Added to the National Register of Historic Places (and designated a National Historic Landmark) on February 27, 1987

Something you should know about me is that I really, truly don’t care about organized sports. I played AYSO soccer when I was a kid, collected baseball cards, even took 1st place at my 6th grade track competition. But none of that translated into an abiding interest in sports.

This is all to say that I’m coming to this writeup on the Rose Bowl with a history fan’s curiosity, rather than a sports fan’s passion. I grew up in Altadena, just a 10 minute drive from the stadium, but until December of 2023, I had never been inside the stadium that Sports Illustrated once called “the number one venue in college sports.”

Even for a know-nothing like me, it’s impossible not to be impressed with the Rose Bowl’s impact on sports. In addition to hosting the mega-popular Rose Bowl Game almost every New Year’s Day (or January 2, when New Year’s falls on a Sunday) since 1923, the Pasadena venue has hosted five Super Bowls, two attendance-record-setting World Cups, and held cycling and soccer competitions at the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, respectively. It’s been the home of the UCLA Bruins since 1982. The Rose Bowl has also become one one of LA’s premiere outdoor entertainment venues for music’s biggest names. The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Coldplay, U2, Depeche Mode, BTS, Kenny Chesney, Rihanna & Eminem, Metallica – they’ve all played to tens of thousands of fans at the Rose Bowl. Even Reverend Billy Graham preached to a stadium full of believers here back in 2004. And oh yeah, the world’s largest flea market takes place there every second Sunday of the month.

Sports arcana – especially related to the annual Rose Bowl Game – is of course an important part of the stadium’s lore. But I’m not going to focus on that here. There’s plenty to say about the stadium’s origins and its intersection with Pasadena history (the City of Pasadena owns it, after all). The building itself has a long and impressive history, too. It’s rare to find a non-residential building that’s still used for its original purpose more than a century in, like the Rose Bowl is. But that continuity has meant a push and pull between the need to keep this a world-class stadium and the desire to preserve what makes it so singular. 

The Tournament of Roses Connection

The football match we call the Rose Bowl Game actually predates the stadium by 20 years. In the 1880s, naturalist Charles Frederick Holder (also the inventor of big game sportfishing) urged members of Pasadena’s Valley Hunt Club to stage a New Year’s Day parade, the Tournament of Roses. They would deck out a bunch of horses and buggies with elaborate flower displays to celebrate the fact that stuff actually grew in Pasadena in the winter, unlike the frigid midwest where many Pasadenans came from. Beginning with their first go in 1890, the annual parade was followed by public games – tug of war and jousting in the early years, later more exotic fare like chariot and ostrich races. There was even an elephant vs. camel race in 1913 (the elephant won). 

The first football game took place in 1902, when the Tournament of Roses invited Michigan, the national college football co-champion, to play against Stanford after the parade. They called it the “Tournament East–West football game,” but it wasn’t much of a contest that year. The Wolverines trounced the Cardinal, 49-0 in what was both a poor matchup and a poorly-organized event – thousands more people showed up than expected, and they had to stand on the sidelines to watch. Football wouldn’t return to the annual festivities for another 14 years. 

The game was reinstated in 1916, at a time when college football was becoming increasingly popular. That year’s matchup between Washington State and Brown (14-0) is considered the first post-season college “bowl” game. For seven years, the East-West game was hosted at Tournament Park, right next to CalTech. By 1920, attendance was regularly eclipsing Tournament Park’s capacity. The Tournament of Roses’ new president William Leishman recognized that the game would need a stadium of its own.

Enter the Hunt

The Tournament of Roses Association resolved on March 20, 1920 to build a stadium in Pasadena that could hold up to 100,000 people. Architect Myron Hunt was a shoe-in as the designer. He was a member of the Association, a friend of Leishman’s and a first prize winner in the Rose Parade float design contest back in 1910. Hunt had also earned respect among Pasadenans for designing much of Throop University (the forerunner of CalTech), nearby Occidental College and the homes of Henry Huntington, Zane Grey (see visit #28) and many more.

Myron Hunt’s first job was to find a suitable site for the new stadium. He and the Tournament Association’s “stadium committee” considered enlarging the existing setup in Tournament Park, and looked at a few different locales in the dry Arroyo Seco riverbed on the westside of Pasadena. Finally Hunt sold the committee on a large open portion toward the north end of the Arroyo, large enough for both a 14-acre stadium and a massive, 20,000 car parking lot. The only problem was that it was a city dump at the time. As William Leishman’s son explained:

…it was full of squatters who raised goats and horses and donkeys down there. There were snakes and gophers and trash and boulders… Every winter when they had a big storm, the water would come through there and clean it all out, and take it to Long Beach.

-Lathrop Leishman, Pasadena Oral History Project, p. 52 (reprinted in Library of Congress’s Historic American Buildings Survey: “Rose Bowl Stadium (Pasadena Stadium)”)

The Tournament Association exchanged Tournament Park for a 30-acre lot in the Arroyo. While the Association started a fundraising campaign to pay for the stadium, Hunt got to work on the design. He looked back to classical coliseums in Greece and Rome for its elliptical shape, which made the sightlines as uniform as possible for every spectator. The seating was inspired by the Yale Bowl, the first bowl-shaped football stadium in America, which had raised tiers of seats at slightly larger intervals as they moved up, creating a gradual curve. The same “cut and fill” technique employed at the Yale Bowl was also used here, where the ground dug out to create the field is then used as embankments to support the seats. 

When the Tournament Association realized they weren’t going to make the $750,000 estimated budget, Hunt scaled down his ambitions and built some of the stadium out of temporary materials, with the intent of replacing them later. He axed a grand facade for the outside, replacing neoclassical arches with simple stone retaining walls, wood and mesh; he removed two of the entrance tunnels he’d planned. In the end, the stadium cost $272,198.26.

Work on the Rose Bowl took just nine months. The contractor employed a team of men and donkeys to dig and haul the dirt, and haul up local river rock to build the foundation. The Rose Bowl was completed in time for its unofficial first game on October 28, 1922 (USC vs. Cal), a test run for the Rose Bowl Game proper. As originally built, the southern end of the bowl was open to allow for a 220-yard running track that ended outside the stadium’s perimeter. With that “horseshoe” configuration, the stadium held 57,000 seats. 

The Growth of the Bowl 

The first Tournament of Roses game at the new stadium was held January 1, 1923. A sold-out crowd watched USC beat Penn State 14-3 – though the game started inauspiciously, when Penn State showed up an hour late due to the traffic. That first year a Pasadena Star News reporter came up with the name “Rose Bowl” for the stadium. It caught on quick, and so did the Rose Bowl Game itself. Demand was high enough for tickets that Myron Hunt enclosed the south end of the bowl in concrete, adding an additional 19,000 seats in time for the game on January 1, 1929. That same year night lighting was installed for the first time.

The original wood-on-earth construction of the seating was replaced with permanent concrete floors in 1930; additional aisles and risers added another 10,000 seats for a total of ~85k, and the scoreboards were added then too. A few years later a Works Progress Administration project added perimeter fencing, bridges and a host of landscaping, including the rock walls that circle the stadium today.

Beginning in the 1940s, updates to the Rose Bowl were handled by the City of Pasadena with a series of private architecture firms. Just a few of the changes since then:

• 1948-9: north and south elevations are extended upwards for a uniform rim; Rose Bowl now accommodates over 100k patrons. Around this time the large concrete columns were added as support for the upper tiers.
• 1949: neon “Rose Bowl” sign with rose logo added on the southern entrance
• 1961: two-story press box added
• Late 1960s: upgraded lighting installed; wooden benches replaced by aluminum seating
• 1972: permanent seats added on the north and south ends (capacity up to 104,594), concession stands built on the concourse and perimeter
• 1982: seismic strengthening adds a concrete colonnade, support beams under the upper tiers on the south end
• 1989: Court of Champions added as a forecourt in front of the south entrance
• 1992: press box is expanded into a three-story structure with elevator tower, tripling the press capacity and adding 37 luxury boxes
• 1993: field widened and permanent accessible seating added near tunnels in advance of the 1994 World Cup
• 1996: new toilets and concession buildings in the concourse; elevators and more accessible seating added; new color video board and “matrix” board for scores/graphics
• 2007: locker rooms renovated, new media center completed
• 2011-2013: $152 renovation project widens tunnels, adds new scoreboards and video boards, builds new concession stands and adds a Rose Bowl museum 

Currently, the Rose Bowl holds about 92-93,000 spectators for games. That number can increase to above 100k for concerts, when temporary seating is added on the field. 

The War of the Roses

No doubt, the Rose Bowl has continued to evolve throughout its history. But there’s a reason it’s known as “The Grandaddy of Them All,” not “The Older Brother of Them All” or “The Precocious Young ‘Un That Will Outshine Them All.” It’s over a century old, and lacks many of the amenities of more modern stadiums. The seats are narrow; the video screens are comparatively small; you have to go outside the stadium to reach the concession stands. I’ve read that cell connectivity can be pretty spotty in the stadium on game days. 

Part of the old-school feel is the result of its status as a National Historic Landmark since 1987. Every decision about upgrades is weighed against the need to preserve as many of the character-defining features of the original building as possible. Back in September 1988, David Look, the Chief of the Cultural Resources Team for the National Park Service, sent a strongly-worded letter to the City of Pasadena regarding proposed “skyboxes” on the east side of the Rose Bowl. “The north and east elevations are the most intact elevations of the bowl,” Look writes. “The cuts in the bowl rim required to bridge the skybox with the bowl, will damage historic fabric…This addition to the Rose Bowl will seriously affect the integrity of the structure which could result in our reconsidering the National Historic Landmark designation.” Today, the stadium’s east side is skybox-free.

15 years later, the NFL considered adopting the Rose Bowl as a home stadium for one of its teams. Their varied proposals included the addition of 30-60 feet of new risers for seating, and an underground parking lot for 2000 cars, dug into the middle of a streambed. There was plenty of local opposition to the plan on a variety of grounds, from hydrology to noise complaints. Ultimately the NFL shelved the project. But the process highlighted how difficult it is to balance between commercial interests, community and historical preservation in a landmark building of such significance.

While that tension between growth and tradition has followed the Rose Bowl throughout its history, the past is ever-present here. The impressive bronze and marble wall at the Court of Champions, added to the south entrance in 1989, records the standout players and coaches of every Rose Bowl Game. Sports greats like Jackie Robinson (who played football here in high school and college, before switching to baseball), Brandi Chastain (who scored the winning goal at the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup at the Rose Bowl) and commentator Keith Jackson (who coined the nickname “The Granddaddy of Them All”) are immortalized with statues around the stadium’s perimeter. There’s a small but marvelous museum dedicated to the Rose Bowl’s history, inside one of the original locker rooms, right at the exterior entrance to tunnel 15A. 

My favorite historical detail at the Rose Bowl is one that’s easy to miss. When a team enters the stadium through tunnel 15A, as one of them does every game day, they run past the same planks of wood that lined the tunnel in the 1920s. Those planks are held in place by a layer of concrete, so thin that you can still see the texture of the wood. I have no idea if this was the builder’s intention from the get-go, or if the wood was supposed to be temporary, and only covered later as a preservation method. Either way, I love that idea that every player runs by this material echo of the Rose Bowl’s earliest days, on their way out to the open field. 

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ “$152M Rose Bowl Renovation Kicks Off In Pasadena” (CBS News, January 25, 2011)

+ “Caltech Connections in Rose Bowl History” (caltech.edu, August 11, 2022)

+ Charleton, James H., National Park Service: Rose Bowl’s NRHP nomination form

+ Curtis, Jake: “Hello 12-Team Playoff in 2024; Good-bye Rose Bowl Tradition” (SI.com, December 2, 2022)

+ Farmer, Sam: “Pasadena Not Sold on NFL Plan” (Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2003)

+ Fassbender, Tom: “Jackie Robinson: A Pasadena Hometown Hero” (LA Explorers Guild, February 15, 2022)

+ “Great Bowl to Seat Thousands” (Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1921 – via ProQuest)

+ Gustkey, Earl: “Like a Rock : Where Boulders Once Were Strewn, the Rose Bowl Stands as a Monument to Football” (Los Angeles Times, January 25, 1993)

+ Historic American Buildings Survey: “Rose Bowl Stadium (Pasadena Stadium)” (LOC.gov)

+ Historic Resources Group, LLC: “Proposed NFL Rehabilitation Project Preliminary Historic Preservation Evaluation (April 21, 2003 – reprinted in the NRHP nomination form)

+ Hunt, Myron: “The Pasadena, California, Stadium” (American Architect vol. 128, October 20, 1925 – reprinted in the NRHP nomination form)

+ Hunt, Myron: “The Pasadena Stadium” (California Life, summer 1923 – reprinted in the NRHP nomination form)

+ McCollough, J. Brady: “Commentary: ‘Nothing is locked in’ for Rose Bowl’s future with College Football Playoff expansion” (Los Angeles Times, December 1, 2022)

+ “Memorable Moments in Rose Bowl Stadium History” (PDF – rosebowlstadium.com)

+ “Rose Bowl Stadium Historical Facts (rosebowlstadium.com)

+ “Rose Bowl Stadium Fun Facts” (PDF – rosebowlstadium.com)

+ “Rose Bowl (Tournament of Roses) Game Results” (Los Angeles Almanac)

+ “The Rose Bowl” (Los Angeles Almanac)

+ “Stop the NFL From Moving To The Rose Bowl 2003 ‑ 2016 (West Pasadena Residents’ Association)

+ Witz, Billy: “At 100, the Rose Bowl Has Seen Many Sunsets” (New York Times, December 31, 2022)