in the street, lots of fun memories. We had quite a few families in our street with kids of similar age so we’d all play while the grown-ups drank and danced, then Big Ben would be on the telly going “BONG BONG…” and then all singing the Auld Lang Syne song and the next morning, a lot of mess to clean up. Bit quieter these days. I do like to get out before the sun sets and get a last sketch of the year in, and so on New Year’s Eve I cycled downtown on my new bike (my other bike went the way of so many celebrities in 2016, just before Christmas), before settling on the corner of 4th and I Streets in old east downtown Davis.”I Street” is not like “I, Claudius” by the way, nor is it like the Roman for 1st Street. I thought about drawing a panorama, but I got cold. Ended up adding most of the colour once I got back indoors as well. This building is historic, it is known as the Schmeiser House, and was built in 1911 by a man called Theodore Schmeiser, who ran a company that manufactured almond hullers and brought the first water supply to Davis. Here is a page with some history about it. Apparently the chimney has a swastika built into the brickwork, added as a “good-luck charm” by the Schmeisers whose family had come from Germany, obviously in the pre-Nazi era when that symbol didn’t mean what it later meant. Still, hmm. People apparently call this the “Swastika House”. If it wasn’t mentioned in every single article about this building, it might not be noticed (I didn’t, but I will now). Interestingly, I have learnt that Davis actually had a football team until 1909 called the “Davis Swastikas”, which had big swastikas on their chest; they disbanded after a player died of a broken neck. Here is some info on Davis wiki – that uniform looks very shocking in modern context, but again, this was well before it meant what it now means. Ugh. Well, a bit of sketching and a bit of history as one year changes into another, and this is still a lovely old building I’ve wanted to sketch in ages. There’s a whole list of historic Davis buildings and monuments listed on the City of Davis website as the “Historic Pedestrian and Bike Tour” on which the Schmeiser Building is included. I should really make my way through the list, sketching each one. I have sketched 23 of the 47 (remarkably few!), so I know what my new year’s resolution will be…