National Register visit 183: The House at 1360 Lida Street. There’s not much in the historical record about this Queen Anne Victorian in Linda Vista, Pasadena’s wealthiest neighborhood. We don’t know who commissioned it, who designed it and who lived in it during its earliest years (if you do, give me a holler). What we do know is that it’s one of the few properties in Linda Vista that’s still standing from the late 19th century, an important transitional time for this hillside neighborhood just west of the Rose Bowl.
The house was built in 1888, five years after an Iowa farmer named John Yocum and his family bought the land west of the upper Arroyo Seco and started turning it into arable, livable land. The Yocums were fabulously successful in attracting both interest and interesting people to Linda Vista. They even set up a horse-drawn railway circuit to take potential buyers from Pasadena up to an experimental nursery in the neighborhood. But when the short-lived real estate boom of the late 1880s went bust, it hit the Yocums harder than most. John Yocum went bankrupt, and was sued by former business partners; his son Nathan disappeared, distraught over a bad business deal. They sold the tracks from the railway to the Mount Lowe Railway, who were building the famous funicular in Altadena.
We may not know a lot of specifics about the history of the house at 1360 Lida, but it’s a useful jumping off point to explore the early history of one of LA’s most exclusive neighborhoods.
Historic photo credits:
📷 FW Martin: View of Linda Vista Rd. curving through countryside, ca. 1908 (via @californiastatelibrary)
📷 View of Pasadena from Linda Vista, ca. 1898. (Public domain, via @usclibraries & @californiahistoricalsociety)
I'm visiting all the landmarks in LA County listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Read more about this one and many more at etandoesla.com/183-house-at-1...
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