The Temple of Music was Claus Spreckels’ most expensive gift to his adopted hometown of San Francisco. It was a concession to his son, Adolph B. Spreckels, who served very successfully as a park commissioner and who enlisted many members of his class to improve the Golden Gate Park. The document provides a good sense of the bourgeois male club culture of the era. It also gives insights into the German-American network in San Francisco: Now only was Frederick W. Dohrmann (1842-1914) a successful, first-generation, German-American crockery merchant, and, from 1896, the owner of California’s first department store, the Emporium, he was also a driving force of the German Benevolent Society, the German Altenheim, and served as a park commissioner.