Dr. Howard B. Gates is remembered today primarily for his home (in Naglee Park at 62 South Thirteenth Street) which was designed by the noted architect Bernard Maybeck. Son of a pioneer educator, Howard rose to become one of the most respected medical men in the county.
Howard Gates was born in 1867 in the San Jose Institute, a private school run by his father Freeman. As a young boy Howard probably rode the first horse cars out the Alameda all the way to downtown Santa Clara, fished in the Guadalupe Creek , and marveled at the new-fangled electric lighting on the 230 foot tower sitting astride the intersection of Market and Santa Clara Streets.
Gates attended U.C. Berkeley during the period when Bernard Maybeck was commissioned by Phoebe Hearst to make a master plan for that campus. It is possible that he may have met the great architect at this time; at any rate he would have been aware of Maybeck's work.
After graduating from Berkeley, Gates enrolled in Cooper Medical College in San Francisco. He later received his MD degree from New York's Homeopathic College.
Dr. gates returned to San Jose in 1895 and began his practice in the old Porter Building at Second and Santa Clara Streets. Two years later he married Amelia Levenson, also an MD, and soon they had a thriving practice at their Gates Sanitarium at Eleventh and Santa Clara. This location, then on the edge of town, would later attract other medical establishments, including San Jose Hospital.
By 1904 the Gates' were affluent enough to have their custom built home erected on Thirteenth Street, just two blocks from their sanitarium. Howard's hope of walking to work was short lived, however, as he was soon to be appointed superintendent of the County Hospital, and this would require that he take "Big Red" streetcars across town.
The Earthquake of '06 caused extensive damage to many local buildings. St. Patrick's Church on Santa Clara, the Normal School on Washington Square , and the County Hospital were left in total ruin. It became Dr. Gates greatest challenge to supervise the reconstruction of the County Hospital.
Howard and Amelia took a two year sabbatical in 1908 and traveled to Berlin, Vienna and Zurich to brush up on the latest surgical techniques.
Although hardly 40, Howard's heavy workload was taking its toll on his health, and in 1909, his family convinced him to relocate to the Los Angeles area. Soon after, he suffered a serious mental breakdown. In 1913 he crossed the Atlantic to take the cure in Sorrento on the Bay of Naples. His condition worsened and he was moved to Rome where he lived out his last days surrounded by his family which now included an adopted son.
The end came on May 1, 1914, just a few months before the continent was swept up in the "Great War." The cause of his tragic death at age 47 was diagnosed as an acute case of "peripheral neuritis." One can't help wondering if that 2 year trip abroad in 1908-09 had not been a fruitless search to find a cure for his mental illness.
Gates body was cremated in Rome and returned to California. The records at Oak Hill Cemetery indicate that his ashes were buried there when his mother was interred in the family plot in 1920. There is no inscription on the stone, however, he lies in an unmarked grave in the section of Oak Hill which is reserved for San Jose Pioneers.
Bernard Maybeck, son of an immigrant woodcarver, was sent by his father to Paris in 1881 to learn furniture design. While in Paris, he decided to follow his true bent and enrolled in the famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts which was the seat of classicism in the arts. Maybeck's classical training would serve him time and again, when as an architect in San Francisco, he combined a myriad of classical styles into romantic dream houses which his skeptical peers labeled "creative eclecticism."
Using local materials, especially redwood, and extensive landscaping, Maybeck and others created California's first original architecture, referred to as San Francisco Bay Tradition. Maybeck's two most outstanding landmarks in the Bay Area are the Palace of Fine Arts, created for the Pan Pacific Exposition of 1914, and the Christian Science Church in Berkeley. The architect's less imposing, but in many ways more fascinating creations, were the many private homes he designed around the Bay Area. The greatest accumulation of these fanciful homes is in the hills on the north side of the Berkeley campus where Maybeck himself lived.
The Maybeck homes are adapted to Northern California living, i.e., they conform to our regional climatic conditions, and they extend the free flow of space by eliminating the distinction between indoors and out of doors. His hill houses make extensive use of balconies, rooms which open into gardens, and large cathedral height windows which make the rooms seem more spacious than they actually are. The lavish use of carved redwood on the interiors and exteriors, and the delicate gothic tracery windows were evidence that Maybeck didn't stray too far from his father's profession. Maybeck believed, as did his internationally famous contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, that the home should blend in with the natural landscape that surrounds it.
Much of Maybeck's domestic work prior to the earthquake reflected his interest in Swiss, German and English medieval styles. The house he designed for Howard B. Gates in San Jose is a good example of his eclectic genius. Basically Italian in design, its extended roof line, forming a cover for elaborately sculptured baroque balconies, gives the upper portion of the house a Swiss flavor. What appears from the street to be a home of one and one half stories, is actually three stories high. The first story, lowered into the grade, includes the kitchen and dining room and servant's room. A large oval shaped opening in the rear leads from the dining area onto what was a sunken garden. A circular stair leads from the lowered first floor to the spacious living room and on up to the bedrooms which are tucked neatly into what one would normally consider the attic space. Natural light comes in from the numerous rear windows and skylights.
Text taken from Historical Footnotes of Santa Clara Valley by Jack Douglas.