Added to the National Register of Historic Places August 9, 2011

Sometimes, the National Register serves up a headscratcher. Yes, the house at 1360 Lida Street, built in 1888, is a compact gem of a Queen Anne Victorian. It fits plenty of decorative wonder into its 1,960 square foot footprint. The corner consoles with their delicate carved vine patterns, that hexagonal fishscale shingle up on the second floor of the north facade, the unusual seven-sided interior doorway with the sliding doors (see pics here) – there’s a ton of personality and texture here to enliven this oaked-in corner lot in the Linda Vista neighborhood of Pasadena, on the slopes just west of the Rose Bowl (see visit #186). 

And yet in the historical record, the House at 1360 Lida is somewhat of a mystery. We don’t know who commissioned, designed or built it; records are scant before 1914, when Linda Vista became part of neighboring Pasadena. I’ve dug up no info about who lived there for its first few decades, and old newspapers and building permits offer only clues. The Los Angeles Times puts Margaret Kidder there in the ‘30s, a respected artist and teacher whose work was exhibited at LACMA, the Pasadena Art Institute (later known as the Norton Simon) and the Ebell Salon (see visit #141 for more on that) during her lifetime. 

Even the house’s nomination form for the National Register offers little context about how it got there, and where it fits into Linda Vista’s development. Instead it focuses on the house as “a notable example of the Queen-Anne subtype of the single-family residence property type identified in the Multiple Property Documentation Form ‘Late 19th/Early 20th Century Development and Architecture in Pasadena.’” Fair enough, but…what makes this one special?

In the absence of much more to go on, let’s think of the House at 1360 Lida Street as a jumping off point for exploring the early history of the bedroom community of Linda Vista. These days it’s Pasadena’s wealthiest neighborhood, where the median price of a house in 2022 was a whopping $2,575,000. But it wasn’t always that way. Back before the Spanish missionaries came, this land was tended by the indigenous Hahamongna, a tribe of the Tongva/Kizh people. According to historian Beverly Wayte, Linda Vista was called “Indian Flat” as late as the 1880s because of its former inhabitants.

For nearly 60 years the neighborhood was part of the 36,000 acre Rancho San Rafael, granted to the Spanish Corporal José Maria Verdugo in 1784. The Verdugo family owned the land throughout the turbulent first half of the 1800s, even after Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, and the missions were secularized in the 1830s. But starting in 1843, “Indian Flat” would begin a dizzying number of ownership changes over the next half century – first it was stolen by an LA City politician named Ignacio Coronel, who sold it to a couple young American lawyers in 1852, one of whom traded it back to Verdugo’s son Julio in 1858, who then split the recovered ranch with his sister Catalina, who took ownership of the northern part including Linda Vista. 

But then Julio mortgaged the whole rancho to an LA merchant who seriously screwed them over with the terms of the mortgage (a devastating drought that killed a lot of their cattle didn’t help), and the courts foreclosed on the old Rancho San Rafael in 1869. It was auctioned off to a quartet of investors, who turned around and sued 36 Verdugo family members who had laid claim to part of their new property. In what’s now called “The Great Partition of 1871,” the courts settled the case by dividing the old Rancho into 31 parts, owned by 28 separate parties. Julio Verdugo and his blind sister Catalina were allowed to stay in their homes. 

After the Great Partition, a German immigrant named Benjamin Dreyfus bought a large section of the old Rancho San Rafael in 1871, including Linda Vista, and used it to raise sheep while he focused on his winemaking venture in Anaheim. Dreyfus sold the land to a real estate syndicate in 1883, who turned it around that same year to a farmer named John D. Yocum.

The House at 1360 Lida Street era really begins with the Yocums. John Yocum and his wife Hannah had moved to Pasadena from Iowa in 1882, along with their son Nathan and daughter-in-law Lydia. Initially they bought four acres on Monk Hill, just across the Arroyo from Linda Vista. But when they spied the untouched slopes across the way, they sold off a portion of their Monk Hill property, and bought Linda Vista from the syndicate that owned it, plus additional land at the bottom of the Arroyo. The Yocums built a farmhouse just north of present-day Lida Street, then another near Devil’s Gate Dam (neither still exist). Over the next few years, they leveled and tilled the soil, tunneled deep into the hillsides for water, and planted some 12,000 peach and apricot trees. 

The Yocums also developed part of their acreage into ranch or home plots that they could parcel off. New settlers were soon attracted to the arable, unused land. Folks like Byron Clark, a horticulturist who built the irrigation system that helped Altadena flourish, then lined Linda Vista Drive (then called Park Avenue) with pepper trees, and joined with his brother-in-law and John Yocum to start a nursery. And also Dr. Jacob Hodge, who planned a sanitarium on his property in Linda Vista, then opened a medical practice that would eventually evolve into Huntington Memorial Hospital. 

Linda Vista got caught up in the real estate boom of 1886-87. John Yocum spearheaded the construction of the Linda Vista Bridge, connecting the area to Pasadena. His son Nathan formed a syndicate of influential businessmen called the Pasadena Park Tract Land and Water Company, to buy up and develop hundreds of acres of Linda Vista and another tract further south across the Arroyo, called the Park Place Tract (also on the National Register as the Park Place/Arroyo Terrace Historic District). They used to take prospective buyers around Park Place on a horse-drawn railcar, which would wend its way across the bridge and up to the nursery. 

The real estate boom went bust in 1888, and the Yocums’ fortunes went south that same year. Nathan went missing for a few months after a business deal went south, and his Park Place syndicate dissolved as buyers abandoned their mortgages. John Yocum filed for bankruptcy after a series of legal misfortunes and returned to peach growing at his Linda Vista farm. The tracks for the horse-drawn railcar were pulled up and sold to the Mount Lowe Railway in Altadena. 

It was right around this turbulent time for the real estate market in Los Angeles that the House at 1360 Lida was built. We may not know who originally lived in that house, but we know that the community was evolving from a small group of family farmers into an upscale neighborhood of entrepreneurs and working professionals, with plenty of room for growing crops.

While the rural vibe has disappeared in the 135 years since the House at 1360 Lida Street was built, Linda Vista is still dominated by growing things, especially trees, many of which were planted back in the late 19th century when the Yocums were around. And the memory of Linda Vista’s early pioneers are still preserved in the street names around Linda Vista. Wicks Road is named after one of the investors that sold Linda Vista to John Yocum in 1883; Chamberlain Road got its name from a family that bought property there in 1888. According to Beverly Wayte, Lida Street itself is named after Lydia Yocum, Nathan’s wife. And just north of Lida Street you’ll find the two-block Yocum Street, near where the family’s house used to be. 

The House at 1360 Lida Street is one of the few remnants from the late 19th century that still stands in Linda Vista, a witness to a time of growth and transition for one of LA’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ 1360 Lida Street Photos (Realtor.com, ca. 2011)

+ Byker, Sam: “Rural by the Rose Bowl” (Los Angeles Times, August 26, 2007)

+ Cronin, Jeff, City of Pasadena: House at 1360 Lida Street’s NRHP nomination form (PDF download)

+ “Early History of Linda Vista Neighborhood Anything But Cut and Dried” (Pasadena Now, July 19, 2019)

+ Grimes, Teresa with Laura Vanaskie, Galvin Preservation Associates: “Late 19th and Early 20th Century Development and Architecture in Pasadena” (PDF download)

+ “Holiday Home Tour Planned” (Los Angeles Times, November 15, 1962 – via ProQuest)

+ Linda Vista-Annandale Association website

+ ”Margaret Kidder: American, 1904-1959 – Biography” (AnnexGalleries.com)

+ “Our Artists in Person: Margaret Kidder” (Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1935 – via ProQuest)

+ Wayte, Beverly: “Linda Vista Revisited: From Indians to Modern-day Pasadenans: Part I” (Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 2, summer 1991)

+ Wayte, Beverly: “Linda Vista Revisited: From Indians to Modern-day Pasadenans: Part II” (Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 3, fall 1991)+

Wayte, Beverly: “Linda Vista Revisited: From Indians to Modern-day Pasadenans: Part III” (Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 73, No. 4, winter 1991)