Why Wilson Avenue matters.
Wilson Avenue is a foundational corridor where Downtown Glendale's commercial character meets the city's original town center, early electric railway expansion and a street whose shifting importance charts Glendale's rise from rural settlement to metropolitan business district.
Running through Downtown Glendale between Adams Hill and Rossmoyne, the urban corridor follows a long east-west line from the San Rafael Hills toward the western city, crossing Glendale Avenue, Brand Boulevard and Central Avenue as the surrounding scale changes from residential blocks to the concentrated core. Eastern stretches pass beneath the rising terrain around Rossmoyne through a lower landscape of houses, apartment buildings and mature street trees before the roadway enters a denser sequence of commercial structures. Traveling west brings Wilson through Glendale Avenue and into Downtown, where larger façades, closely spaced storefronts and multistory buildings compress the street around its principal intersections. Beyond Brand Boulevard, the corridor continues through a taller urban field before development gradually loosens toward the western edge of Central Glendale. The result is a corridor whose hillside approach, changing building scale, historic commercial intersections and direct passage through Downtown make the physical growth of Glendale unusually legible within a single east-west route.
What defines Wilson Avenue.
Wilson Avenue is best known for passing through the original center of Glendale, where the intersection now formed with Glendale Avenue served as the commercial nucleus of the emerging settlement during the late nineteenth century. The road was then 3rd Street, and the surrounding townsite grew from land acquired during the 1880s by E. T. Byram, B. F. Patterson and George W. Phelon after the breakup of former Rancho San Rafael holdings. When the Glendale town plat was filed in 1887, businesses and houses already clustered around 3rd Street and Glendale Avenue. George F. Dutton operated a grocery at the intersection, and the same corner later accommodated the local post office and barbershop as the settlement developed around a population of 300. A nearby 75-room hotel built in 1886 and 1887 by Cameron E. Thom, Erskine Mayo Ross and Charles Crow represented one of the young town's most ambitious investments, costing $60,000 before the collapse of the late-1880s property boom undermined its original commercial purpose. The hotel subsequently housed a girls' school, Glendale Union High School and a Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium before disappearing in 1928. 3rd Street acquired another formative role after Edgar D. Goode began developing the Glendale and Eagle Rock Railway in 1907. Passenger service began in 1909, and the tracks ran east from Glendale Avenue along the street before turning toward Colorado Boulevard and Eagle Rock. The line extended to Verdugo Park in 1910 and reached Montrose in 1913, tying the old town center to communities developing along the Verdugo foothills. Renamed Wilson Avenue, the street carried forward the geography of Glendale's first commercial center even after the city's economic focus migrated west toward Brand Boulevard.
The intersection of Wilson Avenue and Brand Boulevard captured that westward commercial shift through a concentrated building campaign during the 1920s. Builder John William Lawson chose the southwest corner for a four-story office block in 1922, placing Glendale's first business building of that height one block beyond the commercial center then concentrated around Brand and Broadway. Lawson had arrived from Michigan in 1907, rebuilt his finances after losses 1910 and accumulated property through the renovation and resale of older houses before undertaking larger projects. His Wilson Avenue building later became associated with Webb's Department Store, whose founder Harry S. Webb had arrived from Chicago in 1916 and developed one of Glendale's principal locally owned retail businesses. Across the central district, architect Alfred F. Priest designed the six-story Security Trust and Savings Bank building at Brand and Broadway in 1923 and completed nearly fifty Glendale commissions as the downtown skyline rose around Wilson. By the end of the decade, the corridor supported apartment architecture as well: J. A. Grundfor designed the Tudor Revival Canterbury Court Apartments at 319 West Wilson Avenue in 1928, extending the period's investment beyond commercial construction into denser residential building. Downtown underwent another dramatic vertical expansion in the late 1980s, when a project north of the Glendale Galleria was planned at more than $150 million with 790,000 square feet across twin office towers bounded by Brand, Broadway, Orange Street and Wilson Avenue. Development of The Exchange simultaneously reshaped the blocks between Brand Boulevard, Louise Street, Broadway and Wilson, linking the historic corridor to a new generation of downtown investment. Wilson Avenue traces Glendale's commercial geography across three distinct scales: the nineteenth-century town center at Glendale Avenue, the 1920s business expansion around Brand Boulevard and the late twentieth-century high-rise core that followed.
How Wilson Avenue fits.
Wilson Avenue works as the anchor for a Glendale sequence tracing the city's surviving domestic architecture from a Victorian house once standing directly on the corridor through an early capitalist's exotic private estate and into an adobe residence rooted in the former Rancho San Rafael.
Begin at Doctors House Museum, a Queen Anne-Eastlake residence built 1888 at Third and B streets, the present intersection of Wilson Avenue and Belmont Street. Four physicians occupied the house in succession, beginning with C. V. Bogue, who used it as both a residence and medical office before David Winslow Hunt purchased the property after arriving from Minnesota in 1901. Hunt expanded the carriage house and stored Glendale's first automobile in its original section, and later owners included physicians A. L. Bryant and Leon H. Hurtt. Silent-screen actor and filmmaker Nell Shipman lived there with her family from 1917 through 1920, sharing the property with a menagerie that included two bear cubs. Threatened with demolition in 1979, the house became the catalyst for formation of The Glendale Historical Society, was moved from 921 East Wilson Avenue to Brand Park and reopened as a museum after restoration. Continue to Brand Library & Art Center, originally Leslie C. Brand's private residence El Miradero. Architect Nathaniel Dryden, Brand's brother-in-law, designed the 1904 house with inspiration from the East Indian Pavilion constructed for Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition, producing the Saracenic forms that distinguish the property from Glendale's surrounding residential architecture. Brand died in 1925 and left the estate to the city upon the death of his wife, stipulating that the property become a park and library. Mary Louise Brand remained there until 1945, and the mansion became a 5,000-square-foot library in 1956. A 21,000-square-foot addition completed in 1969 extended the original architectural language into new arts spaces, and a trail beyond the house reaches the Brand family cemetery, marked by a pyramid containing family members and their dogs. Conclude at Casa Adobe de San Rafael, completed in 1871 for Tomás and Maria Sanchez with adobe bricks made on the property. Sanchez had served as Los Angeles County sheriff, and the house belonged to a landscape still closely connected to the former Rancho San Rafael, the enormous Spanish land grant once held by José María Verdugo. After a period of abandonment, the property faced demolition in 1930 when the California Medicinal Wine Company acquired it and planned to remove both the building and its mature eucalyptus trees. Neighbors stopped the destruction, Glendale purchased the property that year and restoration was completed by 1932, making the adobe an early centerpiece of the city's architectural preservation work. The progression moves from a Queen Anne house rescued from Wilson Avenue through Brand's highly personal turn-of-the-century estate and culminates in the Sanchez adobe, carrying Glendale's surviving domestic architecture backward from the incorporated city to the nineteenth-century rancho landscape that preceded it.
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