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The Arthur Savage Duplex

On the east side of North Marengo Avenue, north of Washington Boulevard, in the residential blocks of Pasadena that constitute today the Garfield Heights Landmark District, stands the Arthur Savage Duplex at 1299-1301 North Marengo Avenue. The building was designed in 1924 by Henry Mather Greene, working from his Pasadena office under his solo professional designation Henry M. Greene, Architect, in the third year of his independent practice following the formal dissolution of Greene & Greene. The commission is a two-unit residence — a duplex, as its name in the firm’s records indicates — and it is the firm’s only documented duplex commission across nearly three decades of California practice. The building is identified on the City of Pasadena’s Historic Properties List as the Arthur Savage Duplex, attributed to Henry M. Greene, dated 1924, and individually listed within the broader Garfield Heights Landmark District designation.

The commission’s documentary record at Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library is unusually rich for a Greene project of this scale. The drawings preserved in the Greene & Greene archive include perspective views, site plans, detail drawings, sketches, orthographic drawings, pencil drawings, blueprints, and — perhaps most distinctively — watercolor wash drawings. The watercolor washes are presentation-grade drawings, executed at a finish above the working-drawing standard, and they suggest that the Savage commission was, despite its modest scale and unusual building type, treated by Henry’s office with the level of design care that the firm brought to its more familiar single-family residences.

The Duplex as a Building Type

A duplex is not, in the Greene & Greene catalog, a common building type. The firm’s residential portfolio is overwhelmingly single-family, with each commission producing one house for one family on one lot, programmed as the principal residence of an owner-occupant. The departures from this pattern are limited: the 1912 Mary Maud Earle Apartment Building, also known as the Herkimer Arms, was an eight-unit apartment building for winter visitors, and represents the firm’s only multi-unit residential commission of any scale. A duplex — two units, side by side or stacked, sharing a single building envelope — sits in an intermediate position between the single-family residence and the apartment building, and it is a building type the firm did not generally take on.

The Savage commission is, accordingly, the firm’s only duplex. The decision by Arthur Savage to commission a duplex rather than a single-family house was not, in the residential practice of mid-1920s Pasadena, unusual. Pasadena’s housing stock was diversifying significantly in the years between the two World Wars, with rental and small multifamily residences becoming an increasingly important component of the city’s residential development. A duplex offered an owner the practical advantages of either occupying one unit and renting the other, or renting both units as an investment property; the building type was, in the early 1920s, a recognized middle ground between the substantial owner-occupied bungalow and the larger apartment buildings rising downtown.

Henry Greene’s response to the duplex program — what survives in the Avery archive’s set of drawings — was to treat the commission with the architectural care of a single-family residence while addressing the practical requirements of two-unit occupancy. The two units share an exterior envelope, structural systems, and site, but each functions as an independent dwelling. The building, in its overall composition on the lot, reads as a single architectural statement rather than as a stack of separate units. The design discipline of the firm’s residential vocabulary, applied to the duplex program, produced a building that is identifiable as Greene & Greene work and identifiable as a duplex without one identification compromising the other.

The North Marengo Avenue Greene & Greene Cluster

The Arthur Savage Duplex is one of several documented Greene & Greene works on North Marengo Avenue, and one of the latest to be commissioned. The cluster, taken as a whole, gives the street one of the densest concentrations of firm-attributed work outside of the Pasadena Park Place–Arroyo Terrace neighborhood.

The cluster includes:

Across the two decades from 1903 through 1924, the firm executed at least five known commissions on the eastern side of North Marengo Avenue, with all five attributable directly to Henry Mather Greene’s hand. The Wilcox and Brown demolitions in the mid-twentieth century have substantially reduced the cluster’s physical presence on the street; the Huston House at 605, the relocated Black House at 1070, and the Savage Duplex at 1299-1301 are the three Greene & Greene buildings still standing on North Marengo Avenue today. The Savage Duplex is, in this sense, one of the last anchors of a Marengo Avenue Greene & Greene tradition that began two decades before its construction.

The duplex is also among the latest residential commissions by Henry on this particular street. After 1924, no further Greene & Greene commissions are documented for North Marengo Avenue. The Savage Duplex closes the street’s Greene & Greene record.

The Garfield Heights Landmark District

The Garfield Heights Landmark District was designated by the City of Pasadena on March 29, 1999, recognizing the architectural and historical significance of the residential blocks of North Marengo Avenue between street numbers 917 and 1328 — both sides of the street. The district encompasses a substantial concentration of early-twentieth-century Pasadena residential architecture, including the relocated Emma M. Black House and the Arthur Savage Duplex among its Greene & Greene–attributed buildings, along with works by other architects of the period and the broader vernacular Craftsman, Colonial Revival, and Mediterranean Revival residences that make up the district’s contributing fabric.

The Savage Duplex’s location within the district provides ongoing preservation protection for the building. The district’s listing on the City of Pasadena’s records, with its 1999 designation date, recognized the architectural ensemble of North Marengo Avenue’s residential development as a coherent piece of the city’s early-twentieth-century building history, worth protecting both individually and as a collective composition. The duplex contributes to that composition in a specific way — as the only Greene & Greene multi-unit residential commission anywhere, sited within the district that protects it.

The duplex is, in addition, individually listed on the City of Pasadena’s Historic Properties List with status codes GG (recognizing the building as a Greene & Greene work) and HMG (specifically attributing the design to Henry Mather Greene). The dual listing — both as an individually significant property and as a contributing structure within the Garfield Heights Landmark District — gives the Savage Duplex a particular standing within Pasadena’s historic preservation framework.

Henry Greene in 1924

The Arthur Savage Duplex was completed in the same year as the Thomas Gould Jr. House in Ventura, the major 1924 Henry Mather Greene residential commission for Mabel and Thomas Gould Jr. The two buildings — the Gould House at 4,299 square feet on 1.75 acres of coastal hillside in Ventura, and the Savage Duplex on a Pasadena residential lot in what would become the Garfield Heights Landmark District — represent the range of programs that Henry’s solo practice was capable of executing in 1924. The Gould House was a substantial residence with a thirty-thousand-dollar construction budget, an engaged Stanford-trained client, and a landscape designed by Theodore Payne. The Savage Duplex was a two-unit Pasadena residence with a more modest budget, a building type the firm had not previously taken on, and a site within an established residential block of the city.

The two commissions, taken together, indicate something about how Henry’s solo practice was operating in the third year of his independent work. He was not, in 1924, restricting his commissions to projects of a single type or scale. He was taking commissions across the residential range — from substantial coastal-California estates to Pasadena duplexes — and executing each at the level of architectural finish appropriate to its program and budget. The Avery archive’s preservation of presentation-grade watercolor wash drawings for the Savage commission indicates that the firm’s investment in the duplex’s design was not perfunctory; the building was treated as a project worth designing carefully, and the drawings were prepared with the visual finish that the firm’s tradition required.

The 1924 commissions also represent a moment in the late firm’s career when its residential output was beginning to taper. After 1924, Henry’s commissions would be fewer in number; the late 1920s would see his practice shift increasingly toward smaller commissions, alterations and additions, and limited new construction. The Savage Duplex sits at the upper edge of this transition — a 1924 new-construction residential commission, executed in the last years before the firm’s residential output substantially diminished.

The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story

The Arthur Savage Duplex occupies a particular position in the Greene & Greene catalog as the firm’s only documented duplex commission. It is the clearest available evidence that Henry’s solo practice could execute the duplex program — a building type generally associated with speculative builders rather than with high-end architectural firms — at a level of design finish consistent with the firm’s broader residential tradition. The Avery archive’s preservation of the building’s presentation-grade drawings, including watercolor wash renderings, indicates that the firm’s office documented the project with the same care given to single-family commissions of the same period.

The building is also a piece of the broader North Marengo Avenue Greene & Greene cluster — one of the densest concentrations of firm-attributed work in Pasadena outside the Park Place–Arroyo Terrace neighborhood. With the Wilcox and Brown houses demolished and the Huston House and Black House surviving in their original or relocated configurations, the Savage Duplex is one of the three remaining Greene & Greene buildings still standing on the street. Its survival within the Garfield Heights Landmark District, designated by the City of Pasadena in 1999, gives it a degree of formal preservation protection that supports its continued physical presence in the district.

The duplex is, finally, a documentary indication of how Henry’s solo practice was thinking about residential development in Pasadena in the mid-1920s. The duplex was, in 1924, an emerging building type for the city — a response to the housing pressures and the investment-property opportunities of the postwar period. That Henry took the commission, and that he produced a building that has been individually recognized on the city’s historic properties list a hundred years later, indicates that his late solo practice was capable of engaging seriously with the residential building types that were shaping Pasadena’s residential character in his lifetime, regardless of whether those building types had been part of the firm’s earlier Pasadena Peak Period output.

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Closing Reflection

The Arthur Savage Duplex does not appear on Greene & Greene tour itineraries. It is not the subject of major monographic publications. It is rarely mentioned in the same sentence as the Gamble House, the Blacker House, the Cordelia Culbertson House, or the Thomas Gould Jr. House — the substantial single-family commissions that have come to define the firm’s residential reputation. It is, by program and by scale, a different kind of building: a 1924 two-unit residence on a residential block of North Marengo Avenue, designed by Henry’s solo practice, in the firm’s only documented engagement with the duplex building type.

The building’s quiet presence in the Greene & Greene record is, in a way, more revealing than the more famous commissions. It documents that Henry’s late solo practice was prepared to take on commissions of building types and scales that the firm’s better-known tradition had not generally engaged with — and to design those commissions with the same documentary care, the same drawing standards, the same level of design attention. The watercolor wash drawings that Henry’s office prepared for the Savage commission, preserved in the Avery archive a hundred years later, show what the firm thought a duplex deserved.

The duplex is still there. Two units, sharing a single building envelope, on the east side of a Pasadena residential street, within a landmark district designated by the city seventy-five years after the building was constructed. Two families, on any given evening across the past century, have been doing what families do in residential buildings — eating dinner, going to sleep, getting up the next morning, and continuing to occupy the space that Henry Greene drew for two units of two-family living, in the third year of his solo practice, in the same year he was completing the Gould House in Ventura.

The duplex form was, in 1924, a relatively new piece of the Pasadena housing landscape. It is now, a century later, a familiar one. The Arthur Savage Duplex is one of the buildings that helped make it familiar.

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