Sunday, July 7, 2019

Pasadena


After seeing the great exhibition in San Diego, we took the train up to Pasadena, where our son, Hunter and his wife now live. Since childhood our son has loved touring, so he organized a tour to introduce us to his new home city. 

One of the cultural stops was The Gamble House. We had visited the house before, maybe 40 years earlier, and I remember being more excited by it then.  That was possibly because we were then with colleagues on a junket, not on a general public tour. I love the period and looking at the photos I am posting I feel what I did then … the harmony of this Arts and Crafts house, from its Japanese-influenced wood structure to the stained glass of its front door.



David Gamble, second generation of Proctor & Gamble, and his wife Mary, from Cincinnati decided to build their winter residence in Pasadena and hired the firm of Greene & Greene.  The latter were architects who had built other houses in the neighborhood which the Gambles obviously liked, and it could not have hurt that the Greene Brothers originally came from the Gambles’ home town.

Charles Greene (1868-1957) and Henry Greene (1870-1954) were born on the outskirts of Cincinnati.  Their father became a physician in St. Louis and put the boys in a Manual Training School at Washington University.  He then decided that they should become architects and enrolled them in the architectural school at MIT.  They found work as apprentices in a couple of architectural firms when their parents moved to Pasadena and asked their boys to join them.  On the trip west they visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago where Japanese architecture made a lasting impression on them.  Opening their own architectural firm, they designed what they called “Ultimate Bungalows” of which the Gamble House is one. Some bungalow! Our tour of most of the rooms took over an hour and we were not lingering. 


The drawings were ready in February of 1908 and construction was started in March.  Not everything moves quicker today then in yesteryear! The Gambles also wanted Greene & Greene to design the furniture which was all completed by the summer of 1910.  The house included a number of blind doors and inset closets giving a very clean look, accentuated by the furniture.

Mary and David were not the only Gambles living in the house but two of the sons were there at different times.  it seems there was always a child or grandchild around and Mary’s sister, Julia, became a full-time resident. There were bedrooms for all, most of them with sleeping porches which were much appreciated in the days before air conditioning. The dining room table was expandable, and the large sitting room was designed to accommodate the different activities of family members.



We also went to see the City Hall of Pasadena, a very grand building indeed. The project began in 1923 when the people of Pasadena approved a $3.5 million project to develop a civic center with City Hall being the centerpiece. This was near the end of the “City Beautiful Movement” 1890’s to 1920’s when urban planners decided that “design could not be separated from social issues and should encourage civic pride and engagement.”  It continues to do so almost a century later.


The low relief armorials on the building have the seal of the city on a shield. My schoolmate, David Phillips, who is an expert in armorials, supplied me with the explanation: The word Pasadena means “valley” in the Ojibwa (Chippewa) language but has been interpreted as “Crown of the Valley” or “Key of the Valley,” hence the adoption of both the crown and the key in the official City Seal.


It is not easy to keep a hundred-year old building in mint condition particularly when it is being used by hundreds of employees and visitors every day!  Near the end of the 1990’s the City hired an architectural firm to do a major renovation that included earthquake-proofing the building by floating the pillars of the foundation on moveable steel balls. The employees were all cleared out in 2004 and were finally allowed to return in 2007.  Now again, it is worth a look.

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