See that column in the center of the square? Ninety-seven feet tall, bronze figure of Nike on top — the Greek goddess of victory, not the shoe company. That's the Dewey Monument, and the story behind it involves a nude model, a shooting, children's literature, and one of the finest art museums in California. All connected.
The model for that statue was — allegedly — a broke, six-foot-tall art student named Alma de Bretteville, who made money posing nude for paintings that hung in saloons around the city. The sculptor himself said the model was actually a woman named Clara Petzold, but the Alma story stuck because the Alma story is better. And here's why.
Adolph Spreckels — son of the sugar king Claus Spreckels, twenty-plus years older than Alma — cast the deciding vote on the committee to approve that statue design. Whether or not Alma actually posed for it, Adolph fell for her hard. They courted secretly for five years, and Alma reportedly called him her sugar daddy. He was heir to
a sugar fortune and he was old — that's the joke. Some people claim the phrase started right here.
Now, Adolph Spreckels. In eighteen eighty-four, he walked into the San Francisco Chronicle offices, pulled out a Navy pistol, and shot the editor, Michael de Young, at point-blank range. He was furious about articles accusing his family's sugar company of fraud.
De Young survived, and the reason he
