Walter Danforth Bliss (8/23/1872-) San Francisco, California (A.I.A.)

Walter Bliss was born on August 23, 1872, at Glenbrook, Lake Tahoe. He was the son of Duane Leroy Bliss and Elizabeth Tobey Bliss, a prominent California family. His father arrived in California during the gold rush, working in mining camps of the Mother Lode country. He then entered the banking and lumbering businesses in Nevada. The banking firm of Paul, Bliss and Baker was absorbed by the Bank of California in 1865, with Duane Bliss joining William C. Ralston, D. O. Mills, and William Sharon in organizing the Virginia and Truckee Railroad and the Carson and Colorado Railroad.

In 1872 Duane Bliss organized the Carson and Tahoe Lumbering and Fluming Co. of California and Nevada, which bought 50,000 acres of timber land and built sawmills at Glenbrook, Lake Tahoe. This business conducted extensive logging and lumber operations, operated railroads, steamers, and thirty miles of flume for the transportation of lumber to the Comstock mines in Virginia City, Nevada, during the great silver mining days. In 1896 Duane Bliss built the passenger steamer "Tahoe", and in 1899 he organized the Lake Tahoe Railway and Transportation Co. He was the president and manager until his death in 1907. This company took over the steamer and railroad equipment of the C.& T. L. & F. Co., built the narrow gauge railroad from Truckee to Tahoe, built the famous Tahoe Tavern and opened a transportation and resort service at Lake Tahoe.

Walter Bliss' oldest brother, William Seth Bliss, was the engineer for his father's C. & T. L. & F. Co., managing logging and engineering operations at Bijou, California from 1887-1893. He located and built the narrow gauge railroad between Truckee and Lake Tahoe in 1899. He became president of his father's L. T. R. & T. Co. in 1908 as well as the manager of the C. & T. L. & F. Co. He was the president of the latter from 1911-1926. By 1910 the Bliss family owned a great deal of land around Lake Tahoe, some of which they sold to other prominent families from San Francisco. In 1927 William Bliss began liquidating these huge land holdings at Lake Tahoe. The State of California benefited from this liquidation when, in 1928, Walter, William and their sister, Hope, donated 162 acres of land at Rubicon Point as a memorial park for their father. D. L. Bliss State Park was some of the first land in Lake Tahoe to be owned by and open to the public.

While his family was building a financial empire, Walter Bliss went east to study architecture. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1895. He then joined McKim, Mead and White of New York, a prestigious architectural firm responsible for designing such buildings as the Agricultural Building at the Columbian Exposition, the Boston Public Library, Madison Square Garden, and the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in New York. He met William Faville while both were employed there, and in 1898 he and Faville returned to California, setting up their architectural partnership in San Francisco.

Walter Bliss designed the Tahoe Tavern in 1901 for his father. Located one-half mile south of Tahoe City, the brown-shingled hotel with its multiple gables was a favorite vacation spot for the wealthy from the Bay Area. Socialites from San Francisco ferried across to the Oakland Mole and took a train to the Tahoe Tavern, arriving on special spur rails that carried them directly to the hotel.

Bliss and his wife, the former Edith King Pillsbury, appear in the San Francisco Blue Book of 1925. In addition, he was a member of the American Institute of Architects, the University Club, Pacific Union, Transportation Club and the Masons.