Claremont

About Claremont.

A college town founded by the Santa Fe in 1887 and anchored by Pomona College two years later, Claremont holds the deepest National Register list at the valley's east end, from a Marston and Maybury theatre to Depression era stone houses built by hand.

Claremont, California is the San Gabriel Valley college town whose National Register list runs from a Marston and Maybury theatre to a district of stone houses built by hand during the Depression, the deepest and strangest register of any city at the valley’s eastern end. Eight properties carry federal listings here, and they do not tell one story. They tell three: an architecture story, a folk building story, and a civil rights story, and all three are still standing on residential streets you can buy into. For a buyer who cares what a town’s record says about its houses, Claremont’s record says more than any of its neighbors.

The town the railroad and the college built

The Santa Fe and its Pacific Land Improvement Company founded Claremont in 1887, the same boom year that platted half the valley. What saved it from staying a paper town was Pomona College, which moved here in 1889 and anchored everything after. By 1902 the town had voted its street grid into its identity: east west streets numbered, north south streets named for colleges and universities. Incorporation came in 1907. The Claremont Colleges grew to seven institutions, and the town around them grew tree lined and deliberate, the City of Trees and PhDs. College towns keep their old fabric at a rate ordinary suburbs never match, because the institutions hold their ground and the professors buy the old houses and stay. Claremont is the proof in this valley.

The architect record

The Padua Hills Theatre, built 1930 in the hills at the mouth of Palmer Canyon, went on the National Register in 1998, reference 97001660 (National Park Service). The design is by Marston and Maybury, the successor firm of Sylvanus Marston, the Pasadena architect whose work anchors so much of this library. Spanish Colonial Revival, built as the home of a theatre colony, and significant for more than its architecture: the Mexican Players performed there from 1931 to 1974, the longest run of Mexican themed theatre in the country. Below it, the original Scripps College campus, ten buildings by Gordon Kaufmann built 1926 to 1939, holds its own district listing, reference 84000887 (National Park Service). A Kaufmann campus and a Marston firm theatre in one town of thirty seven thousand. That is the architect record.

The stone houses

On South Mills Avenue stands the Russian Village District, fifteen houses on the register since December 1978, reference 78000680 (National Park Service). Konstanty Stys, a Polish immigrant everyone called Steve, bought land here in the twenties and spent the Depression helping friends who had lost everything build houses from what the ground and the wrecking yards gave up: local field stone off the alluvial fan, salvage from the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, railroad car siding. Only one house in the district had an architect. Stys sold lots cheap, often with no money down, and the neighbors built each other in. The name is wrong, he was Polish, but the houses are exactly what they claim to be, and the federal register agreed. I spent twenty years building houses and I hold field stone masonry done by amateurs to a hard standard. This work has stood for ninety years. Nearby at 4353 North Towne sits the Pitzer House, a 1912 stone house on the register since 1986, reference 86002192, that the architectural historian Robert Winter called the finest stone house in southern California. Claremont has a genuine stone building tradition, and it is on the register twice.

The civil rights record

The Intercultural Council Houses, twelve homes on a single block bounded by Blanchard Place, Claremont Boulevard, First Street and Brooks, went on the register in 2015, reference 15000121 (National Park Service). Built 1947 to 1952 in Claremont’s Arbol Verde barrio, they were a deliberate integration experiment: a church committee brought Anglo graduate students and Mexican American families together as neighbors on one block, at a time when the town’s own housing was segregated in practice. Millard Sheets had one of his architecture students draw the plans, and the houses went up in the International Style, flat roofed and plain. A register listing earned for what a block of small houses meant, not what it cost. The 1927 Santa Fe depot downtown, Spanish Colonial Revival, reference 82002188, rounds out the register and now houses the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art, so the building that founded the town keeps its doors open.

The fabric

The residential core around the Village and Memorial Park carries the mix a college town accumulates: Craftsman bungalows from the grove decades, Spanish Revival from the twenties, midcentury infill where professors built modern. North Claremont climbs toward the wilderness park through postwar and custom foothill streets on what were citrus groves into the fifties. The Village itself stayed a real main street, and the town’s design guidelines treat the old neighborhoods as named places with their own rules, which tells you how the city thinks about its fabric. Worth knowing: some of the town’s most iconic buildings carry no federal listing at all. The register here is deep, and it still undercounts the town.

Reading the houses

Claremont’s stock rewards a builder’s reading twice over, and I read it with the eyes of one, twenty years of custom homes behind a real estate license I have held since 1990. In the academic core the houses were built for people who stayed decades, and long ownership shows in the interiors: original casing and built ins maintained rather than replaced, plaster kept, sash never swapped for vinyl. That kind of continuity is what a finish carpenter is trained to see, because it is what we were hired to create. In the stone work, whether a Stys house or the foothill customs above town, the reading moves to the masonry itself, how the stone is coursed and struck, and whether the openings have moved since the walls went up. A town this documented also gives you archives most cities cannot: Claremont Heritage keeps house files, and for an old house here the history is often literally on file.

Claremont against its neighbors

Glendora, the next foothill town of consequence to the west, holds the citrus record, the physical evidence of the industry itself on the federal register. Claremont holds the architect record and the deepest register at this end of the valley. Monrovia farther west holds the protection record, three decades of local ordinance. Three foothill towns, three different kinds of proof. Claremont’s version is the one where the town’s institutions did the preserving, and its prices have always known it.

How to verify what you are looking at

Every register property named on this page carries its National Park Service reference number in the text, and the nominations are public. The Padua Hills and depot records also sit with the California Office of Historic Preservation. Claremont Heritage maintains the town’s architectural archives and house files. For any single house, the city permit record tells you what was touched and when. Claremont’s entity record is Wikidata Q506398. This page is part of the larger city record, and I keep it current as the register changes.

Architects Who Practiced Here.

• Gordon B. Kaufmann · Pasadena resident 1916 through 1939, trained as draftsman in Reginald Johnson's Pasadena office 1916 to 1920, partner in Johnson, Kaufmann, and Coate from 1921 to 1924 at 100 East Colorado Boulevard in Old Pasadena, with Pasadena, San Marino, Arcadia, and Claremont commissions spanning Period Revival residential through monumental institutional Streamline Moderne.

Sources and references.

• Claremont, entity identifier for the city, Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q506398)
• Padua Hills Theatre, NRHP reference 97001660, listed January 23, 1998, National Park Service (https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/97001660)
• Russian Village District, NRHP reference 78000680, listed December 28, 1978, nomination public at NPGallery, National Park Service (https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/78000680)
• Pitzer House, NRHP reference 86002192, National Park Service (https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/86002192)
• Scripps College for Women, NRHP reference 84000887, National Park Service (https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/84000887)
• Intercultural Council Houses, NRHP reference 15000121, National Park Service (https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/15000121)
• Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Station, NRHP reference 82002188, National Park Service (https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/82002188)