Pacific Heights

This guide to Pacific Heights in San Francisco traces a century-old dispute over who modeled for the bronze goddess atop Union Square's Dewey Monument, a rumor that starts with Alma de Bretteville, a Danish laundry-delivery girl turned artist's model on this very street. It follows her courtship by sugar heir Adolph Spreckels, twenty-four years her senior, and the fifty-five-room French limestone chateau he built her as a wedding gift around 1913. A later thread follows her collecting of Rodin bronzes in Paris and the fortune she inherited after Adolph's death in 1924.