Added to the National Register of Historic Places (and designated a National Historic Landmark) on December 8, 1976

So look, I admire mission revival architecture as much as the next person. Give me a tidy cream-colored stucco wall, topped with those reddish clay Spanish tiles, and I’ll “ooh” and “aah” and “isn’t that darling?” and maybe post about it on Instagram. This 1925 example is a fine one. Architect Joseph Kucera designed an elegant two-story home, at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac in San Marino, that any well-to-do family would be proud to live in. But in the grand scheme of things, this house isn’t one of just two dozen National Historic Landmarks in LA County because it’s a pretty building. It’s because it was the home of Edwin Hubble, one of the greatest astronomers of the 20th century. 

Hubble was one of those kinds of renaissance men that we don’t see so many of anymore. Years before he expanded our understanding of the cosmos, he was a medal-winning high school track athlete, earned an undergrad scholarship to the University of Chicago, led their basketball team to a conference title, and studied law, literature and Spanish at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. He returned to the University of Chicago to study astronomy as a graduate student. 

Just as Hubble was completing his graduate studies in 1917, George Ellery Hale came a-calling. Hale was founder and director of the Mount Wilson Observatory in the mountains above Pasadena, which had just installed the 100-inch Hooker Telescope, the most powerful telescope in the world at the time. Of course Hubble wanted in, but he had to defer the job for two years when Uncle Sam came a-calling: after hauling ass to finish his doctoral dissertation on “Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae,” Hubble shipped off to France to serve during WWI.

Hubble’s new house at 1340 Woodstock Rd. was completed in 1925, just a few minutes south of Hale’s personal solar laboratory. He moved in at a turning point in his life, both personally and professionally. Hubble and his wife Grace had married the year before and were starting their lives together. Also in 1924, Hubble discovered dozens of “Cepheid variable” stars within the Andromeda and Triangulum star clusters. Using techniques developed by astronomer Henrietta Levitt, Hubble was able to gauge their distance from the earth, proving conclusively that there were tons of galaxies well outside of our own. The Milky Way was not alone!

This was the first of many of Hubble’s contributions that would shape our view of the cosmos and change how astronomy was practiced. Some other important ones: 

• Hubble’s Law: He discovered, along with Milton Humason (a former janitor and “night assistant” at Mt. Wilson), that nebulae are moving away from each other, and from observers on earth, at a velocity in proportion to their distance away from us. In other words, the universe is expanding! This idea laid the groundwork for the big bang theory. It also helped to confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which held that the universe must be contracting or expanding.
• Based on previous discoveries by Leavitt and Harlow Shapley, he refined a methodology for measuring distances from the earth to distant galaxies and nebulae. 
• He developed a classification system for nebulae, called “Hubble’s tuning fork.”
• He advocated for the construction of the 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego; Hubble was the first astronomer to use it.
• He lobbied for the Nobel Institute to classify astronomy as a branch of physics, and therefore eligible for the Nobel Prize in Physics. They finally relented in 1953, the same year that Hubble died. 

All of this work was done during Hubble’s tenure at Mt. Wilson, and nearly all of it during his 28 years of residence at this lovely mission revival home in San Marino. You can just imagine Hubble descending from the mountain at daybreak after a night spent gazing at stars a million light years away, walking through the door, giving Grace a hug and sitting down to smoke a pipe and contemplate the universe-expanding discoveries he had just made.

Recommended Reading:

+Hubble House’s NRHP nomination form 

+Case Files: Edwin Hubble (The Franklin Institute)

+The Unbelievable Life of Edwin Hubble and His Contributions to Astrophysics (All That’s Interesting, 2015)

+The 200-Inch Telescope and Some Problems It May Solve (Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 1947)

+Bugs and Bullets in an Expanding Universe: The Scientists who worked in Paradise (Communicate Science, 2013)