Half a Day in South Pasadena, on Foot
South Pasadena is three and a half square miles. You can read most of it in an afternoon, and you can get to it without a car, which is unusual in this valley. This is a route rather than a ranking, and it starts where the train drops you.
The A Line platform sits at 905 Meridian Avenue, at Mission Street. Walk out of it and the oldest building in the city’s original business district is already in front of you. 913 Meridian is dated 1886 through 1888 in the City of South Pasadena’s own Inventory of Historic Resources. It started as a general store and small hotel and ended its commercial life as the Meridian Iron Works, which is the name a lot of people here still use for it. Since 1987 it has been the South Pasadena Historical Museum, run by the South Pasadena Preservation Foundation.
From there, walk Meridian north and then south. The city’s inventory sorts its listed properties into named districts, and two of them sit on either side of the station: North of Mission and South of Mission. Read down the inventory entries along those blocks and the same word keeps returning, Craftsman, with dates from 1903 into the 1920s, house after house on the same street. That repetition is the point of the walk. One Craftsman is a house. A run of more than thirty of them is a decision a city made and then kept.
If the street work interests you more than the route does, the Craftsman style page explains what you are looking at, and the South Pasadena city page carries the housing side of this city rather than the visiting side.
A walk tells you whether you like a street. It does not tell you what happens when a house on it goes on the market. If you have reached that second question, Sell Odds is the tool I built for it, and it estimates how likely a house is to sell at a given asking price rather than guessing what the house is worth.
How do I get to South Pasadena without a car?
The Metro A Line stops at South Pasadena station, at Mission Street and Meridian Avenue, and the station address is 905 Meridian Avenue. That platform is where this route starts, and it is the reason South Pasadena is the first walk in this series rather than the fourth.
How old is the building across from the platform?
The building at 913 Meridian Avenue is dated 1886 through 1888 in the City of South Pasadena’s Inventory of Historic Resources, which puts it in the ground before South Pasadena was a city. It started as a general store and small hotel and ended its commercial life as the Meridian Iron Works, which is the name a lot of people here still use for it. The Preservation Foundation, which runs it now, calls it the oldest building in the city’s original business district.
Can I go inside it?
It is the South Pasadena Historical Museum now, run by the South Pasadena Preservation Foundation since 1987, and the Foundation opens it Thursday afternoons alongside the farmers market on Meridian and again on Saturday mornings. Opening hours belong to the Foundation and they change, so check with them rather than with me.
What are the historic districts here, and does a district mean the whole street is protected?
The city’s inventory sorts its listed properties into named districts, among them North of Mission, South of Mission, Mission West and Grand Avenue North. A district is a mapped area with an inventory behind it. Whether one specific house inside it is individually listed is a separate question, and the inventory is the public document that answers it. If you are close to making an offer inside one of them, I will read the inventory entry for that specific address with you.
What should I actually be looking at on Meridian Avenue?
The porch. On a Craftsman block the porch carries the argument: the taper of the columns, the pier they stand on, how deep the eave runs and whether the rafter tails are exposed or boxed in. Preservation Brief 17 is the federal method for reading a building that way, and it is listed in the sources below.
How do I find out when a specific house here was built?
Look the address up in the City of South Pasadena’s Inventory of Historic Resources. For each listed property it gives a construction date, a style and the district it sits in. That document is the record, not a summary of the record. Once you have a date and a style for an address, the question that usually follows is what it would take to sell it, and that is the one Sell Odds answers.
Why do people talk about South Pasadena and the freeway?
A freeway route was planned through the city and fought for decades. The South Pasadena Preservation Foundation keeps its own account of that fight and of the surplus houses the state bought and did not demolish. That history is theirs to tell, so the guide points you at them rather than retelling it.
If I want to live on one of these blocks, what should I be looking for?
On a Craftsman, I look first at whether the porch structure and the original window openings are still there, because those two things cost the most to put back and they are the two things buyers of these houses care about most. That is my own judgment from twenty years of building and remodeling, a fair amount of it putting porches and window openings back, and not a claim from any public record. If you want a second pair of eyes on a particular porch before you write an offer, that is work I do.
Sources and references.
- Inventory of Historic Resources, The city's own list of its historic properties, carrying an address, a construction date, a style and a district for each one., City of South Pasadena (https://www.southpasadenaca.gov/files/assets/public/v/1/community-development/documents/inventory-of-historic-reso.pdf)
- South Pasadena Preservation Foundation, The nonprofit that has run the South Pasadena Historical Museum at 913 Meridian Avenue since 1987, and that holds its own record of the freeway fight and the houses left behind by it., South Pasadena Preservation Foundation (https://sppreservation.org/)
- Preservation Brief 17, Architectural Character, The federal method for looking at an old building and naming what gives it its character., National Park Service, Technical Preservation Services (https://www.nps.gov/tps/how-to-preserve/briefs/17-architectural-character.htm)
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