South Pasadena

About South Pasadena.

South Pasadena is an 1888 streetcar suburb in the San Gabriel Valley whose eleven local historic districts, Greene and Greene's Oaklawn ensemble, and 1925 Rialto Theatre preserve one of the most intact early townscapes in the valley.

South Pasadena, California is the San Gabriel Valley city that kept its early fabric: an 1888 charter town of Craftsman, Victorian, and revival neighborhoods where eleven locally designated historic districts now protect what the streetcar era built. The game here is the reverse of the estate cities. Almost everything a buyer walks is inside or beside protected fabric, so the two questions that matter are what the district status lets you touch, and whether the house in front of you still carries its original work. This page holds the record for both.

A town that voted itself into existence

South Pasadena chose independence early and on the record. In February 1888 the residents of the southern portion of Pasadena voted eighty-five to twenty-five to incorporate, and on March 2, 1888 the city stood on its own, the sixth municipality in Los Angeles County, population just over five hundred (City of South Pasadena). Donald McIntyre Graham served as first mayor. The boundaries drawn by 1889 are essentially the boundaries today, about three and a half square miles, which means the city never diluted itself with annexation. The Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad had arrived in 1885, the Raymond Hotel and the Cawston Ostrich Farm opened around 1886 and pulled the tourists in, and when the Pacific Electric Short Line came through, every block in town sat within walking distance of a red car stop. South Pasadena was one of the first true streetcar suburbs in Los Angeles, and it still reads like one.

The record carries a hard fact from those decades too. Before the 1950s South Pasadena was a sundown town, excluding non-white residents and workers, and that exclusion is part of how these neighborhoods originally filled. It belongs on the page for the same reason the rest of the record does: the record is only useful whole.

The Greenes’ front door

Charles and Henry Greene built houses across Pasadena that the whole country studies. In South Pasadena they built something they built nowhere else: a bridge. The South Pasadena Realty and Improvement Company hired the brothers to master plan its Oaklawn subdivision, and the ensemble went up in pieces: the entrance portals in 1904 to 1905, clinker brick and river rock under timber and wrought iron, then the Oaklawn Bridge and Waiting Station in 1905 to 1906, with M. De Palo as consulting engineer (Greene and Greene Virtual Archives, Avery Architectural Archives). The bridge ran six spans and three hundred forty feet over the Santa Fe tracks, one of the country’s early reinforced concrete bridges and the only bridge the Greenes ever designed. The waiting station beside it, Arroyo Seco boulders and brick under redwood beams and Ludowici clay tile, sheltered Pacific Electric passengers waiting for the red cars (Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey). The ensemble went on the National Register in 1973 and stands as South Pasadena Cultural Landmark 3. Cars came off the bridge in 1973; the city restored it in 2002. You can walk it today for nothing, and a block west sit two more Greene and Greene houses, including the Howard and Etta Longley House, one of their earliest surviving residential works.

One more Greene commission tells you who this town drew. In 1903 to 1904 the brothers designed a house here for Lucretia R. Garfield, the widow of President James A. Garfield, and kept altering it for her through 1916 (Greene and Greene Virtual Archives). A president’s widow picked this town, and the house is still on its street.

Mission Street and the Rialto

The original business center grew where the rails crossed, around Mission Street and Meridian Avenue, and its old commercial core is documented block by block in its National Register file. The 1888 Meridian Iron Works building anchors it, restored by the city and serving now as the historical museum and the base of the South Pasadena Preservation Foundation. Down Fair Oaks Avenue stands the Rialto Theatre, opened October 17, 1925, architect Lewis Arthur Smith, a twelve hundred seat Moorish fantasy trimmed with Spanish Baroque and Egyptian flourishes. Citizen petitions saved it from becoming a parking lot in 1977, the National Park Service listed it on the National Register in 1978, and though it closed as a cinema in 2007 and now houses a church, the marquee still runs and La La Land put it back on screen (National Park Service). The Century House of 1888, moved from Meridian Avenue to Mission Street, is the house from Halloween. Filmmakers keep coming back to South Pasadena because the fabric is real: a town that never tore itself down can play anywhere in America.

The freeway that never came

For most of the last sixty years the state planned to drive the 710 freeway extension straight through this town, and for most of the last sixty years South Pasadena said no. The Meridian route would have taken whole corridors of early housing. The Longley House shows how the defense actually worked: its place on the National Register blocked the demolition, and the transportation department’s request to strip it from the Register went nowhere. Multiply that fight across decades and you get the result a buyer sees today: blocks of intact early stock that would not exist if the road had won.

The neighborhoods and the stack

The preservation machinery here is the deepest of any small city in the valley. The movement organized in 1970, became the South Pasadena Preservation Foundation, and the city now carries eleven locally designated historic districts, with surveys in 2002 and 2017 identifying roughly sixty more areas that may qualify. That is the stack, federal to local, and it sits over Victorian survivors like Wynyate of 1887 by W. R. Norton, over the Adobe Flores from the Mexican era, and over Raymond Hill, where the grand Raymond Hotel of 1886 burned on Easter morning 1895, rose again in 1903, and came down in the Depression for the houses that hold the hill now. Oaklawn itself is a designated district, and its full record gets its own page in this library.

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. Twenty years of building teaches you to read a house from the inside out, and South Pasadena is the best town in the valley to do it, because so much survives to read. In an early Craftsman here I am looking at the box beams and whether their joinery is original or applied, at built-ins that sit in walls framed for them, at casing profiles that repeat room to room, at quarter-sawn oak under a century of finish. A house can be inside a district and still be gutted; the district protects the shell, not the soul. The reading tells you which one you are standing in.

South Pasadena against its neighbors

The city sits between Pasadena, the parent it voted itself out of, and the Los Angeles line, with San Marino along its eastern edge and Alhambra to the south. Pasadena has the monuments and the scale. San Marino has the estates. South Pasadena has continuity: the most complete small town fabric of the three, held together by the districts and the decades of defense. Across the valley, Arcadia makes the clean contrast: Arcadia’s prize is postwar estate land, South Pasadena’s prize is that the prewar town never left.

How to verify what you are looking at

The record here is unusually easy to pull. The National Register files for the Oaklawn ensemble, the Longley House, the Rialto, and the Mission Street core sit in the National Register database. The city’s eleven districts sit on the local register, and the Preservation Foundation keeps the working archive at the Meridian Iron Works. For any single house, the city permit record tells you what was touched and when, and the district maps tell you what governs the parcel. In this market the district status defines what you can change, and the original work inside defines what you are paying for. Both are documented, which is the way I like a market to read. 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.
• Mid-Century Modern · Postwar modern style emphasizing indoor-outdoor flow, structural honesty, and integration with site. In the SGV, MCM is well-represented in Pasadena's Madison Heights and in the foothill communities, often in works by H. Roy Kelley, Buff & Hensman, and Smith and Williams.
• 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.

Architects Who Practiced Here.

• G. Lawrence Stimson · G. Lawrence Stimson (1882 to 1939) was a Pasadena architect and builder responsible for approximately 350 Craftsman bungalows in Pasadena and South Pasadena between roughly 1905 and the late 1910s, plus a smaller number of larger commissions. His SGV catalog includes the Italian Renaissance Revival mansion on South Orange Grove Boulevard now known as the Tournament House (1906 to 1914), the Mission Revival residence at 227 Oaklawn Avenue in South Pasadena with Greene and Greene-designed interiors (1907), and the 1917 Stimson family residence in San Marino. He worked inside the family real estate development business his father, George Woodbury Stimson, founded in Pasadena in the late 1880s.
• H. Roy Kelley · H. Roy Kelley was a Los Angeles-based residential architect with a documented Pasadena, San Marino, South Pasadena, and Rancho Santa Anita catalog from the mid-1930s through 1950. He took his architecture degree from Cornell University in 1915 and was elected Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA) in 1940. He specialized in Early California, Monterey Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, English Revival with Cotswold Cottage features, and one-story California ranch designs. The 2004 City of Pasadena Period Revival Architecture report names him among the architects who established the California ranch as a residential type, alongside Wallace Neff, Palmer Sabin, and Donald MacMurray. His papers are preserved at Cornell University (thirteen scrapbooks of designs, articles, and photographs of his residences from 1913 to 1965) and the University of California, Santa Barbara Architecture and Design Collection (6.5 linear feet, including annotated drafts of his memoir 50 Happy Years of Architecture).
• Joseph J. Blick · 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.
• 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.