Lynn Downey

Contributor

Lynn Downey is a writer, historian, and consulting archivist. Her book, Arequipa Sanatorium: Life in California’s Lung Resort for Women, was published in 2019 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Downey’s grandmother was a patient at Arequipa in the 1920s.

History

Art as a Tonic: Making Pottery and Defeating Tuberculosis at the Arequipa Sanatorium

By Lynn Downey • April 16, 2020

In the spring of 1913 journalist Elise Roorbach was walking around downtown San Francisco when she passed a gift store. She saw some unusual vases in the window and went into the shop to look. They weren’t finely formed, and they didn’t have shiny glazes in pretty colors. Some were rather crude, with drip marks… Read more →

History

How the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Gave Working Women a Place to Breathe

By Lynn Downey • March 10, 2020

In September of 1909, San Francisco’s businessmen opened the latest issue of the Merchants’ Association Review, looking forward to reading stories about the city’s recovery in the years since April 18, 1906. The earthquake on that spring day flattened the city’s financial center and its working-class district, and then reduced them to cinders in a… Read more →