Book Recaptures Era of Grand Hotels and Grandiloquent People

Like the annual waves of easterners who came 100 years before him, Tom Carpenter got caught up in Pasadena’s belle epoque , took up residence and fell in love with the grandeur of resort hotel living.

Unlike them, he stayed and wrote about it.

“I just wanted the facts,” he still says about the research that led to a pamphlet that grew to become a booklet and finally resulted in a substantial book.

When he arrived from the east seven years ago, Carpenter said, he was immediately fascinated with the 40-year resort era that established Pasadena’s elegance and then vanished in the 1920s, leaving only a few visible traces and some blurred memories.

Carpenter’s book, “Pasadena: Resort Hotels and Paradise,” is “a major contribution,” said Pasadena historical librarian Carolyn Garner. “This is the first substantial book that puts it all together.”

In the 1880s, when Pasadena was pastoral, when the railroads were pushing west and when easterners were amassing huge fortunes, the first of five enormous hotels was built for what was then a four-month social season. From January through April, entire families and their staffs of servants came by the thousands to live in the elegant hostelries that existed only to cater to their every whim and taste.

“Just think!” commands a still-surprised Carpenter, “Here was this small town with five major hotels, with 400 to 500 rooms each, that were open only in the winter.

“It was part of the society requirement that you traveled and one of the things you had to do was maintain contacts. People came and spent the entire season in Pasadena. Everyone was a name dropper. Here we had this amazing era that has been so hidden from our point of view.”

The reason nobody wrote about the era at that time, Carpenter reasons, is “because it was being lived, so there was no reason to write about it.”

First came the Raymond Hotel, which opened in 1886 and had such a steady clientele that it never welcomed tourists or short-term guests. It burned to the ground on Easter in 1895, and reopened in 1901 with 400 rooms.

The three connecting buildings of the Hotel Green covered most of two city blocks and had 550 rooms, along with ballrooms, verandas and parlors.

The Maryland, whose assembly room seated 1,500, covered eight acres at Colorado Boulevard and Los Robles Avenue, and had guest bungalows that extended for several blocks.

The Huntington, originally the Wentworth Hotel, was saved from financial ruin by railroad magnate Henry Huntington and opened in 1914, complete with a staff dormitory of 164 rooms, a theater and two-ward hospital.

Finally came the Hotel Vista del Arroyo, which began small and grew to 400 rooms and several bungalows on the east bank of the Arroyo Seco.

Among the visitors were Presidents Benjamin Harrison, James Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland and William Howard Taft. Among the famous were John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Charlie Chaplin and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Among those who visited and then established homes were Gen. George Patton’s family, Michael Cudahy of the meat-packing firm, Andrew McNally of the map-making company, William Wrigley, beer magnate Adolphus Busch and Garfield’s widow. Such people and their magnificent homes established Pasadena’s unique old neighborhoods.

The earliest Tournament of Roses festivities had hotel guests in their carriages parading a route that circled the Green Hotel, then went to the Maryland and finally to Tournament Park, near the Huntington.

And what happened to the hotels?

Aging buildings, a younger generation, a shift in economics that ended the era of great fortunes, competition from other resort areas, and finally the Great Depression, Carpenter says.

Only the Huntington remains as a hotel. The Raymond was demolished. The Maryland burned and was never rebuilt. The Vista del Arroyo became a hospital, a military center and finally, a federal court building. One of the Green buildings was demolished, one was converted to housing for senior citizen and the third, where Carpenter lives, became own-your-own apartments.

Until he arrived to work for a local company as a free-lance remote nuclear mechanical design specialist, he never intended to settle down, Carpenter said.

“I fell in love with all of it,” he said of Pasadena, the Green and his historical research that took him to every library in the area and as far away as the Library of Congress in Washington. “I didn’t mean to write, I just wanted some answers. It became an overwhelming task even before writing, and it consumed my life.

“After years of research I found I had a book of limited interest, small run, self-published, delivered and deposited in my living room.”

Now, one year later, he has only 27 copies remaining of the original 1,000 first edition. They sell, for about $25, only in a few local stores and are in city and college libraries throughout Southern California, Carpenter said. He figures his reward has been a profit of about $2 for every hour of work he invested in the project, and a permanent, endlessly fascinating home.