San Marino, California

Why you should experience San Marino in Los Angeles, California.

San Marino is a patrician enclave where the West San Gabriel Valley's residential character meets broad estate parcels, mature tree canopies and an unusually concentrated legacy of Southern California domestic design.

Positioned between Pasadena, South Pasadena, and San Gabriel, the neighborhood occupies level and gently rising ground beneath the San Rafael Hills, where long residential avenues extend across a low-density landscape framed by the San Gabriel Mountains to the north. Deep setbacks, expansive lawns, layered gardens and dense street trees give individual houses substantial separation even where the underlying blocks retain the regular geometry of the surrounding valley. Huntington Drive supplies the primary encounter through the southern half of the community, crossing a predominantly residential city whose commercial frontage remains concentrated along a limited number of intersections. Virginia Road and surrounding streets create a secondary passage through larger parcels where mature planting, long approaches and architectural variation give the northern interior a markedly different scale from denser communities nearby. The result is a neighborhood whose unusual continuity of large residential parcels and architect-designed houses preserves a distinct chapter of the West San Gabriel Valley's early twentieth-century suburban development.

What you should know about San Marino.

San Marino is best known for emerging from nineteenth-century agricultural estates that Henry E. Huntington, George S. Patton and neighboring landowners consolidated into an independent city in 1913. Benjamin Davis Wilson, Los Angeles's first elected mayor, established Lake Vineyard on land containing vineyards and the body of water later transformed into Lacy Park, then transferred adjoining property to his daughter Maria Jesus Wilson and her husband James De Barth Shorb. Shorb expanded the family's agricultural enterprises through the San Gabriel Wine Company and named his estate San Marino after the Maryland farm where he had grown up. Financial difficulties following the decline of Shorb's enterprises eventually forced the property into receivership under George S. Patton, husband of Wilson's younger daughter Ruth and father of the future World War II general. Henry E. Huntington purchased the San Marino Ranch in 1903, the same period in which his expanding Pacific Electric system and Southern California landholdings were reshaping settlement throughout the region. Patton continued managing the property until William Hertrich became Huntington's ranch superintendent in 1904, and Huntington and Patton developed a close relationship as neighboring landowners. Concern over annexation by surrounding municipalities pushed local estate owners toward incorporation, and San Marino became a city on April 25, 1913. George S. Patton became its first mayor, giving the agricultural properties of the Wilson, Shorb, Patton and Huntington families a municipal successor whose boundaries preserved much of their former estate geography.

Residential construction accelerated during the 1920s as former ranch acreage entered subdivision and architects translated Southern California's Period Revival movement into houses ranging from compact speculative designs to substantial private estates. Building activity reached 212 new structures in 1927 with a combined value exceeding $3 million, placing the city's architectural expansion near its interwar peak. Wallace Neff, Roland Coate, Reginald Johnson, Marston, Van Pelt & Maybury, Gordon Kaufmann, Paul R. Williams and Myron Hunt contributed residential work across San Marino during an era when prominent architects participated at several scales of development. Berkeley Street included Spanish Colonial Revival houses by Neff, and Harold J. Bissner designed residences along Fleur Drive, placing architect-designed work within tracts as well as distinctive estates. Neff completed his own Orlando Road residence in 1928, using Spanish Colonial Revival forms and landscape work by A. E. Hanson; his practice ultimately became closely associated with the white stucco walls, tile roofs, courtyards and deeply modeled openings that helped define Southern California's interwar residential architecture. Myron Hunt pursued another branch of Period Revival design at the Emery Estate, where a Tudor Revival residence commissioned during the later 1920s carried an expenditure of $165,000 when houses nearby were being built for a fraction of that sum. The Depression sharply curtailed the building surge before residential construction resumed during the postwar decades, leaving the 1920s as a particularly concentrated architectural layer within the city. San Marino's domestic fabric consequently joins works by major regional architects with entire streets shaped during the same building cycle, giving its residential landscape significance beyond the individual estates for which the city became widely known.

How to fold San Marino into your trip.

San Marino works as the anchor for an outing connecting an Arts and Crafts masterwork created for a Midwestern industrial family, a Pasadena museum shaped by two successive collecting institutions and a Chinese-inspired cultural building conceived by an early twentieth-century dealer and scholar.

Begin at Gamble House, where Charles and Henry Greene designed an 8,100-square-foot residence for David and Mary Gamble of the Procter & Gamble family in 1908, completing construction in January 1909 after less than a year of work. The architects developed the house as an integrated Arts and Crafts composition in which structure, joinery, furniture, stained glass and carved ornament operate across the same design, producing the most complete surviving example of their mature work. The Gamble family transferred the property to the City of Pasadena and the University of Southern California in 1966, securing the house as a center for architectural study and preservation. Continue to Norton Simon Museum, whose institutional lineage began with the Pasadena Art Institute in 1922 before the organization evolved into the Pasadena Art Museum and gained international stature through exhibitions devoted to Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and other major twentieth-century artists. Galka Scheyer's 1953 bequest brought 500 works associated with the Blue Four and other modern artists into the collection, and Ladd & Kelsey designed an 85,000-square-foot museum building that opened in 1969. Financial difficulties led Norton Simon to assume responsibility for the institution in 1974; his European and Asian holdings joined the existing collection before the museum reopened in 1975, and Frank Gehry later renovated the galleries during the closing years of the twentieth century. Conclude at USC Pacific Asia Museum, occupying the building Grace Nicholson commissioned from Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury in 1924 after more than two decades spent developing her expertise in Native American and Asian art. Nicholson supplied architectural imagery that guided a composition derived from Chinese imperial courtyard architecture, imported roof tiles, stone and marble carving, bronze and copper work from China, and opened the first portion in 1925 before completing the courtyard in 1929. She gave the building to Pasadena in 1943 for cultural purposes; the Pasadena Art Institute subsequently occupied it, the Pacificulture Foundation arrived in 1971 and a 2013 partnership with the University of Southern California created USC Pacific Asia Museum, whose holdings now span more than five millennia of Asian and Pacific art. The progression moves from the Greenes' integration of architecture and craftsmanship through the institutional evolution behind the Norton Simon Museum and culminates in Grace Nicholson's fusion of collecting, scholarship and Chinese architectural precedent, connecting three distinct expressions of the San Gabriel Valley's exceptional cultural patronage.

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