Historic Adobe Flores Set Adrift in Modern Surroundings

Adobe Flores, with its thick, whitewashed walls and olive-green shutters, is a bit of early California afloat in a sea of modern apartment buildings.

Located on Foothill Street, a tiny thoroughfare near the Pasadena Freeway, the adobe house was built about 145 years ago and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was designated the city’s first Cultural Heritage Landmark in 1971.

However, the same Cultural Heritage Commission files that detail the house’s landmark status also say the site’s historical value was destroyed by surrounding construction.

As a result, perhaps, the house is seldom touted and little known, even to locals.

But its current occupant, Wallace Robert McCloskey, 84, sings the adobe’s praises, hoisting the American flag each morning over the cactus garden in tribute to the house’s role in California history.

McCloskey, a retired real estate developer and building materials entrepreneur, purchased the adobe in 1967, then built the surrounding apartments.

He doesn’t believe the new construction destroyed the site, and takes credit for saving the house itself.

“The property was on the market through probate,” he said, “and other bidders wanted to develop the entire (four-acre) tract. They felt it would be economically unfeasible to let the house stand. The family of the former owners cooperated with me.”

The six-room house is believed to have been built in 1845 by Manuel Garfias, a lieutenant colonel in the army of Mexico, which had granted to Garfias the surrounding Rancho San Pasqual. The rancho’s 14,000 acres sprawled over much of what is now Altadena, Pasadena, South Pasadena and San Marino.

The adobe takes its name from Mexican Gen. Jose Flores, who during the Mexican-American War met there with four of his officers to draw up terms of surrender to U.S. Capt. John C. Fremont, who had battled Flores at Cahuenga Pass, near Los Angeles.

Today, the house stands separated from the street by tall palms and a clambering cactus garden grown dense with age.

Behind the garden, a low stone wall sets off three lush peach trees with arthritic trunks. Two wrought-iron horse heads, once used as hitching posts, mark the stairs to the brick patio, decorated with old wooden benches. Atop a chimney, a weather vane silhouettes a Mexican family riding to town.

Adobe Flores has played many roles.

Originally, it featured a confessional booth for a visiting priest. The two stalls of the confessional are now a linen closet. McCloskey converted a nearby recessed alcove into an enclosed phone booth.

Five original fireplaces, once the only way of heating the house, remain as they were.

A wooden east wing, added sometime before the Civil War, changed the house’s L-shape to a “U” around a courtyard. The wing was later bricked and plastered to resemble the two-foot-thick walls in the older part of the house.

McCloskey and his late wife, Jane, used to throw parties in the courtyard, once hosting 150 dinner guests plus an orchestra, McCloskey said. The courtyard now boasts a lily pond under a sculpted fountain, religious art objects and three stones once used to grind flour.

For a time, the adobe was open to the public as a tearoom after Clara Eliot Noyes bought it in 1919. “It attracted golfers from the nearby Raymond Hotel, and tourists and artists from everywhere,” McCloskey said.

McCloskey, born in Nova Scotia, was raised by his grandmother in Flint, Mich., and left home and school to seek his fortune at the age of 14. After three years of selling magazines door-to-door, he went into the magazine business, employing 1,800 sales people, “many older than I was,” he said. He came to California around 1924 and launched his real estate career.

Today, he lives at the adobe with a housekeeper and maid, and has willed the house to his three daughters and nine grandchildren.

Buying the property started off as a simple commercial transaction, he said.

“I intended to use (the adobe) as a clubhouse for the (apartment) tenants. But my wife liked it so much that we decided to move in.”