98 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {landmark} words by MARGARET KOENIG • photography by ROBB MOST kohl pumphouse The historic Kohl Pumphouse is easy to miss. Located in San Mateo’s Central Park near the Ninth Avenue entrance, the small, nondescript building is hidden by a white wrought-iron gate flanked by stately oaks, and marked by a plaque that most passersby wouldn’t look at twice. You’d hardly guess that the pumphouse is the sole surviving building of the grand estate that once occupied these grounds. Before being acquired by the City of San Mateo in 1922, Central Park was home to Charles Polhemus, director of the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad and prominent San Mateo resident, who lived on the property in a Victorian mansion in the mid-1800s. Sometime in the 1870s, Charles sold the estate to William Kohl, a naval captain and founding member of the Alaska Commercial Company, who would reside there for the next three decades. Kohl oversaw extensive landscaping and planting, the majority of which still exists today, including the 900-foot iron fence bordering El Camino Real, a cast-iron dog statue imported from Italy and, most notably, the pumphouse. Constructed in the late 1800s with dirt floors and an unfinished interior, the pumphouse provided water for landscaping, and was later also used as a maintenance workshop. It wasn’t until 1976 that the San Mateo Arboretum Society decided to renovate the pumphouse so that it could serve as the organization’s headquarters. Today, the building still houses the pump mechanism for the original 240-foot well and provides irrigation water throughout the park’s 16.5-acre grounds.
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