Why Raymond Avenue matters.
Raymond Avenue is a storied corridor where Old Pasadena's architectural character meets resort-era grandeur, early commercial expansion and a north-south street whose name preserves the hotelier who helped establish Pasadena as a winter destination.
Running through Old Pasadena between the northern residential districts and Raymond Hill, the metropolitan corridor follows a long north-south line across Washington Boulevard, Walnut Street, Colorado Boulevard, Green Street, Del Mar Boulevard and California Boulevard before climbing toward South Pasadena. Northern stretches pass through quieter residential blocks where mature trees, detached houses and surviving stonework occupy gently changing terrain before the street enters Pasadena's historic commercial center. Traveling south across Colorado Boulevard brings brick commercial buildings, narrow storefronts and former industrial properties into close succession, with the scale opening around Del Mar as the street approaches the rail corridor and southern districts. The avenue continues beyond Old Pasadena through lower-density residential and institutional frontage before rising toward the terrain associated with its original namesake hotel. The result is a corridor whose long alignment, changing grades, preserved commercial architecture and transition between residential Pasadena and its historic center reveal several distinct phases of the city through a single street.
What defines Raymond Avenue.
Raymond Avenue is best known for carrying the name of Walter Raymond, the Boston travel entrepreneur whose resort enterprise became inseparable from Pasadena's emergence as a nationally prominent winter destination during the 1880s. Raymond arrived in Southern California in 1883 and developed the Raymond Hotel with financial backing from his father, Emmons Raymond, a railroad businessman. The hotel opened on Bacon Hill in 1886, and the elevation soon became known as Raymond Hill as the surrounding avenue adopted the family name. Fire destroyed the first Raymond Hotel on Easter Sunday in 1895 after an ember escaped one of its numerous chimneys, and Walter Raymond rebuilt the resort on a larger scale for reopening in 1901. The avenue became the address of three major resort properties during Pasadena's hotel era: the Raymond at its southern end, the Green near the developing commercial center and John Hunt Painter's 1888 hotel at its northern reaches. Raymond also carried civic and cultural institutions, including Pasadena's early public library on North Raymond and an opera house farther south, giving the street functions extending beyond the seasonal resort economy. An 1888 photograph already shows Raymond filled with pedestrians, horse-drawn vehicles, businesses and a public parade, capturing the avenue as one of the young city's active streets within two years of Pasadena's incorporation.
Commercial development around Colorado Boulevard gave the avenue a second consequential role as Pasadena evolved from resort town into an established city. Pasadena National Bank opened in 1886 and initially occupied a room on Raymond before moving into the Masonic Temple at Raymond and Colorado, where its vault incorporated five-foot-thick walls reinforced with steel horseshoes. Architect Harry Ridgway designed the Romanesque Revival Masonic Temple at the southeast corner in 1894, adding a substantial masonry building to an intersection already emerging as a commercial center. William Morgan, an English-born miner and lumberman, built Pasadena's first permanent post office and the Morgan Block at 44-48 South Raymond, tying federal postal service and private commerce to the same street. Home Telephone and Telegraph Company later operated at 70 North Raymond, and by 1912 it had become Pasadena's sole residential telephone provider. Streetcars shared Raymond with wagons, bicycles, horses and pedestrians during this period, placing the avenue within the transportation network accompanying Pasadena's rapid metropolitan growth. The concentration of banking, postal service, telecommunications, retail buildings and street transportation converted an avenue associated with resort travel into one of the principal commercial arteries of early Pasadena.
How Raymond Avenue fits.
Raymond Avenue works as the anchor for an outing connecting a surviving resort annex from Pasadena's winter-hotel era, a former military building converted into a contemporary arts institution and a museum whose financial crisis brought one of the twentieth century's great private collections to Pasadena.
Begin at Castle Green, built in 1898 as the Central Annex of Colonel George Gill Green's successful Hotel Green and formally opened on January 16, 1899. Architect Frederick L. Roehrig combined Moorish, Spanish and Victorian elements across a structural-steel building with brick walls and concrete floors, making it Pasadena's first fireproof building. A pedestrian bridge crossed Raymond Avenue to connect the annex with the original hotel, and an underground passage created another physical connection between the two properties. The hotel expanded again in 1903 with a wing extending toward the Wooster Block, producing a sprawling resort complex around Raymond and Green streets. Declining hotel business brought conversion of Castle Green into cooperative apartments in 1926, removal of the bridge in 1929 and demolition of nearly all the original hotel east of Raymond in 1935. Continue to Armory Center for the Arts, housed in a 1932 California National Guard Armory on North Raymond Avenue. The institution traces its educational lineage to the Pasadena Art Institute's Children's Museum program, opened in 1947 as an early West Coast venture in artist-led contemporary visual-arts education. Enrollment grew until its workshops were serving 450 students each week, and subsequent incarnations operated at Lincoln School and McKinley Elementary School. Pasadena officials approached workshop leaders in 1985 about occupying the disused armory, which had also housed the Pasadena Badminton Club for more than half a century. Supporters from the recently closed Baxter Art Gallery at Caltech joined workshop leaders in forming the Armory Center for the Visual Arts the following year. More than $1 million financed rehabilitation of the former military facility, and Armory Center for the Arts opened there on November 2, 1989. Conclude at Norton Simon Museum, whose institutional history begins with the Pasadena Art Institute, founded in 1922 and incorporated in 1924. The organization commissioned Ladd & Kelsey in 1964 to design an 85,000-square-foot museum at Carmelita Park, and the new Pasadena Art Museum opened in 1969 with holdings and acquisitions encompassing Larry Bell, Richard Diebenkorn, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. Construction debt threatened the institution with closure during the early 1970s, leading trustees to reach an agreement with industrialist and collector Norton Simon in 1974. Simon assumed the museum's financial obligations and management, combined its holdings with a private collection he had built since the mid-1950s and reopened the institution in March 1975. His collecting ultimately encompassed more than 8,000 works during his lifetime, including European paintings, master prints and South and Southeast Asian sculpture. Jennifer Jones Simon later oversaw a 1996-1999 gallery renovation by Frank Gehry, followed by Nancy Goslee Power's redesign of the sculpture garden. The progression moves from Roehrig's resort architecture through the conversion of a Depression-era armory into an arts institution and culminates in the financial rescue and reinvention of Pasadena's principal art museum, connecting three periods when architecture and cultural patronage reshaped the city.
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