by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As 1928 dawned, the J.B. Ransom Corporation, with financing from the Bradbury Syndicate, began plans to issue its first unit of the Gainsborough Heath subdivision, a nearly 300-acre section in the eastern portion of the tony San Gabriel Valley enclave of San Marino. The land, known for about 15 years, from the early 1870s toward the later 1880s under the ownership of Luther H. Titus (who bought the tract from Leonard J. Rose of Sunny Slope), as the Dew Drop Ranch, was acquired by the San Gabriel Land and Water Company as part of a more than 1,100-acre subdivision to include the town of East San Gabriel, but, that Boom of the 1880s project went unfulfilled.
The Titus ranch passed into the hands of Louis L. Bradbury, who mined his fortune with copper in México and who went on the build the remarkable Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles, as well as owning large swaths of the San Gabriel Valley property, including the town bearing his name. After his 1892 death, the estate was under the guidance of his wife, Simona Martínez and attorney John D. Bicknell, while, after she passed a decade later, her children assumed the mantle of management. Louis L. Bradbury, Jr. was building a house, including using portions of the adobe house in which the Titus clan lived, but the origins of which are murky (some sources say Michael White, a native of England, built it, while others suggest it was constructed as part of the Mission San Gabriel.)
The Ransom firm completed work on the edifice, called it La Ramada Inn (not to be confused with Glendale’s Casa Verdugo adobe, long known as a restaurant by that name) and made it t administrative headquarters for Gainsborough Heath. The opening phase of the tract was in this area, north of Huntington Drive and west of San Gabriel Boulevard (formerly Rose Avenue, part of which still exists in the southern section of the subdivision.)
1928 opened with a float entered by the company in Pasadena’s famous Tournament of Roses Parade and the opening was scheduled for 19 February. Two weeks before that, trouble arose when the 6 February issue of the Pasadena Star-News reported that,
Police arrested I. Shubata of Santa Anita road for threatening the life of J.H. Smith, foreman for a contractor opening streets in the new Gainsborough Heath tract. No weapon was used, and the San Gabriel Japanese Society furnished bail. The Japanese have been stirred considerably by notice giving them a few days to vacate land on which they have lived for several years, although they were only “squatting” on it, it is claimed.
Nothing further could be located about this incident, but it is notable because of the unsubstantiated report of squatting, or illegally occupying land, whereas Japanese farmers, unable to own land by state law, were forced to lease property instead. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Express of 28 January published a piece in which James B. Ransom averred that “nowhere in the world can there be found a more distinguished setting for an exclusive residential community.”
The developer made the connection to the nearby Huntington Library, Art Gallery and Botanical Gardens, with artist Thomas Gainsborough, whose paintings were the centerpiece of the art collection of transportation and real estate titan, Henry E. Huntington, the tract namesake. Ransom continued that the subdivision “appropriately takes its name from the great English painter” but that there was “its striking resemblance to beautiful Gainsborough Lane in [Ipswich] England.”
Observing that a “Gainsborough motif” was used throughout the project, including with “the most elaborate [sign]boards ever installed on a residential subdivision,” Ransom boasted “this new property is already established in an environment of culture” and added,
San Marino is destined to become the mecca of artists and writers, not to mention scientists, drawn here by the high scholarship standards and exhaustive research work of the California Institute of Technology, within about a mile of Gainsborough Heath.
He also highlighted “the palatial Bradbury home . . . of pure Spanish Colonial design . . . and one of the very few modern houses actually constructed of adobe brick,” another, of course, being the Homestead’s La Casa Nueva, the Temple family residence almost completely built of the material and finished at the end of 1927.
A Ransom ad from that date was more ornate in its description that the tract “in artistic conception . . . perfect naturalness and matchless environment reflects Gainsborough’s immortal ‘Blue Boy,'” and is “Nature’s masterpiece in a peculiarly Californian setting of fine estates . . . a painter’s landscape with a superb background of amethystine mountains.” The piece breathlessly went on that there were to be “splendid homes for those who love an environment of Art, Culture or Science.” There were also radio spots on KNX with the Biltmore Hotel Orchestra of Los Angeles to promote the project, while several photo collages were printed in newspapers to highlight the tract’s opening.
The day prior to the grand opening, Ransom executive O. Nicholas Gabriel penned a promotional piece for the Express in which he expressed the view that “the formal opening . . . will reveal some of the most superb natural attractions of any fine residence community in the Southland.” These included live oak trees, orange trees and mountain views that “Easterners desire in their homes out here.” Another reference to La Ramada indicated something of an architectural model for builders to follow, including “one of the most elaborately furnished office suites ever used in a subdivision.” Gabriel added that a $30,000 community auditorium was nearing completion at the south side of the tract on Del Mar Avenue, apparently where a baseball field is now.
By early March, another promotional push was promulgated, with the Star-News of the 3rd citing Gabriel as stating that “exceptional interest is being manifested in the marketing of Gainsborough Heath” and that “to care for the great influx of interested visitors,” the auditorium was where “open house prevails” for those wanting to explore the “subdivision de-luxe.” Gabriel continued that,
An intensive building program which will exceed anything of its kind yet attempted in Southern California will be launched at Gainsborough Heath during the next few weeks. The new construction calls for 1000 homes ranging in cost from $10,000 to several hundred thousand dollars each, together with two business houses on Huntington drive, the latter forming a nucleus for a new business section of San Marino. To date, upward of $800,000 has been expended by the big realty corporation in an elaborate landscaping program, electrolier [multi-bulb street lighting] system, streets, sewers and other improvements.
The La Ramada Inn, the executive added, was to open in about two weeks and “patrons will be served tasty teas and luncheons in the arcade of the pure adobe building and in the oak shaded, flag-stoned patio overlooking Huntington drive.” Lunches would also be available in the auditorium, also nearly finished with a planned event to include a lecture on Henry Huntington.
In its coverage the same day, with much of the same wording as in the Crown City paper, the Express remarked that “visitors to the old mission in San Gabriel and to the ‘Mission Play,'” performed in a new theater to which Huntington and Walter Temple were the biggest donors, at $50,000 each, enjoyed “an exceptionally interesting side trip” to Gainsborough Heath with its “bit of California life with romance and early traditions,” being situated between the mission and the Huntington estate. In fact, the writer of the Mission Play, John Steven McGroarty was a featured speaker and performers from the long-running production also participated in an event at the Gainsborough Auditorium, where mass meetings of cities like Monrovia and Pasadena were also held.
Ornate advertising continued into the summer, with one broadcasting the tract’s “atmosphere of culture and refinement, together with the proper assurance of exclusiveness” to readers who were in “families of prominence,” “successful people,” and “leaders of the community.” In May, an unusual promotional piece was staged in which a live “Blue Boy” was posed next to a Dodge “Senior Six” sedan owned by a Ransom executive. Ads, however, soon morphed into combinations with other Ransom projects at Bandini, Montebello Park and the Montebello Park Golf Club, all in the City of Commerce and Montebello areas, which were more decidedly working and middle class, as part of a “Know the East Side” campaign.
In early June, news was broadcast that designs, in English, Mediterranean and Spanish styles, for new houses were accepted by a tract architectural committee, though nothing further was said about the ambitious plan to have 1,000 residences built there in short order. Prices of these early residences were said to range from $5,000 to $26,000, though the Express of 9 June remarked that “the low range of prices prevailing for the property is also expected to result in the construction of homes of a more modest nature.”
This seems to have indicated that the grandiose ambitions of the Ransom company for Gainsborough Heath were not being realized, despite a 20 July statement in the South Pasadena Foothill Review that “with hundreds of visitors . . . each day . . . increased activity is reported.” A new tract manager was hired in late August, street paving was highlighted the following month, but there was clearly a downshift in promotion and media attention in the last half of 1928 and afterward.
An unusual event was featured in several newspapers in March 1929 as crews digging for a sewer line installation found some 400 feet of tunnel at 9 1/2 feet below the surface, leading to speculation that it might have been constructed by the Mission San Gabriel padres to hide from Indians or that it was built by indigenous people for a water system, though it was later determined that it was part of the 1880s work of the San Gabriel Land and Water Company to transport water for the hotel of the ill-fated East San Gabriel townsite project.
In fall 1929, just days after the crash of the stock market on Wall Street in New York City, which ushered in the early stages of the Great Depression, a renewed marketing campaign was undertaken for Gainsborough Heath, though the ads were smaller and far less baroque than their predecessors. It was promoted that only 18% of San Marino was undeveloped, but half of that was embraced within the bounds of the tract and the term “today’s prices” was used extensively, suggesting a reduction, though no figures were given.
The Express of 2 November included the remarks that,
With building activity in full swing, improvements being completed and trees removed from the business property fronting on Huntington drive, all indications are that Gainsborough Heath in San Marino is today on the threshold of an expansion and growth that will not stop until this popular J.B. Ransom Corporation development is solidly built up.
Pushed was the street paving work “said to be the best constructed residential street in the San Marino district.” Statistics in other press accounts from that period were cited that purported to augur well for the tract relative to building permits, valuations and the sales manager insisted to the Star-News of 16 November that “the last three months of 1929 should show a very substantial increase over the figures of last year.” It was added that “the prices for home sites . . . are surprisingly low,” while an undescribed “program offering special inducements to homebuilders” was also touted. It was even claimed that “some estimate that within a period of five years there will be practically no vacant property for sale in San Marino for the purpose of residential building.
The 29 December number of the Times featured a Ransom ad that proclaimed “START 1930 OFF RIGHT! Invest in the New East Side fast becoming known as New Los Angeles” as the company pushed their several projects from Montebello Park north to Gainsborough Heath. The Depression, however, would only worsen considerably in succeeding months and years, with the worst to come in waves of bank failure in 1932 (when Walter Temple lost the Homestead, the last remaining of his once substantial properties.)
Notably, a City of San Marino Historic Context Statement Draft from 2019 cited historian Elizabeth Pomeroy and county assessor data showing that only two houses were built at Gainsborough Heath prior to 1930 and 70 by the end of World War II, though the resulting boom, part of America’s peak in economic and political power, changed matters considerably.
As for the adobe that was incorporated into La Ramada, it managed to survive the Great Depression, as it became part of the Saints Felicitas and Perpetua parish when that was established in 1939. The structure was again renovated for a ground-floor chapel/church and a second-story rectory and, as growth called for a new church, this was completed in 1948 and the adobe remained as the rectory as well as a social hall. In 1962, however, the adobe building was destroyed, the church website states, “to conform to San Marino zoning rules.”
This meant that the sole remaining adobe building in San Marino is the Michael White Adobe, one of about 40 Nineteenth Century ones left in the county (including the core of the Homestead’s Workman House), though that edifice has faced demolition on several occasions due to plans by San Marino High School—to date, however, it remains preserved.
The story of Gainsborough Heath as a late 1920s ambitious elite subdivision in exclusive San Marino is one, however, that involves a long history prior to that, as well as its modern revival, even though this involved the loss of a historic structure. The tie, moreover, to the Ransom developments in the City of Commerce and Montebello, also constitute a notable component of Roaring Twenties greater Los Angeles’ growth and expansion, reflective of “east side” suburbanization that accelerated greatly in ensuing decades.