Monrovia

About Monrovia.

A railroad era foothill town founded in 1886 on a rule that every lot buyer build a real house, Monrovia kept its Victorians, its Craftsman blocks, and the Aztec Hotel on old Route 66, and it has been formally protecting them longer than almost any city its size in the valley.

Monrovia, California is the San Gabriel Valley foothill city that has run a historic preservation ordinance and a Mills Act program since 1995, with 164 designated historic properties on its register as of January 1, 2024 (City of Monrovia). Three decades of formal protection is the story here. Plenty of valley cities have old houses. Very few have thirty years of landmark designations, tax contracts, and demolition review to go with them, and for a buyer that track record changes the math on every early house in town. A designated Monrovia house comes with a paper trail, a review process, and in many cases a property tax contract. You should know which of the three you are buying before you write the offer.

A town founded on a building requirement

Monrovia sold its first lots on May 17, 1886, and the deal came with a condition: every buyer had to put up a house worth at least 2,000 dollars within six months (City of Monrovia). That rule was aimed straight at the speculators who were flipping paper lots across the valley in the boom of the eighties. The 1880s, to be clear. Not the decade of big hair and Depeche Mode. The rule worked. When the land bust came, Monrovia had houses where other townsites had surveyor stakes, and the town held. The founder was William N. Monroe, a railroad construction superintendent who bought his ground out of Lucky Baldwin’s Rancho Santa Anita. His own home, The Oaks, still stands at 250 North Primrose Avenue, and Myrtle Avenue, the spine of the town, is named for his daughter (City of Monrovia). Monrovia incorporated in 1887, which makes it the fourth oldest general law city in Los Angeles County, behind only Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Pasadena. A town founded on the premise that a house should be real has been living up to it ever since.

Thirty years of the ordinance

Monrovia adopted its historic preservation ordinance in 1995 and has run it continuously since: a seven member commission, 164 designated historic properties as of January 1, 2024, and one designated historic district, the Wildrose Tract (City of Monrovia Historic Preservation). The teeth are in the demolition rule. Every structure built before 1940 goes through demolition review, with a hold of up to 180 days, which means the early fabric here does not disappear over a weekend. The Mills Act program has run alongside the ordinance since 1995, and it is not a token: participants in 2024 averaged 5,183 dollars in annual property tax savings (City of Monrovia). For an owner of a designated house that is real money every year, and for a buyer it means a designated house here can carry a tax contract that transfers with the sale. Ask for it. In this town the record usually exists, which is more than I can say for most of the valley.

The Aztec Hotel

The building that put Monrovia in the architecture books is the Aztec Hotel at 311 West Foothill Boulevard, opened in September 1925, designed by Robert B. Stacy-Judd. The National Park Service credits it as the first attempt to apply Mayan art and architecture to a modern American building, and it went on the National Register in 1978 (National Park Service). It is also Monrovia Historic Landmark number 10. Foothill Boulevard here was the original alignment of Route 66 until the 1931 realignment bypassed it, so for six years every car on the mother road rolled past that facade. There is nothing else like it in the valley, and the fact that it stands in a town of Victorians and bungalows tells you something about the twenties: the boulevard was a stage, and Monrovia had a front row seat.

The Sinclair house

At 464 North Myrtle Avenue stands the Upton Sinclair House, a National Historic Landmark, the federal register’s highest tier (National Park Service). The author of The Jungle, the muckraker who ran for governor of California, lived on the town’s main street. Landmarks at that level are scarce anywhere; a residential one on Myrtle Avenue is part of why Monrovia’s register reads heavier than its size.

The fabric

The Victorian layer here dates to the founding decade, and the building requirement is why it is still standing: the 1880s houses were built to be lived in, not flipped. The George H. Anderson House is the register’s showpiece Queen Anne. Over the Victorians sits the Craftsman infill of the 1910s and twenties, block after block of it, and above Foothill the hillside streets climb into the chaparral with houses working the grade. Old Town along Myrtle Avenue runs under facade review, which is why the commercial spine still reads as a main street instead of a strip. The Monrovia Old House Preservation Group has run its Mothers Day home tour for decades, and a town that opens its old houses to the public once a year is a town that knows what it has.

Reading the houses

Here is where my background does the work. I have held a California real estate license since 1990. From 1978 to 1998 I built custom homes, and finish carpentry was my specialty within that work. In Monrovia the reading matters because the stock spans every decade since 1886 and the additions do too. In a Victorian here I am looking for original casing profiles repeating room to room, plaster returns at the openings, sash that belongs to its walls, and floor framing that tells one construction story instead of three. In the Craftsman blocks I am reading porch work against the roof over it and looking for the joinery the style was built to show. The ordinance protects the shell of a designated house. Only the reading tells you what thirty years of ownership did to the inside.

Monrovia against its neighbors

Arcadia to the west is postwar estate land on Baldwin’s old rancho, a different market and a different century. Sierra Madre in the foothills beyond it is the concentration play, the most early fabric per block in the valley. Pasadena is the monument city. Monrovia’s prize is the combination nobody else in the eastern foothills holds: a founding era Victorian layer, a deep Craftsman bench, and three decades of formal protection wrapped around both. Alhambra, at the valley’s western end, shares the period fabric and only adopted its ordinance in 2025, which makes the pair the cleanest comparison in the valley of what thirty years of protection does and what its absence costs.

How to verify what you are looking at

The city publishes its designated historic properties through the Community Development Department, and the count and the Mills Act figures in this page come from the city’s own records. The Aztec Hotel record sits with the National Park Service, as does the Sinclair designation. For any single house, the city permit record tells you what was touched and when, demolition review files are public, and a Mills Act contract is a matter of public record you can pull before you offer. Monrovia keeps a Heritage Room of its own local files, which for a town this size is a luxury. Monrovia’s entity record is Wikidata Q926988. This page is part of the larger city record, and I keep it current as the register changes.

Styles Concentrated Here.

• American Foursquare · Early-twentieth-century American vernacular style that produced large numbers of modest two-story homes throughout American suburbs from roughly 1895 through 1930. The SGV inventory is significant, particularly in the older neighborhoods of Pasadena, South Pasadena, Sierra Madre, and Monrovia. The Foursquare overlaps with the Craftsman in some examples, sharing interior detailing including built-ins, wood paneling, and beamed ceilings, and is often mistaken at first glance for Colonial Revival before closer inspection reveals the boxier proportions and the full-width porch.
• Craftsman · American architectural style that flourished roughly 1900 to 1930 in reaction to Victorian ornament and industrial mass production. Southern California Craftsman bungalows define the SGV's earliest residential character, with the largest intact concentration in Pasadena's Bungalow Heaven Landmark District.
• Folk Victorian · Modest vernacular counterpart to the elaborate Queen Anne, produced widely by builders working from pattern books and trade publications. Folk Victorian homes survive in the oldest neighborhoods of Pasadena, Monrovia, Sierra Madre, and the older parts of other SGV cities. Many examples have been heavily remodeled or replaced, and well-preserved examples in designated districts are increasingly rare.
• Mission Revival · Earliest of the Spanish-influenced architectural styles in California, predating the Spanish Colonial Revival by roughly twenty years. The style draws from the architecture of the California missions themselves. California-originated and one of the only American architectural styles that diffused from west to east, used heavily for early train depots, schools, and civic buildings, and applied to residential work in early Pasadena, South Pasadena, and surrounding cities throughout its era. The SGV residential inventory is small but architecturally significant.
• Queen Anne Victorian · Elaborate late-Victorian style that dominated American residential architecture from the 1880s through about 1905. The SGV inventory is small compared to San Francisco, but significant examples survive in the oldest neighborhoods of Pasadena, Monrovia, and Sierra Madre. The Queen Anne Cottage at the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia, built 1885 to 1886 for Lucky Baldwin, is a National Register landmark and the canonical local reference for the style at its most elaborate.

Architects Who Practiced Here.

• Smith and Williams · Smith and Williams was a South Pasadena architecture firm active from 1946 to 1973, producing over 600 projects across the San Gabriel Valley including private residences, schools, churches, and commercial buildings. The firm's pragmatic modernism shaped Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, Sierra Madre, Arcadia, La Cañada Flintridge, Monrovia, and Azusa. The complete archive is held at the UC Santa Barbara Art, Design and Architecture Museum.

Sources and references.

• Monrovia, entity identifier for the city, Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q926988)