Why Orangewood Center matters.
Orangewood Center is a neighborhood shopping center where Southwest Pasadena's historic residential character meets everyday commerce on ground once occupied by one of the city's earliest public schools.
Set along West California Boulevard near South Fair Oaks Avenue and just steps from Pasadena Avenue, the shopping center occupies Southwest Pasadena between the South Fair Oaks commercial corridor, the former SR 710 right-of-way and the historic residential streets approaching Orange Grove Boulevard, with the Arroyo Seco opening west toward San Rafael Hills and the San Gabriel Mountains rising beyond the city to the north. A low, street-facing collection of storefronts spreads across the former Garfield School grounds, replacing the vertical school buildings that occupied the property through much of the twentieth century. Individual shops and services make short, repeated neighborhood visits the principal encounter, with separate entrances allowing the center to function as a collection of independent businesses. The surrounding street grid places that commercial activity against bungalow courts, older houses and the varied small-scale buildings of the South Fair Oaks district. The result is a modest shopping center whose contemporary form conceals a site extending back to Pasadena's nineteenth-century educational expansion and the later physical upheaval surrounding the unfinished 710 freeway.
What defines Orangewood Center.
Orangewood Center is best known for occupying the former site of James A. Garfield Elementary School, whose ancestry began with California Street School in 1888 before the campus took President James A. Garfield's name in 1890. The original building carried an elaborate late nineteenth-century profile, and a separate kindergarten opened for the 1902-03 school year at Pasadena Avenue and California Boulevard. A 12-room brick school replaced the first structure in 1906, then yielded in 1935 to a collection of newer classroom buildings as Pasadena modernized the campus. Garfield remained embedded in Southwest Pasadena through the following decades, and its auditorium drew 500 residents to a major 1964 meeting over competing routes for the proposed north-south freeway extension. The campus disappeared during the early 1970s as the SR 710 project transformed surrounding blocks, ending more than eight decades of educational use on the property. Orangewood Center emerged on the former school grounds later in the decade, with the present commercial property dating to 1978 and preserving the site as a neighborhood destination under a radically different physical form.
The surviving relationship between Orangewood Center and the surrounding street network makes the vanished Garfield campus unusually legible despite the complete change in use. Pasadena Avenue still defines the western edge of the property, California Boulevard remains its southern axis and the historic South Fair Oaks corridor begins immediately east, fixing the shopping center inside the same grid that organized the school grounds. Garfield's successive buildings tracked Pasadena's growth across three distinct architectural generations, moving from the ornate 1888 school to the 1906 brick replacement and the lower modern classrooms introduced in 1935. The final campus also stood beside neighborhoods later fractured by freeway acquisition, placing its disappearance within the broader transformation of Southwest Pasadena during the SR 710 era. Orangewood Center subsequently became one of the larger commercial parcels among the smaller storefronts, converted houses and early twentieth-century buildings that give South Fair Oaks its unusually varied physical grain. More than a century after California Street School first occupied the corner, the property preserves an uncommon sequence from nineteenth-century school ground through freeway-era clearance to neighborhood commerce.
How Orangewood Center fits.
Orangewood Center works as the anchor for an outing connecting a former freeway staging ground reclaimed as a Mediterranean garden with Southern California's most complete surviving prewar residential Japanese garden and the winter estate that became the permanent institutional home of the Rose Parade.
Begin at Arlington Garden, where a three-acre landscape occupies part of the former Durand estate, once dominated by a 50-room mansion and extensive grounds. The house disappeared in 1964, and the property became a staging area for the proposed 710 freeway before decades of abandonment followed the project's interruption. Betty and Charles McKenney joined designer Mayita Dinos in turning the compacted parcel into a garden beginning in 2005, retaining old pepper, jacaranda, oak and palm trees from the earlier estate among newer Mediterranean plantings. Continue to Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden, created between 1935 and 1940 by Japanese landscape designer Kinzuchi Fujii for Charles and Ellamae Storrier Stearns. Fujii developed a hill-and-pond strolling garden across former tennis courts, using winding paths, waterfalls, bridges and objects acquired in Japan. Its original teahouse was constructed in Japan to Fujii's design, dismantled for shipment and reconstructed in Pasadena before fire destroyed it in 1981. The surviving landscape remains the only intact major Japanese-style garden created before World War II for a Southern California residence. Conclude at Tournament House, the Italian Renaissance residence G. Lawrence Stimson designed for his family and completed in 1914 before William Wrigley Jr. purchased it for $170,000. Wrigley acquired the neighboring property for another $25,000 in 1915 and expanded the grounds that became the estate's gardens. After Ada Wrigley died in 1958, the family transferred the property to Pasadena with the condition that it become the permanent headquarters of the Tournament of Roses. The surrounding 4.5 acres now contain more than 1,500 varieties of roses, camellias and annuals, linking a former Millionaires Row estate directly with Pasadena's defining New Year tradition. The progression moves from land reclaimed after the abandoned freeway project through a masterwork of Japanese landscape design and culminates at a private winter estate permanently converted into the institutional center of Pasadena's internationally recognized New Year celebration.
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