Added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 25, 1999

When you come here, it’s almost as if you’re stepping back in time. That’s part of the feel that stained glass in general brings to you…Philosophically, what we’re doing as a business really fits the space that we’re working in.

-David Judson, President of Judson Studios

If you’ve encountered stained glass in an old building in Los Angeles, there’s a good chance it was designed, crafted, installed or refurbished by Judson Studios. With 127 years in the vitreous artwork biz, Judson has had plenty of time to develop a clientele. But even taking into account the company’s longevity, it’s pretty staggering to consider just how many LA landmarks are graced with Judson glass: from the Natural History Museum to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, Hollywood Forever Cemetery to the LA Central Library, First Congregational Church to Wilshire Boulevard Temple, and countless private homes all over the city.

Now in its fifth generation of leadership by the Judson family, Judson Studios has survived since 1897 through constant adaptation, and also by innovating how stained glass is conceived of and made. Today they work on a vast range of projects, from traditional liturgical windows to wild artist collaborations to textured glass installations for office buildings.

You could fill a handsome coffee table book with all the incredible glass work that’s emerged from Judson Studios over the years (or just buy the one that David Judson & Steffie Nelson published in 2022). But the National Register of Historic Places doesn’t induct windows. So we’re going to focus on the building in Highland Park that’s operated as Judson Studios’ headquarters since 1920. It’s a quirky building, as multifaceted as one of their handmade art glass pieces. And it’s got a heck of a story.

The Patriarch

The story of Judson Studios begins with the arrival of William Lees Judson in Los Angeles in 1893. An Englishman by way of Canada, William Lees lived the peripatetic life of a professional painter. He traveled from Canada to England, Paris to New York, studying at the famed Académie Julian and developing his skills as an art teacher. 

By the early 1890s, William Lees was a 50-something widower with seven children back in Canada. He moved to Chicago to find new portrait commissions from out-of-towners coming to the Chicago World’s Fair. Judson had a studio space in the Auditorium Building, where a young Frank Lloyd Wright also kept his offices. It was here that Judson met the journalist and historian George Wharton James, a fellow England native, who urged him to move to Los Angeles. 

It didn’t take long for William Lees to find his place in LA. He settled in the Garvanza neighborhood, just along the Arroyo Seco in Highland Park, and began making a name for himself as a painting teacher – first offering classes en plein air in Pasadena, then accepting a teaching position downtown at LA’s first art school, the Los Angeles School of Art and Design. By 1895, William Lees had accepted a position as Dean of USC’s new school of fine arts – the first collegiate fine arts program in Southern California.

It was a momentous time for the Judson family. That same year, William Lees’s sons Walter Horace, Paul and Lionel joined their dad in LA. Walter Horace had years of experience working with stained glass in Canada and the East Coast, and by 1897, he and his brothers had formed their own studio with their dad’s help. Originally called Colonial Art Glass, their first major job was an octagonal skylight in the magnificent Pasadena mansion of painter and philanthropist Eva Fényes. From there, they built up a clientele of homeowners, business owners, religious and civic leaders throughout the city. By the 1910s they had a new name, W.H. Judson Art Glass Company, and a steady stream of work designing art glass for the small theaters and movie palaces springing up on Broadway, right at the dawn of the film industry. 

The Original Building

The Judson brothers’ stained glass studio bounced around a few different downtown locations during its early years. Meanwhile, their father William Lees was building what would eventually become Judson Studios’ forever home, about seven miles northeast in the Arroyo Seco.

For the first few years of the USC College of Fine Arts’ history, William Lees Judson and his colleagues taught out of temporary digs, including Blanchard Hall on Broadway. But as the college grew, it needed a space of its own. So in 1901, USC constructed a new building, right across Thorne Street from William Lees’s own home in Garvanza. Designed by the Judson patriarch himself, the new school building reflected a quirky mashup of styles and ideas – the geometry and decorative panache of the contemporary Vienna secessionists; a Moorish-style cupola and arched arcade beneath the main staircase; and a foundation of lumpy stones, taken right from the riverbed nearby. 

The campus included classrooms and studios, a gallery and an art library, and spaces dedicated to photography and pottery. It also included a women’s dorm, as women made up most of the college’s earliest classes. Just across some landscaping from the main building was a Pacific Electric Red Car line, which could whisk you northeast to Pasadena, or southwest to downtown, in a matter of minutes. There’s still a small stone bench right on Avenue 66, where students and staffers used to wait for the Red Car.

We Can!

The earliest decades of the 20th century would have been an exciting time to live near the Arroyo Seco. A vibrant community of artists and artisans, writers and thinkers was gathering there, inspired as much by the nature that flourished around the (usually) dry riverbed as they were by the handcrafted, anti-industrialist values of the English arts and crafts movement. Close neighbors of the College of Fine Arts included Charles Lummis, the eccentric early preservationist, city librarian and founder of the Southwest Museum; Ernest Batchelder, LA’s most famous tilemaker; and Clyde Browne, a printer and the grandfather of singer-songwriter Jackson Browne (all of the above designed and built their own highly creative houses, which you can still visit). 

For a brief time, William Lees Judson and George Wharton James headed up a  confederation of likeminded Arroyo Seco folk called the Arroyo Guild of Fellow Craftsmen, described by James as “an association of expert workers who design and make beautiful things.” The Guild adopted as its emblem a hand holding a hammer with the sun rising behind it and the words “We Can” emblazoned below. You can find it carved in a low-relief frieze above the main entrance to Judson Studios.

In the debut issue of the Guild’s Arroyo Craftsman journal, published in October of 1909, James writes: 

What is the work of the Guild? Read over the following and you will see its variety of scope:

They will plan your home whether it be a palace or a bungalow; they will design its every detail; the stained glass, the wall and ceiling decorations, the hangings of every description…and all will be done with that rational, systematic harmony which comes of experience and expert knowledge…

Their landscape architect will plan and lay out your grounds…

They produce fine books in fine bindings. They make jewelry and forged and hammered metal work…They make fine pottery and build mantels of hand-moulded tiles…

If you want a book plate they design, etch, print or engrave it.

Later in the same essay, James mentions the USC College of Fine Arts building that his old friend William Lees Judson designed. It had recently been enlarged to accommodate the Guild’s meetings and work, based on designs by the Guild’s official architects Robert F. Train & Robert E. Williams – a duo probably best known for Angels Flight. 

[The Arroyo Guild members] are housed in a beautiful building of their own designing, most of the decorations of which are their own work. Already their quarters are too small for the work that has come to them, and they are beginning to plan for a new building to accommodate the additional expert craftsmen who wish to associate themselves with the Guild.

Those plans never materialized. In late 1910, a malfunctioning kiln sparked a fire that destroyed the entire campus, down to the foundation. While William Lees escaped unscathed, untold numbers of paintings and drawings were lost. The Guild would appear to have disbanded as a formal entity after the fire; the first issue of Arroyo Craftsman was also the last. But the relationships forged by the Guild survived. The day after the fire, architects Train & Williams got to work sketching out the building that we see on South Avenue 66 today. 

A New Forever Home

Completed in 1911, the new building continued to house the USC College of Fine Arts until it moved to the main USC campus in 1920, the same year that William Lees officially retired. There are vestiges of the old art school days still visible. Many of the decorative elements on the outside were done by art school students in the 1910s. In the upstairs offices, you can find pull-out trundle beds from back when these were dorm rooms, and an ancient water heater that dates from around the same time. 

The building wasn’t vacant for long after USC left: later in 1920, Walter Horace Judson moved the W.H. Judson Art Glass Co. from downtown LA to this sylvan spot in Garvanza where his dad had taught for nearly 20 years. 

It was a great fit between occupant and locale. The artisans of Judson Studios, as it was known from 1921 onwards, were inspired by the same English arts and crafts traditions as the Arroyo Guild had been. They’d also worked with, or would soon work with, many of the important figures of the Arroyo Seco milieu. Train & Williams often hired Judson Studios to design art glass for their projects, including Williams’s own home nearby, and the Holmes-Shannon House from 1911. When the printer Clyde Brown needed a stained glass piece for the facade of his breathtaking Abbey San Encino home, he gave Judson Studios a run of hand-printed advertisements in exchange. 

Train & Williams’s 1911 building was a weird one for its time, and still sticks out today. The layout’s odd, its two wings tilted at a 110 degree angle to each other, ostensibly because the north one ran parallel to the train tracks, and the south one had to run parallel to Thorne Street, which hit the tracks at a diagonal.

The river rock and shingles of the front exterior walls bear some resemblance to the craftsman style proliferating throughout LA at the time. But then you have these segments of large concrete blocks on the first floor out front, and a couple towers of plain red brick on the back, which don’t quite fit in. And I’m unaware of any other craftsman buildings with a full-on cylindrical turret built into it, like this one has.

Each of the floors is demarcated by something unusual: a red concrete sill circling the entire building between the first two floors; a frieze of cast concrete in a foliate pattern, crowning the second floor just beneath the eaves. It’s an architectural parfait, with terra cotta friezes and colorful tilework popping up in unexpected places.

The inside of Judson Studios is every bit as idiosyncratic as the outside. Short offices plow into cramped passageways; steep staircases lead to cavernous studio space; a bathroom and storage area ring a small landing, with more rooms and staircases shooting off at odd angles. It all feels like an Escher-esque jumble. An inspired Escher-esque jumble mind you, clearly handcrafted with love, which I suppose was precisely the idea for an art school. 

Still, it makes you wonder whether a building with so many curious twists and turns and stairs is the ideal environment for the production of heavy, breakable, time-consuming stained glass pieces. “Because we expand and contract based on the projects we have, we’re always re-evaluating the space,” Judson Studios’ president David Judson acknowledges. “But the environment of the space outweighs all the negatives that we have there.”

Glory Days 

Judson Studios’ first decade in the Garvanza building brought some of its most historically significant commissions. They manufactured and installed the geometric “light screens” at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House and Ennis House, the last two homes for which Wright designed complete stained glass schemes. They began a long relationship with All Saints Church in Pasadena, starting with an opalescent window in the choir loft, and continuing for another 58 projects. Then there were the windows capping each corridor of Hollywood Forever cemetery’s Cathedral Mausoleum, that still bring a soft glow to the crypts of Rudolph Valentino, Hollywood’s founding family the Wilcoxes, and so many more. 

As the decades passed, Judson Studios adapted to new cultural and economic realities. The one-two punch of the Great Depression and WWII nearly ended the business, as many clients couldn’t afford stained glass commissions during the former, and the lead required for caming was unavailable during the latter. Judson’s third generation of presidents, Horace Judson (son of Walter Horace Judson), briefly left the family business to work for Lockheed as America joined the war effort. 

Post-war, Judson rode a wave of memorial window commissions domestically, placed a window at the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC, and expanded its footprint across the globe, with commissions in Japan and Korea. The late ‘50s and ‘60s brought a major aesthetic shift, as the abstract forms of mid-century modernism took hold, briefly pushing aside the neo-Gothic style for stained-glass supremacy. Judson jumped into faceted glass, a bold new form of glassmaking defined as much by negative space as the colored glass itself. The Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel in Colorado Springs, CO is probably Judson’s most famous example of their faceted glass work. 

The latter half of the 20th century found Judson Studios working on all sorts of projects, from cathedrals to retirement homes, synagogues to hotels to medical centers – in every style imaginable, from the traditional figurative stuff to geometric abstraction and beyond. Fourth-generation leader Walter Judson was both an expert in liturgical design and the man who oversaw Judson’s foray into Las Vegas, with domes for Caesar’s Palace and the Tropicana in the 1970s. The company even designed windows for the home of Vegas magicians Siegfried & Roy in 1983 (and yes, they include white tigers).

Judson Studios Building, Today and Tomorrow

Judson’s workforce has grown and shrunk and grown again over the years, but the Garvanza building has been a constant since 1920. They’ve been around so long that the firm regularly gets commissions to restore pieces they originally worked on decades ago. It is pretty mindblowing to think of two stained glass artisans, working on the same piece, in the same building, 70 years apart.

When I visited, I saw artisans shaping small pieces of colored glass with hand-held cutters, in a room lined with samples that cast a mosaic on the ground when the light shone through. Next door in the glazing room, another worker soldered the joints of two pieces of lead came (framing) on a lovely liturgical piece. Downstairs where the pottery kilns used to be, a third employee applied a putty of lamp black, linseed oil and whiting to a piece as a protectant against moisture. While computer technology has certainly made the design process easier, many of these techniques have been in use for Judson’s entire existence, and for many years before. 

Under the leadership of David Judson, the great-great-grandson of William Lees Judson, this venerable stained glass studio is in major expansion mode for the first time in over a century. Back in 2015, Judson acquired a second facility in South Pasadena as a kind of laboratory for their largest-ever commission: a 3,400 square foot window at the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, KS, which required the development of entirely new techniques (watch the documentary Holy Frit for the whole story). Today, Judson’s glass painters work there, and the rest of the space is used for fused glass, and collaborations with fine artists. More recently, Judson expanded into custom “float glass” for commercial and architectural settings, with their Griffin Glass initiative, based out of a third location in Alhambra.

For a more than 125-year-old company making a product firmly rooted in tradition, Judson Studios have struck a balance between reverence for the old ways, and searching the horizon for the future of art glass. When it comes to their headquarters though, Judson is intent on preserving the soul of this building. The alterations over the years have been minimal – a replacement staircase out back, a few double-hung windows swapped out for stained glass panels, a paint redo. A century’s worth of stained glass artisans have worked within these same walls, each one upholding the values painted by Williams Lees Judson on the walls of the glazing room: “Only the best is worth while.” “Art is only the beautiful way of doing things.” “No steps backward.”

Thank you to David Judson for the tour of Judson Studios, to Kyle Mickelson for hooking up the historical photos, and to Katie Dunham for her superb publicist skills.

Sources & Recommend Reading/Viewing

+ Arroyo Craftsman, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Arroyo Guild Press, 1909; reprinted 1999 by Judson Studios)

+ Brander, Liesl: “Judson Studios, oldest family-run stained-glass maker in the U.S., weathers the storm” (Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2020)

+ Counter, Bill: “Blanchard Hall” (Los Angeles Theatres Blog)

+ Henderson, Jaime: “The Bohemian Brownes of the Arroyo Seco” (PBSSoCal.org, April 10, 2014)

+ “Huell Howser and Judson Studios” (originally part of KCET’s “Videolog” series – via @judsonstudios on YouTube)

+ Judson, David & Steffie Nelson: Judson: Innovation in Stained Glass (Angel City Press, 2020)

+ judsonstudios.com

+ McAvoy, Christy Johnson & Jennifer Trotoux, Historic Resources Group: Judson Studios’ NRHP nomination form

+ The Militant Angeleno: “The Militant Angeleno’s Pacific Electric Archaeology Map” (Google Maps, published March 25, 2023) 

+ Monroe, Justin: Holy Frit (MOVIE – Abramorama, Roco & Tandem Arts, 2021)

+ Stires, Julie: “Eva Fényes’ Algerian Court” (PasadenaHistory.org, May 17, 2017)

+ Wattenhofer, Jeff: “Mapping the Historic Routes and Few Remains of Los Angeles’s Massive Streetcar System” (Curbed LA, November 9, 2015)