Added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 5, 2001

Head east on Ford Place from Los Robles Avenue, and you won’t get very far. After just a block, your only choice is to turn left onto North Oakland Avenue. Turn right and you’re illegally driving over the grassy promenade of the Fuller Theological Seminary campus. Back in the early 1900s though, that leafy walkway was a proper residential street, and both the east/west and north/south axes of the T-shape were called “Ford Place.” This area was developed as an exclusive enclave for the wealthy, cut off by chains that connected a pair of ornamental sandstone pillars at each entrance. And at the center of it all, right where the two parts of the T met, was the Edmund Blinn House. 

Edmund was a successful lumberman from the Chicago area whose company made a killing supplying wholesale lumber to big clients in the meatpacking industry and beyond. Like many of Pasadena’s residents of the early 1900s, Edmund, his wife Kate and their four kids used to head west to avoid the bleak midwestern winters, then return come springtime. For the first couple years, they stayed at hotels (the Westminster Hotel in downtown LA was a favorite), but by the end of 1905, the Blinns decided to move to Pasadena full time.

Edmund Blinn stayed involved with the company that bore his name, even after moving 2000 miles away. According to a 1916 profile in the Pasadena Star-News, Blinn kept a small lumber yard in Eagle Rock “because he says it is necessary for his happiness to have a lumber pile to sit on.” There are few mental images that I’ve encountered in my LA history research that I love more than the thought of a rich man in a three-piece suit and a bowtie sitting on a lumber pile for fun. But here are two more stories about Blinn that come close:

• In October of 1905, Blinn traveled to Catalina Island on a fishing expedition, as wealthy Pasadenans tended to do back then. He had snagged a large albacore that was swimming away, and was about to run out of line, when all of a sudden the line went slack. When he reeled it in, he found that a shark had chomped the fish in two, and all he got was the head. This was part of a whole LA Times exposé about how sharks are eating people’s fish in Catalina.
• On Christmas of 1913, the Evening Express reported on a mystery gentleman who had a Christmas Day tradition of handing out silver dollars to every Pasadena policeman he could find. He’d been doing it for eight years, and yet inexplicably, each coin was minted in 1879, and shiny like new. The man, of course, was Edmund Blinn.

Aside from the wholesale wood business, Blinn was active in the commercial and financial life of Pasadena. He was president of the American Cement Products Company, whose ubiquitous Marbelite lamp posts were installed throughout the west coast in the early 20th century. The First National Bank, First Trust and Savings Bank, Union Oil Company of California and Pasadena Hospital Association all counted him among their directors. Blinn owned some prime real estate on the main commercial stretch of Colorado Boulevard (called “Colorado Street” back then), plus Pasadena’s Central Building, still standing at 30 North Raymond Avenue. Not to mention all the citrus groves he owned in Riverside, and the 20,000 acres of wheat in Lewiston, Montana. The Blinns were doing alright. 

Just before they relocated to Pasadena, the Blinn family lived in Oak Park, IL – a village just west of Chicago, known for its preponderance of buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. When it came time to choose an architect for their new home, the Blinns brought a little bit of the midwest to Pasadena by hiring architect George W. Maher, whose innovative Pleasant Home was right across the street from the Blinns’ own residence in Oak Park. The Blinn House is Maher’s only known residential design on the west coast.

Along with Frank Lloyd Wright, Maher was one of the foremost architects in the Prairie School, a loose description given to a generation of architects in the late 19th and early 20th century who sought an indigenous midwestern form of design, free of historical referents. Prairie School buildings were broad and horizontal, with flat or low-pitched roofs, wide eaves and open floor plans – an evocation of the flat expanses of the midwestern landscape. Materials tended to be sourced locally, connecting the Prairie School home with its surroundings. 

A lot of the Prairie School’s ideals dovetailed perfectly with the new craftsman architecture that was developing in Pasadena in the early 1900s, led by Greene & Greene. Both movements focused on human craftsmanship, open interior spaces and a sense of rootedness in the building site. While you’d never confuse the Blinn House for the Gamble House, Maher’s work blends well with its fine craftsman neighbors on Ford Place and North Oakland Avenue. 

When it was completed in 1906, the Blinn House was a simple two-story rectangle, with a hipped roof and a couple chimneys sticking out. Its entrance faced north towards the mountains (the Blinns had purchased the plot next door and purposefully didn’t build on it, for an unobstructed view of the San Gabriels). Its stucco cladding with barely any ornamentation was a clear divergence from the craftsman style prevailing in Pasadena at the time, which tended to wood shingles or horizontal boards. But the open-air porch on the west bottom floor, and the upstairs sleeping porches on both the east and west elevations, are pure California craftsman. The health benefits of warm temperatures and clean air were encoded right into the house. 

George W. Maher had developed a unique philosophy of design that he called the “motif rhythm theory” – a way of unifying the house aesthetically, by repeating the same shapes or symbols throughout. Here, Maher uses a “broken arch” motif in dozens of iterations, from the hood over the front entrance to the trellis on the west side, from the archways leading between rooms to the staircase railing, from the top of the fireplace to the leaded glass windows. As a secondary motif, Maher had a wisteria design added into much of the stained glass that you’ll see on both the outside and inside of the house, an artistic counterpart to the actual wisteria vine that once clung to the trellis outside. The iridescent glass-tiled fireplace, designed by Orlando Gianinni of the well-known Chicago stained glass firm Giannini & Hilgart, also contains that wisteria pattern. 

Edmund Blinn’s connections to the lumber industry no doubt played into the profusion of fine, unpainted wood on display in the public spaces downstairs. Oak and mahogany line the entry hall and grand staircase. Hardwood floors and wooden wainscoting span the library and dining room. Head up the staircase and you first alight on a landing, with a tripartite window that unites the wisteria and broken arch motifs; the reading bench beneath may be my favorite space in the house. 

Upstairs, after passing through another generous landing with built-in seating spaces, you’ll reach the five bedrooms and three bathrooms, all with original wood painted white. In the early days, the east side of the second floor led to open-air sleeping porches. They’ve since been enclosed and converted into office space. 

One of my favorite parts of exploring old houses is finding the little traces of a way of life that no longer exists. At the Blinn House, you’ll find a very-much-outmoded electrical circuit box embedded in the hallway upstairs, no longer operational but a fun little detail to see.

My tour guide pointed out a staircase to the rear of the house, right off the library, where servants would move up and down undetected by houseguests. Head down the stairs, and there was a billiard room in the basement, with a wine closet attached to it. Head all the way up, and you reach an unadorned attic level, where the servants would sleep. I highly recommend you watch this short video by Malia Miglino, about the Blinns’ live-in servant Watal Hishiko and his family. It’s a unique window into the lives of the hardworking people, often from marginalized communities, who toiled behind the scenes to preserve the luxurious lifestyles of Pasadena’s well-to-do. 

Edmund Blinn died at home on February 2, 1922, and Kate continued living there until 1941. At that point she sold the home to the philanthropist Gloria Crane Gartz, who intended to transform it into the permanent clubhouse for a women’s organization she helmed, the Women’s City Club of Pasadena. From the get-go, the Women’s City Club experimented with inviting other local women’s organizations to rent out the space for their own purposes, basically acting as an incubator for all sorts of educational, civic, political and philanthropic groups led by women. 

In 1945 the Women’s City Club bought the Blinn House outright from Gloria Gartz, and announced plans to expand the footprint of the existing Blinn House into the empty parcel to the north. The architect they hired to build on George W. Maher’s work? The redoubtable Myron Hunt, designer of the Rose Bowl, Pasadena Central Library, Throop University (later renamed Caltech) and so many more landmarks in the area. His wife happened to be a member of the Women’s City Club, which no doubt helped convince him to take the job. I’m reminded of that other well-known Hunt in the annals of early 20th century LA architecture, Sumner Hunt, who designed multiple headquarters for the Ebell Club, which counted his wife as a past president.

The women of this town are having as much fun with their new Women’s City Club of Pasadena as a bunch of little girls with a new doll house. The first annual election was a great party as well as being a serious occasion…Myron Hunt, architect for the new building project, was the only man present, and seemed to enjoy himself too. At least he was a good sport and was patient about answering questions. 

–Pasadena Star-News, October 28, 1945

Hunt’s new plans scored a generous feature in the November 2, 1945 issue of the Star-News and Pasadena Post. Originally planned out in phases, the idea was to double the square footage with a lecture hall, a greatly expanded kitchen, and more generous dining space looking out on the garden, plus a curving driveway to let passengers unload near the front entrance. 

Newspaper reports from 1946 announce the construction of an annex at the northeast of the Blinn House, adding two dining rooms seating a total of 162 people. Some kitchen alterations were made too, and a new wraparound driveway was added. The proposed lecture hall was never built, but the larger of the two dining spaces is large enough to accommodate lectures (I gave a lecture about Pasadena bungalow courts there in 2024). The new wing required opening up a wall that used to enclose the dining room. Cons of that move: they had to move one of the original art-glass windows to an interior hallway upstairs. Pro: there was now room for an in-home phone booth!

By the time all these renovations were made, just a year into the Women’s City Club’s formal ownership of the Blinn House, these facilities were in use by the League of Women Voters and the Women’s Civic League, both of which maintained offices at the clubhouse; plus groups representing both Democratic and Republican women, religious groups, Altrusa, the Pasadena Art Society, the County Medical Association Auxiliary, the Pasadena Tuberculosis Society and a couple dozen more.

For 75 years, the Women’s City Club were excellent stewards of the Blinn House, preserving what made it magical and making the smallest of adjustments where needed. The kitchen was remodeled and expanded in 1949 (very necessary when you’re serving 2,500 meals per month), and a parking lot was added to the east of the house in 1960. The open porch on the bottom west side was enclosed in 1964 and christened the “Garden Room.” Some structural rehabbing in the 1990s, strengthening of chimneys, swapping out old sinks – that was it.

Then in May of 2020 the Women’s City Club dissolved, and transferred ownership of their beloved clubhouse to Pasadena Heritage, the long-running preservation nonprofit. With the help of grants from the Pasadena Community Foundation and Civitas Pasadena, Pasadena Heritage rehabbed the property, upgrading the electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems and installing a new roof. Visitors since May 2022 have passed below a hanging Pasadena Heritage sign in the shape of a broken arch – an inspired callback to the motif that George W. Maher wove into the fabric of the house.

Pasadena Heritage’s move to the Blinn House completes a lovely “full circle” story. One of the organization’s earliest preservation victories was the successful move of Pasadena’s oldest extant bungalow court, Gartz Court, in 1984. That court was commissioned by Kate Crane Gartz, mother of Gloria Gartz, who owned the Blinn House in the early ‘40s and sold it to the Women’s City Club. And to further cement the connection between the two properties, Gartz Court is usually attributed to Myron Hunt & Elmer Grey – the same Hunt who was brought on board to remodel the Blinn House, 35 years later. There’s some beautiful continuity at play here: an architecturally significant historic home, taken over by a local organization who uses it for the betterment of the Pasadena community, then transferred to an organization whose main goal is to preserve buildings for the betterment of the Pasadena community. It couldn’t have worked out better.

Thanks to Bridget Lawlor of Pasadena Heritage for sharing one of the historic images of the Blinn House, and to Sandi Hemmerlein for approving the use of some of her Blinn House photos. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “About George W. Maher” (https://georgemaher.org)

+ “Announce Future Building Program of Women’s City Club” (Star News and Pasadena Post, November 2, 1945 – via Newspapers.com) 

+ Bermont, Bradley: “Pasadena Heritage takes over the historic Edmund Blinn House” (Pasadena Star-News, April 6, 2021)

+ Foote, Blyhe: “New Women’s Clubhouse of Pasadena Will Open Saturday, Tea Set Nov. 4” (Pasadena Star-News, October 28, 1941 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Foote, Blythe: “Women Take Over Noted Landmark” (Pasadena Star News, August 22, 1941 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “George W. Maher” (PDF – The Prairie School Review, vol. 1, no. 1, 1964 – via USModernist.org)

+ Gregory, Tim, The Building Biographer: Edmund Blinn House’s NRHP nomination form

+ Hemmerlein, Sandi: “Photo Essay: Pasadena Heritage Throws Open the Doors to the Historic Blinn House” (Avoiding Regret, September 19, 2023)

+ “History of the The Blinn House” (pasadenaheritage.org)

+ “House, Pasadena, Cal” (The Inland Architect & News Record, vol. 50, no. 1, July 1907 – via Internet Archive)

+ Jefferson, Alison Rose, Historic Resources Group: Ford Place Historic District’s NRHP nomination form

+ “Lumbertrade Leader Is Called” (Pasadena Star-News, February 3, 1922 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Miglino, Malia: Hishiki family & the Blinn House (VIDEO – @macabremalia on Instagram)

+ “Miss Blinn Is Bride of Molton H. Lewis” (Pasadena Star, July 10, 1914 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “New Bank to Open” (Pasadena Star-News, May 4, 1912 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “New Women’s City Club Being Renovated; Center of Many Interests” (Pasadena Star News, May 19, 1946 – via Newspapers.com)

+ Paonessa, Laurie and Clio Admin: “Pasadena Heritage; Women’s City Club of Pasadena; Edmund Blinn House.” (Clio: Your Guide to History, August 10, 2023)

+ “Pasadena Heritage Celebrates Acquiring Historic Blinn House, The ‘Chance of a Lifetime’” (Pasadena Now, May 23, 2022)

+ “Pasadena Heritage Debuts a Beautifully Refurbished Blinn House” (pasadenacf.org, May 26, 2022)

+ “Pasadena Resident Remembers Police Each Year with $1” (Los Angeles Evening Express, December 25, 1913 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Pictures of Pasadenans: Edmund B. Blinn, Who Loves a Lumber Pile” (Pasadena Star-News, November 15, 1916 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Pleasant Home History” (pleasanthomeop.com)

+ Sanborn Map Company: Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps from Pasadena, 1903, 1910, 1931, 1931-51 (via LA Public Library)

+ “Society: Personal” (Los Angeles Herald, October 3, 1905 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “The women of this town…” (Pasadena Star-News, October 28, 1945 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Two Changes of Bank Directors” (Pasadena Star-News, June 3, 1914 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Wed Yesterday” (Pasadena Star-News, May 19, 1920 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Women Incorporate Clubhouse” (Pasadena Star-News, June 2, 1945 – via Newspapers.com)

+ “Yesterday’s Hotel Arrivals” (Los Angeles Times, August 25, 1904 – via Newspapers.com)