Glendora

About Glendora.

A foothill citrus town founded in an 1887 land rush, Glendora carries its grove history on the federal register twice, once as the largest bougainvillea in the country and once as a castle built by hand from the ranches the tract houses erased.

Glendora, California is the San Gabriel Valley foothill city whose two National Register listings are a bougainvillea vine and a hand built castle, and both of them are monuments to the citrus industry that built the town. That is not a gap in the record. That is the record. Glendora never produced a millionaire’s row, and its one brush with Greene and Greene stayed on paper as far as the record shows: fourteen drawings of ranch houses for Judge Charles Silent’s foothill estate, dated 1908, held today in the Greene and Greene collection at Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. What it produced was fruit, and the two things the federal register chose to protect here are the living advertisement for that industry and the folk monument built from its wreckage. For a buyer, that history is still standing in the housing stock: grove era homes, Craftsman blocks, and foothill streets laid over land that grew oranges within living memory.

A boom town that held

Glendora sold 300 lots on its first day of sale, April 1, 1887. George D. Whitcomb, a locomotive works founder from Chicago, had subdivided about 300 acres at the foot of the mountains the month before, in the same boom year the Santa Fe’s transcontinental line reached the valley. He built the name from his wife Leadora and the glen behind his home. The town incorporated on November 13, 1911, and by then it had already gotten its second railroad: the Pacific Electric’s Monrovia and Glendora line opened in December 1907, running cars straight to downtown Los Angeles. That line is the same interurban spine that carried Monrovia through its own growth years, and the two towns have been foothill siblings ever since. Pride of the Foothills is the town’s own name for itself. The oranges paid for it.

The vine on the register

At Bennett and Minnesota Avenues stands the Glendora Bougainvillea, the largest growth of the plant in the United States, planted in 1901 by the Hamlins, early citrus growers, from parent stock that reached California on a whaling ship around 1870. It is California Historical Landmark No. 912 and it went on the National Register in 1978, reference 78000683 (Office of Historic Preservation, National Park Service). Read that designation slowly. The state and federal registers protect a flowering vine here because it is one of the best surviving pieces of the early twentieth century sales pitch: California as paradise, oranges in the yard, flowers up the palm trunks. Every subdivision brochure the valley ever printed descends from the image this vine was planted to create. It blooms hardest in June and July, and it is worth the drive.

The castle built from the groves

The other federal listing is the Rubel Castle Historic District at 844 North Live Oak Avenue, listed in 2013, reference 13000810 (National Park Service). Michael Rubel bought a defunct citrus ranch as a teenager in 1959 and spent 1968 to 1986 building a castle on the old reservoir: river rock, recycled granite, bottles, scrap steel, telephone poles, whatever the disappearing ranches gave up as the groves went under tract houses. Towers five stories high, no architectural plans, hundreds of volunteers. The district also keeps the ranch’s citrus packing house and outbuildings, which the National Register nomination calls rare surviving examples of the facilities that once dominated this end of the valley. I built houses for twenty years and I will tell you plainly: hand set stone masonry at that scale, without drawings, that has stood since the seventies, is not a curiosity. It is a body of work. The Glendora Historical Society owns it now and runs tours, and you should take one.

The fabric

The housing stock reads in layers, same as the town’s history. A thin founding layer from the boom years. A broad Craftsman layer from the 1910s and twenties, when the groves were at full production and the growers built well. Postwar tracts over the northern groves as citrus collapsed in the fifties and sixties. And through the middle of it, Glendora Village along Glendora Avenue, a walkable main street the town never let die. The streets north of Foothill climb into the chaparral, and the older foothill houses up there were built to work the grade and catch the air moving down out of the canyons, the same airflow the citrus men planted by.

Reading the houses

The grove economy is the key to reading this town, and my years building custom homes are how I turn it. The best early houses here were built by people who made real money in fruit and spent it where they lived, and the proof is in the finish work, the trade I ran as the specialty inside my own construction company for twenty years. Casing profiles that repeat room to room. Built ins with the joinery showing. Sash that still belongs to its walls. Glendora has no thirty year designation record to lean on, so the houses have to speak for themselves, and I have been listening to houses since 1978 and licensed to sell them since 1990. An unprotected 1912 house that still reads as one construction story is a find. One that reads as three remodels wearing a Craftsman face is a different purchase entirely, whatever the listing photos say.

Glendora against its neighbors

Monrovia to the west holds the protection record: three decades of ordinance, register, and Mills Act contracts. Glendora holds the citrus record, the physical evidence of the industry itself, and its early houses trade without the paper trail Monrovia gives you, which puts more weight on the reading. Claremont, the next foothill town of consequence to the east, holds the architect record: a college town whose register carries Marston and Maybury, Gordon Kaufmann, and a folk built district of its own. Glendora sits between them, the working orchard town in a row of foothill siblings, and its stock is priced like it.

How to verify what you are looking at

The bougainvillea’s record sits with the California Office of Historic Preservation as Landmark 912 and with the National Park Service under reference 78000683. The Rubel Castle Historic District record sits with the National Park Service under reference 13000810, and the full nomination is public. For any single house, the city permit record tells you what was touched and when. Glendora’s entity record is Wikidata Q851041. This page is part of the larger city record, and I keep it current as the record changes.

Sources and references.

• Glendora, entity identifier for the city, Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q851041)
• Glendora Bougainvillea, California Historical Landmark 912, California Office of Historic Preservation (https://ohp.parks.ca.gov/ListedResources/Detail/912)
• Glendora Bougainvillea, NRHP reference 78000683, National Park Service (https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/78000683)
• Rubel Castle Historic District, NRHP reference 13000810, nomination public at NPGallery, National Park Service (https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/13000810)