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The Mary Maud Earle Apartment Building (Herkimer Arms)

Among the residences, schools, churches, commercial buildings, ice plants, and unbuilt projects that Greene & Greene drew across nearly three decades of California practice, only one was an apartment house. It still stands. It does not stand where it was originally built. It does not contain the eight units it was originally designed for. But the building survives — relocated, repurposed, restored — and it remains the only example in the firm’s portfolio of the building type. The Mary Maud Earle Apartment Building, known almost from the day of its 1912 completion as the Herkimer Arms, is the only surviving apartment building designed by the firm. There were not many of them to begin with. There is, today, this one.

The building’s history is unusual on almost every count. It was built of gunite, an early form of pneumatically applied concrete, at a moment when the firm was experimenting with new materials and methods beyond the carpentered timber that had defined the Ultimate Bungalows. It was furnished, throughout the eight units, with built-in cabinetry that included hideaway trundle beds folded into armoires — a design solution to the practical problem of accommodating winter visitors who needed furnished apartments that could be lived in immediately and that did not waste space on conventional bedroom furniture. It was lived in for the better part of a century at its original site at 527 East Union Street in Pasadena, including a long late phase as housing for students at the nearby Fuller Theological Seminary. It was issued a demolition permit in 2006. It was saved by preservation advocates, purchased by a nonprofit housing developer, cut lengthwise in two pieces, transported across the city of Pasadena on two consecutive nights in late 2009, set on a new foundation in the Villa Parke neighborhood, and restored. It is now part of an affordable-housing development called Herkimer Gardens. The two large units it contains today were sold to low-income first-time homebuyers.

It is a story that does not fit neatly into the standard Greene & Greene narrative. That is part of why it matters.

The Apartment House

The Herkimer Arms was built in 1912 as a two-story building containing eight apartment units, four to a floor. It was designed for winter visitors — the seasonal clientele on which Pasadena’s early-twentieth-century identity as a destination resort city depended — and was built furnished, with the expectation that residents would arrive with luggage and find a working apartment on the day they took possession.

The building’s exterior was finished in gunite. Gunite is a dry concrete mix sprayed at high pressure through a hand-held nozzle onto a prepared surface, where the impact and water content fuse it into a structural skin. By 1912, the firm had been working through a sequence of alternatives to traditional Craftsman cladding: hand-applied rough-pebble dash coats had given way, over the previous decade, to more refined techniques. The Herkimer Arms used what was, in 1912, the newest of these — gunite applied by hand-controlled nozzle. The technique left an uneven texture across the exterior wall surfaces, the result of the operator’s hand controlling a continuous stream of material across an inherently variable application. The unevenness was not an error to be corrected. It was, by all accounts, a quality the Greenes appreciated. It gave the building a hand-made surface that aligned with the firm’s broader commitment to evidence of craft. The Herkimer Arms is one of very few Greene & Greene buildings of any type with a gunite exterior, and the surfaces it carries today, much repaired and restored after relocation, are still recognizably the surfaces of 1912.

The building’s massing was modest: a rectangular two-story block, with a parapeted roof, framed in front by trellises on either side of the principal facade. Original green terracotta tiles served as a decorative accent on the exterior. A front porch and steps led up to the main entrance from the original street level. The composition was not Craftsman in the residential sense — there were no shingles, no exposed brackets, no clinker brick, no projecting Japanese-influenced rafters. It was something different: a small urban apartment building in the dignified institutional vocabulary that the firm reached for, increasingly, when the program asked for it.

The Built-Ins

What set the Herkimer Arms apart from any other apartment building in Pasadena, in 1912 or now, was what the firm did inside the units. The eight apartments were not minimally appointed rentals to be filled by tenants with their own furniture. They were finished, furnished spaces, with built-in cabinetry of the kind the firm was famous for — and they were specifically designed for visitors who would arrive with suitcases and stay for weeks or months.

The signature element was the trundle bed armoire. Each unit was equipped with a built-in armoire containing, behind its doors, a hideaway trundle bed that could be deployed for sleeping and stowed for the day. Around the bed compartment, the armoire incorporated bookshelves, drawers, and a pull-out desk surface that the firm called a “breadboard” desk — a flat panel that slid out horizontally for use and tucked back into the cabinet when not needed. The combination meant that a single piece of fitted furniture, integrated into the wall of the apartment, performed the functions of bedroom, library, dressing room, and writing desk. The main rooms of the apartment did not have to be partitioned for sleeping. The whole apartment could be lived in as a daytime space, then converted, in a few minutes, to a night-time space.

The built-ins were, in their way, an early-twentieth-century solution to a problem that would later preoccupy mid-twentieth-century American apartment design — how to make small urban units function as well as larger residences. The Greenes’ answer, in 1912, was to absorb the bedroom into the millwork.

When the building was rehabilitated after relocation, repair and restoration of these original built-ins — the trundle beds, the armoires, the breadboard desks — was specifically itemized in the rehab scope. The work that the firm had done inside the units, a century before, was understood by the rehab team as a defining feature of the building.

Mary Maud Earle, J. Parker Earle, and the Spreadsheet Question

The commission has come down through the documentary record under more than one name. The Greene & Greene firm’s own records identify the project under Mary Maud Earle. The City of Pasadena’s historic-properties list identifies it as the J. Parker Earle Apartment House. These are not two different buildings. They are the same building, attributed to two members of what was almost certainly the same household, in two different documentary traditions that have not entirely synchronized.

This is the second case, in this section of the firm’s portfolio, of a husband-and-wife dual naming pattern. The 1911 Lena W. Huston House at 605 North Marengo Avenue carries the same kind of doubled identification: filed in the firm’s records under one spouse, recorded in the City’s properties list under the other. In the case of the Earle commission, the firm’s records — and so this site’s listing of the project — use the name Mary Maud Earle. It is a reasonable inference, given the pattern, that Mrs. Earle was the active client during the design and construction of the apartment house, and that the City’s listing of the building under her husband’s name reflects the conventional naming practices of municipal property records rather than the actual architectural relationship.

In the building’s contemporary identification, neither name has prevailed. From very early in its life, the building has been known instead by the name of the street on which it was first built. It is the Herkimer Arms — for Herkimer, the original name of the East Union Street block on which it stood — and it is by that name that it has been known for a hundred years.

The Long Years on East Union Street

The Herkimer Arms operated as winter-visitor apartments through its early years and continued in residential use through the twentieth century. At a certain point, the building’s original function as accommodations for seasonal visitors had given way to a more conventional rental use. For many of the later twentieth century’s decades, the building was used as housing for students at Fuller Theological Seminary, the major theological institution located on Walnut Street nearby. A 1912 apartment house designed for winter visitors had become, by the late twentieth century, a building full of seminary students.

The original site at 527 East Union Street was, by the 2000s, no longer the East Union Street the firm had built into. The block’s surrounding context had been substantially altered over the intervening century by Pasadena’s urban changes: redevelopment, demolition of neighboring buildings, alteration of street alignments, construction of new buildings of unrelated character. The Herkimer Arms remained — but as an isolated piece of 1912 architecture amid a built environment that had moved on around it.

In 2006, the building’s owner decided to develop the site. A demolition permit was issued. The Herkimer Arms — the only surviving Greene & Greene apartment building anywhere — was scheduled to be removed.

The Cut, the Move, the New Life

Pasadena Heritage and other local preservation advocates intervened. After what the rehab record describes as several failed efforts to find an alternative, a new site was acquired by Heritage Housing Partners, a nonprofit affordable-housing developer, in early 2008. The new site was on North Raymond Avenue in Pasadena’s Villa Parke neighborhood. The plan was to relocate the entire building.

Relocating a two-story gunite apartment house of 1912 vintage is not a routine operation. The building was cut lengthwise into two pieces. Each piece was loaded onto a transporter and moved across the city of Pasadena on its own night, in late 2009 — the two halves traveling on consecutive nights, on streets cleared of overhead obstructions, in the small hours when traffic could be diverted. The two halves were set on a new foundation at the North Raymond Avenue site and rejoined.

The rehabilitation that followed was extensive. A new foundation. Structural repairs throughout. Extensive repair of the original gunite exterior. Replacement of outdated building systems. Repair and restoration of original doors, windows, and wood trim. Repair of the interior built-ins — the trundle beds, the breadboard desks, the cabinet hardware. Repair of the interior stairwell. Removal of a much-altered roof parapet that had accumulated over the twentieth century, and reconstruction of a parapet to match the firm’s original 1912 design. Installation of new rain gutters per the original drawings. Removal of non-original front exterior stairs and replacement with a front porch and steps following the original design. Repair or in-kind replacement of the original green terracotta tiles. Reconstruction of the two trellises that had originally framed the main facade.

Because of zoning at the new site, the original eight units could not be retained as eight. They were converted, with what the rehab team describes as minimal impact to remaining historic fabric, into two large four-bedroom units, one on each floor. In the new floor plan, the original one-room studios became self-contained bedroom suites, each with a large bedroom, the original closet, and an updated bathroom retaining surviving historic elements — original tubs, medicine cabinets, doors, and windows. The two-room studios became living and dining rooms. Non-original kitchens, the result of mid-twentieth-century alterations, were either converted into walk-in closets or combined to create enlarged kitchens for each of the two new full-floor units.

The two units were sold to low-income first-time homebuyers. The Herkimer Arms — built for winter visitors in 1912, occupied by seminary students for much of the twentieth century, threatened with demolition in 2006, cut in half and moved in 2009 — became, in the 2010s, two homes for two Pasadena families.

The project received the 2012 City of Pasadena Historic Preservation Award and the 2013 Los Angeles Conservancy Preservation Award. The building has been designated a City of Pasadena Historic Landmark. It is recognized as eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story

The Herkimer Arms occupies a singular position in the firm’s portfolio. It is the firm’s only apartment building. It is one of the firm’s only gunite-clad buildings. It is one of the firm’s earliest experiments with a building type designed not for a single owner-occupant but for an indefinite series of short-term residents. And it is, today, an exceptionally rare example in the broader history of American architecture: an early-twentieth-century apartment building, designed by a leading firm, surviving intact enough to have been worth cutting in half and moving across a city to save.

The 1912 date situates the building at the very opening of the Later Partnership era. The Cordelia A. Culbertson House — the closing great Ultimate Bungalow — was on the boards. Charles Greene was still in Pasadena, still working alongside Henry, three years away from his Carmel-by-the-Sea relocation. The firm’s residential commissions were beginning to taper, but the firm itself was still operating at full capacity, still attracting commissions across the typological range of the period. The Herkimer Arms is the apartment-building entry in that broader output, executed in the same year as the Annie Blacker House on South Madison Avenue, the Edward S. Crocker Guest Cottage in Pasadena, and a small handful of other 1912 commissions that opened the firm’s final formal partnership decade.

The fact that the building is the only one of its type in the firm’s catalog is, in part, an accident of how the firm’s business developed: residential commissions for distinguished individual clients dominated, and apartment buildings — a building type generally associated with investor-developers and rental income — were not a market the firm pursued. That the firm did execute one apartment building, at all, and that the one it executed was as carefully detailed and thoughtfully programmed as the Herkimer Arms, is a quiet indication of how seriously Charles and Henry Greene approached every commission that crossed their drafting tables, regardless of building type.

Quick Reference

Closing Reflection

There is a sense in which the Herkimer Arms is two buildings that happen to occupy the same gunite shell. It is the 1912 apartment house, designed for winter visitors, fitted with armoires that hid trundle beds and breadboard desks, surfaced in hand-applied gunite by an operator whose hand was understood by the architects to leave its own evidence on the wall. And it is the 2010s building, set on a new foundation at a new address, restored in its original details, configured for two families instead of eight. The first building was almost lost. The second building exists because the first was almost lost.

What survived the cut and the move is the architecture itself: the gunite, the proportions, the trellises framing the front, the terracotta tiles, the trundle beds folded into the cabinetry, the breadboard desks that pull out where they always pulled out. What did not survive, and could not have, is the Herkimer Arms’s original neighborhood — the East Union Street block as it was in 1912, and as it had ceased to be by 2006. The building’s relocation is, by the standards of the most rigorous historic preservation, a compromise. It is also the reason the building still exists.

The two families who own the two units in the Herkimer Arms today did not buy them as a commemorative gesture. They bought them to live in. The trundle beds are not, presumably, in daily use. The breadboard desks may or may not still slide out. The gunite is, after a century and a relocation, in the condition that gunite is in after a century and a relocation. Mary Maud Earle’s apartment building, by whatever name it goes under, is doing what apartment buildings do, which is to say it is housing people. That, in the end, is the most that any building can be asked for, and the Herkimer Arms — the only surviving Greene & Greene apartment building — is doing it.

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