Pasadena resident from 1887, practiced from Pasadena offices c. 1900 through 1937 retirement, designed residences and civic works across Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, and Altadena, listed as one of five architects in the 1902 Pasadena city directory alongside Greene and Greene.
Joseph J. Blick (1867 to 1947; Wikidata Q17626500) was the Pasadena architect whose residential and commercial work threaded through the city’s transformation from Victorian-era resort town into the West Coast’s foremost Arts and Crafts center. Across a forty-five-year practice that began in 1892 as a draftsman and ended with his 1937 retirement, Blick designed residences in Pasadena, South Pasadena, Altadena, San Marino, and Hollywood across the full stylistic arc of California residential architecture, moving from Colonial Revival and Shingle through Folk Victorian, Craftsman, Mission Revival, Mediterranean Revival, Italianate, Tudor-Craftsman, Period Revival, and finally Streamline Moderne. In 1902, when the Pasadena city directory listed only five architects in the city, Blick was one of them, alongside Greene and Greene. His documented works include the Hiram Wadsworth residence in Altadena (1912), the George S. Patton family residence in San Marino (1910), the A. Kingsley Macomber-Lunkenheimer residence at 1215 Wentworth Avenue in Oak Knoll (1906), and the Scottish Rite Cathedral on N. Madison Avenue (1924). Owners and prospective buyers of a Blick house doing architectural due diligence are looking at a building shaped by an architect trained in the classical apprenticeship tradition under a Royal Institute of British Architects member, who moved with the stylistic currents of his era and built across the full economic range of Pasadena’s pre-war housing stock.
An owner deciding what a Blick house should ask can read the Sell Odds guide on the odds a home sells at a given price before any number is set.
Greg Anderson of Arroyo Casa takes Joseph J. Blick houses in Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino and Altadena to market as their listing agent: he reads a documented named architect house against the right comparable sales, not the block it sits on, and tests the price with Sell Odds, the tool he built on sold and unsold MLS outcomes. Blick is one of five architects in the 1902 Pasadena city directory, and his range ran from Colonial Revival and Shingle through Craftsman to Streamline Moderne, so style alone will not name him. I surface the attribution early: if the house has been formally surveyed, his name should already sit in the record as architect of record. An attribution already in a survey record does not have to be argued for during escrow. Request a Sell Odds read on your Blick house.
Joseph J. Blick, 1867 to 1947, was born in Clinton, Iowa, the son of building contractor James Shannon Blick, and came to Pasadena in 1887 at twenty to work as a contractor alongside his father. In 1889 he entered a formal architectural apprenticeship under T. William Parkes, a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. That was the older route into the profession, distinct from the university trained architects of his generation, and it grounded him in the drafting and construction discipline of the late nineteenth century British model. By 1892 he was practicing as a draftsman in Pasadena. He retired in 1937, forty five years later.
Because it listed five architects in the entire city and he was one of them, alongside Charles Wesley Buchanan, C.F. Driscoll, William B. Edwards, and Greene and Greene. He was working out of rooms 413 and 414 in the Dodworth Block at the time. He had built his own house at 275 Madeline Drive the year before and lived in it until his death in 1947, which means the architect who helped shape mature Pasadena spent his whole career living inside it.
Because he moved with the currents rather than defining one. The catalog runs Colonial Revival and Shingle, through Folk Victorian, Craftsman, Mission Revival, Mediterranean Revival, Italianate, Tudor Craftsman and Period Revival, and finishes in Streamline Moderne. That is a longer continuous arc than most of his Pasadena contemporaries, including Frederick L. Roehrig, Myron Hunt and Sylvanus Marston, all of whom worked more narrowly inside specific style periods. He was willing to blend within a single house, too: the 1911 Albert H. Gates residence at 499 Monterey Road is a Tudor Craftsman chalet with Mission touches.
Not where you would expect. His Craftsman work does not concentrate in Bungalow Heaven the way the speculative bungalow builder catalogs do. It clusters on the higher streets, Grand Avenue, California Boulevard, Bellefontaine and Madison, and it shows the Craftsman style at its larger residential scale rather than in its smaller bungalow form. Documented examples include the 1904 residences at 144 North Grand Avenue and 280 South Grand Avenue, the 1906 Marie Fisk residence at 510 West California Boulevard, the 1906 house at 260 South Orange Grove Boulevard, the house at 515 West California Boulevard, which the Lower Arroyo Seco nomination dates to about 1903, and the 1910 Holloway Stuart residence at 875 La Loma Road. If your search is on Grand, California, Bellefontaine or Madison, call or text me at (310) 402-8430 and I will check what is documented on the block.
Four carry names people recognize. The 1906 A. Kingsley Macomber Lunkenheimer residence at 1215 Wentworth Avenue is the oldest house in Oak Knoll, Mission Revival with Arts and Crafts detailing, and Gebhard and Winter included it in Architecture in Los Angeles: A Compleat Guide in 1985. The 1910 George S. Patton residence at 1220 Patton Court in San Marino was built for the family of the man who would become General George S. Patton Jr., the World War II tank commander. The 1912 Hiram Wadsworth residence at 1090 Rubio Street in Altadena was built for the man who became the first mayor of Pasadena. And Robincroft Castle of 1900 at 275 Robincroft Drive was built for Col. W.H. Harrison. A documented name on a house of this period changes the comparable set, a distinction I hold in person before Sell Odds puts odds on the price.
The Wadsworth residence in Altadena has, repeatedly. It has served as a location for Risky Business, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, The Baby-Sitters Club, Can’t Hardly Wait, and the pilot of 7th Heaven. That much on screen use nearly a century after construction says something practical about the proportions and detailing, which read on camera the way they read from the sidewalk.
A surprising amount of working Pasadena. The vernacular masonry brick commercial buildings at 60 to 64 North Raymond Avenue of 1905, 24 East Union of 1904, the 1911 Union Building at 109 to 121 East Union, home of Pasadena Hardware Company since 1924 and the city’s oldest hardware store, 39 Mills Place of 1910 and 42 South De Lacey Avenue of 1927 form a small set of surviving turn of the century structures on the original downtown grid. He also designed two fire stations, Fire Station 5 at 900 South Pasadena Avenue of 1909, now converted to residential use, and Engine Company 34, Fire Station 4, at 541 South Oak Knoll Avenue of 1917, a Mediterranean Revival station that closed in 1989 and was rehabilitated as a single family residence in 2000. The Pasadena Hall of Justice at 131 East Holly Street and the city jail, both 1930, close the civic list.
The largest of his civic commissions to survive, built in 1924 at 150 North Madison Avenue. It is Streamline Moderne, one of the earliest such buildings in the San Gabriel Valley, and it shows a late career architect picking up an emerging vocabulary roughly a decade before it was broadly adopted on the West Coast. It was determined eligible for the National Register in 1984, and the listing was cancelled at the owner’s objection, so it carries eligibility rather than a listing.
If it is a residence in Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino or Altadena built between roughly 1892 and 1937, it is worth asking. A forty five year practice produced enough houses that his name appears in chain of title and Pasadena building department records across a wide arc of the city’s mature pre war stock. Several carry public designations already: the 1903 George B. Post House at 360 South Grand has been individually listed on the National Register since August 9, 2011, reference 11000499, the 1912 house at 895 South Madison Avenue became a Pasadena Local Landmark on September 26, 2016, and his houses at 260 and 268 South Orange Grove Boulevard are contributing structures to the Ross Grove Landmark District. Call or text me at (310) 402-8430 and I will check the survey record for your address.
Surface it, and surface it early. Owners weighing Mills Act tax abatement, a sale to a preservation minded buyer, or any positioning of the house on its architectural significance should expect his name to appear as documented architect of record if the property has ever been formally surveyed. That is a stronger position than it sounds, because an attribution that already sits in a survey record does not have to be argued for during escrow. When you get to a listing price, I read a documented named architect house against a different comparable set than the block it sits on, and Sell Odds tests that price against the sold and unsold record.
Two, and one of them is a developer’s own house. Blick designed the 1906 residence that the developer J.C. Brainerd built for himself the year the tract opened, which is a useful signal: the man selling the lots hired Blick for his own. The district also holds work by Cyril Bennett and seven houses by Wallace Neff, so a Blick there sits in fast company.
Blick was born September 20, 1867 in Clinton, Iowa, the son of building contractor James Shannon Blick. The family’s path to Pasadena ran through the American scout and adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham, who married Blick’s elder sister Blanche in 1884. Burnham had been raised in California, and after their marriage Blanche returned with him. The rest of the Blick family followed; James Shannon Blick registered to vote in Los Angeles in June 1888 and had relocated to Pasadena by August 1892. Joseph Blick, then twenty, arrived in Pasadena in 1887 and began working as a contractor alongside his father.
In 1891 he married Daisy Russell, a first cousin of his brother-in-law Frederick Russell Burnham. The double family tie surfaced periodically throughout his practice. Blick designed at least three residences for Burnham across three decades, including the 1904 Burnham residence at 500 South San Rafael Avenue in Pasadena’s San Rafael Heights.
In 1896, Blick partnered with Lester S. Moore to found Blick, Moore and Price, Architects, in Los Angeles, with offices in the Byrne Building at 253 South Broadway downtown. The firm reorganized in 1897 as Blick and Moore and continued through 1899. Blick’s individual SGV catalog began before the firm and continued after it. The 1892 Colonial Revival residence at 268 S. Orange Grove Boulevard (now a contributing structure to Pasadena’s Ross Grove Landmark District) is the earliest documented Blick design, the 1894 Henry T. Fuller residence at 268 Bellefontaine Street is his first known Shingle and English Cottage revival work, and the 1895 Adams & Turner Funeral Home at 95-97 N. Raymond Avenue is one of his earliest documented Pasadena commercial structures.
By 1902, with the Pasadena city directory listing him as one of five architects in the city, alongside Charles Wesley Buchanan, C.F. Driscoll, William B. Edwards, and Greene and Greene, Blick was working from rooms #413 and #414 in the Dodworth Block. He built his own residence at 275 Madeline Drive in 1901 and lived there until his death in 1947. By 1924 his office had moved to 17 South Fair Oaks Avenue, Room #314.
Blick’s solo Pasadena practice from roughly 1900 through 1930 defines his SGV catalog. He designed residences across the Craftsman peak of the 1900s and 1910s, the Mediterranean and Italianate sidebar of the same period, the Period Revival 1920s, and finally the Streamline Moderne and Tudor strands of the late 1920s and 1930s. The standard reference summary, that Blick is “best known for diverse residences in Southern California ranging from Mission to Modern styles,” captures the breadth.
The Craftsman residences dominate the middle of his catalog and sit within the broader Pasadena Craftsman context anchored by Bungalow Heaven, the city’s earliest designated landmark district.
The stylistic breadth shows in the variations sitting alongside the Craftsman line. The 1903 George B. Post residence at 360 South Grand Avenue is a Shingle-style home with Arts and Crafts interior, distinguished by curved walls flanking a row of third-floor windows in its front gable. The 1903 Benjamin Folsom residence at 445 Bellefontaine Street is a Folk Victorian. The 1911 M.H. Reed residence at 450 Bellefontaine is Italianate with Arts and Crafts period detailing. The 1911 Albert H. Gates residence at 499 Monterey Road is described as a Tudor-Craftsman chalet with Mission touches, a hybrid that captures Blick’s willingness to blend revival vocabularies within a single house.
The 1906 A. Kingsley Macomber-Lunkenheimer residence at 1215 Wentworth Avenue (PCAD building/5926) is the oldest house in Pasadena’s Oak Knoll neighborhood. Built in Mission Revival with Arts and Crafts period detailing, it sits within the residential pocket south of California Boulevard that would, over the next three decades, develop into one of the architecturally dense neighborhoods in the city. David Gebhard and Robert Winter included it in Architecture in Los Angeles: A Compleat Guide (1985) under the entry “Lunkenheimer House, 1906.”
The Patton family had ranched and developed property in the San Gabriel Valley since the late nineteenth century, and the Patton Court address sits in the heart of historic San Marino.
The 1900 Robincroft Castle, designed for Col. W.H. Harrison at 275 Robincroft Drive in Pasadena, and the 1906 Henderson residence at 795 Oak Knoll Circle round out a cluster of Blick’s earlier estate-scale residential commissions in Pasadena’s older money neighborhoods.
Joseph J. Blick on the makers’ register
Blick’s commercial work concentrates in Pasadena’s older downtown core. The Bekins Co. / Standard Fireproof Storage Company rooftop sign on the building at 511 S. Fair Oaks Avenue (1906) is an industrial-era survival from a narrower commercial era.
The 1924 Scottish Rite Cathedral at 150 N. Madison Avenue (determined eligible for the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 as NRIS 84003894; listing cancelled at the owner’s objection) is the largest of Blick’s civic commissions to survive. Built in Streamline Moderne, the cathedral is one of the earliest Streamline Moderne buildings in the San Gabriel Valley and reflects Blick’s late-career engagement with the emerging Moderne vocabulary roughly a decade before it became broadly adopted on the West Coast. The 1924 Pasadena Star-News building at 525 E. Colorado Boulevard, designed in the same year, sits within the original Colorado Boulevard commercial spine.
Several Blick residences carry public designations. The 1903 George B. Post House at 360 S. Grand Avenue is individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places, reference 11000499, listed August 9, 2011, under the Multiple Property Documentation Form “Late 19th/Early 20th Century Development and Architecture in Pasadena,” the form Pasadena’s list notes against it. The house at 657 S. Grand Avenue is not a Blick listing: the Lower Arroyo Seco nomination gives it as a 1909 house, a contributor to that district. The 1912 house at 895 S. Madison Avenue is a designated Pasadena Local Landmark (September 26, 2016). His 1906 residence at 260 S. Orange Grove Boulevard and 1892 residence at 268 S. Orange Grove Boulevard (the latter co-credited with Edward C. Kent) are contributing structures to the Ross Grove Landmark District. The Lower Arroyo Seco Historic District (NRHP 04000331, listed July 12, 2005, under the Multiple Property Documentation Form “Residential Architecture of Pasadena, CA 1895-1918: Influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement”) covers a portion of South Grand Avenue within Blick’s documented residential catalog area. Inside the Lower Arroyo Seco district, its National Register nomination credits Blick with three contributing houses on West California Boulevard, at 510, 511 and 515.
For the period 1892 through about 1910, Blick’s residential work overlaps the early Pasadena careers of Greene and Greene and the speculative bungalow builders who shaped Bungalow Heaven. For 1910 through 1925, his catalog runs in parallel with Marston, Roehrig, Hunt, and Grey. For the late 1920s through 1937, his work shades into the Period Revival and early Modern era that defined Pasadena’s last great pre-war residential push. The architect-of-record question on any historic Pasadena house, when answered with Joseph J. Blick, places the house within a cataloged body of work that is uniquely broad in stylistic range and uniquely sustained in geographic concentration on a single SGV city.
In the Prospect Historic District, Blick designed two houses, including the 1906 house developer J. C. Brainerd built for himself the year the tract opened. The district also holds work by Cyril Bennett and seven houses by Wallace Neff.
Last updated