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The Samuel Z. Mardian Store and Apartment Building

On the north side of East Washington Boulevard, between Hill Avenue and Allen Avenue in Pasadena, directly across the street from the residential blocks that would later be designated as the Bungalow Heaven Landmark District, stands the Samuel Z. Mardian Store and Apartment Building at 1517-1525 East Washington Boulevard. The commission was designed in 1924 by Henry Mather Greene, working from his Pasadena office under his solo professional designation Henry M. Greene, Architect. Construction was completed in 1925. The building is a mixed-use commercial-residential structure — retail storefronts at street level, apartment units above — and it is the firm’s only documented mixed-use commission combining commercial and residential program in a single building.

The building remains in mixed-use occupancy a hundred years after its completion. The current address range, as listed in contemporary real estate records, runs from 1517 through 1521 East Washington Boulevard, somewhat shorter than the original 1517-1525 address range recorded in the firm’s commission documentation. The current building has approximately 6,550 square feet of gross leasable area, configured as approximately 3,900 square feet of ground-floor retail space and roughly comparable square footage of residential accommodation on the upper level. The retail level features high ceilings, concrete flooring, a display window facing East Washington Boulevard, and back access from the alley running parallel to the building. The residential level retains the apartment program of the original 1924 commission.

The Avery Archive’s “Buildings” Plural

The Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers Collection at Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library catalogs the commission as “Samuel Z. Mardian Buildings, (Pasadena, California, 1924)” — using the plural “Buildings” rather than the singular “Building.” The plural designation is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the commission’s archival record and is consistent with the original 1517-1525 address range, which would have spanned five conventional storefront positions on East Washington Boulevard.

The current configuration of the building at 1517-1521 represents only a portion of the original 1517-1525 footprint. The reduction in address range — from five storefront positions in 1924 to approximately three storefront positions today — may reflect partial demolition, subdivision, or renumbering of the original Mardian commission over the course of the past century, though the documentary record of any specific change is not currently available in publicly accessible sources. The “Buildings” plural in the Avery archive cataloging serves, at minimum, as a marker that the original 1924 commission was understood by the firm’s office as something more than a single-storefront structure — a multi-storefront, multi-unit building that occupied a substantial section of the East Washington Boulevard street frontage.

The Mixed-Use Program

The Mardian commission’s program — commercial storefronts at street level, residential apartment units above — places the building in a particular position within the Greene & Greene catalog. The firm’s residential output, which dominates its better-known portfolio, was almost exclusively single-family. The firm’s multi-unit residential work was limited primarily to the 1912 Mary Maud Earle Apartment Building, also known as the Herkimer Arms, and the 1924 Arthur Savage Duplex on North Marengo Avenue. The firm’s commercial work included the 1911 Earle C. Anthony Automobile Showroom interior at 1000 South Hope Street in Los Angeles, the 1924 Pasadena Drapery Shop Building, and a long sequence of utilitarian commissions for the Pasadena Ice Company. None of these earlier commissions combined commercial and residential program in a single structure.

The Mardian Building is, accordingly, the firm’s only documented mixed-use commission. The building represents the firm’s only sustained engagement with what was, in 1920s American urban development, an emerging building type — the urban mixed-use storefront-with-apartments-above structure that would become a defining element of mid-twentieth-century American main-street commercial corridors. Henry’s 1924 design response to the Mardian program produced a building that has accommodated commercial and residential occupants continuously across the past hundred years, and that has done so within the architectural envelope of a single 1924 Pasadena commercial-residential structure.

The decision by Samuel Z. Mardian to commission this particular type of building, on this particular section of East Washington Boulevard, in 1924, reflects the broader pattern of Pasadena’s mid-1920s commercial development. East Washington Boulevard was emerging in the 1920s as a significant commercial corridor serving the residential neighborhoods to the north and south, and the mixed-use commercial-residential building type — common in the streetcar-era American city — was a recognized program for property owners interested in combining storefront rental income from the ground floor with apartment rental income from the upper level. The Mardian commission represents a property owner’s decision to engage a high-end Pasadena architectural firm — one with no significant prior history of mixed-use commercial work — for the design of what was, in its program, a relatively conventional 1920s urban building type.

East Washington Boulevard and the Bungalow Heaven Adjacency

East Washington Boulevard, in 1924, was an active and developing commercial corridor running east-west through the residential blocks of northern Pasadena. The street served as the northern boundary of what would, sixty-five years later, be designated as the Bungalow Heaven Landmark District — Pasadena’s first historic district, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, encompassing several hundred small Craftsman bungalows and California bungalow residences built primarily between 1900 and 1930 in the residential blocks south of Washington Boulevard between North Hill Avenue and North Chester Avenue.

The Mardian Building, on the north side of East Washington Boulevard at the 1517-1525 address range, sits directly across the street from the Bungalow Heaven district’s northern edge. The siting places the building at the commercial frontage that served the surrounding residential neighborhood — the small storefronts at street level provided everyday retail for the bungalow residents to the south, while the apartment units above provided rental housing for residents who preferred multi-unit accommodation to the single-family Craftsman bungalows that characterized the broader residential context. The building functioned, in this sense, as a transitional architectural element between the single-family residential blocks of what would become Bungalow Heaven and the broader commercial corridor of East Washington Boulevard.

The contemporary commercial context of the Mardian Building’s location reflects the continuing vitality of this mixed-use corridor. The building’s immediate neighbors include locally celebrated independent businesses — Octavia’s Bookshelf, Millie’s Cafe, Lavender and Honey Espresso Bar, and Woon, among others — that constitute what is identified in current commercial real estate descriptions as “The Shops on Hill,” a contemporary retail cluster anchored at the intersection of Washington Boulevard and Hill Avenue. The Mardian Building is, at the time of writing, an active participant in this contemporary retail corridor — its ground-floor storefronts continuing to serve the same kind of pedestrian-scale retail function that the building’s 1924 program contemplated, and its upper-floor apartments continuing to provide the rental housing that the Mardian program contemplated.

Henry Greene in 1924

The Mardian Building was completed in a year of unusually diverse output from Henry Mather Greene’s solo Pasadena office. The 1924 commissions documented in the firm’s records include, in addition to the Mardian Buildings, the Thomas Gould Jr. House in Ventura — a substantial residential commission for Mabel and Thomas Gould Jr. with thirty thousand dollars of construction budget on a 1.75-acre coastal hillside lot; the Arthur Savage Duplex on North Marengo Avenue in Pasadena — a two-unit residence in what would become the Garfield Heights Landmark District; the Pasadena Drapery Shop Building — a Pasadena commercial commission whose specific location and contemporary status have not been preserved in widely accessible records; and the Elmer R. Murphy commission in Pasadena — a residential commission whose detailed program is also not extensively documented in widely accessible records.

The diversity of these five 1924 commissions — a substantial coastal-California residence, a Pasadena duplex, a mixed-use commercial-residential building, a commercial building, and a smaller Pasadena residence — demonstrates that Henry’s solo practice in 1924 was operating across the full range of building types that the firm’s earlier partnership-era practice had engaged with, and was extending the firm’s engagement into building types — the duplex, the mixed-use commercial-residential — that the partnership had not previously taken on. The Mardian commission in particular represents a programmatic engagement with mid-1920s American urban building types that the firm’s earlier Pasadena Peak Period output had not contemplated.

The 1924 commissions also represent a year of substantial productivity in Henry’s solo practice that would not be matched in subsequent years. After 1924, Henry’s documented commissions decline in number, and his practice shifts increasingly toward smaller commissions, alterations, and limited new construction. The Mardian Buildings, the Gould House, and the Savage Duplex — all 1924 commissions — sit at the productivity peak of Henry’s solo career, and they collectively define the architectural range that his independent practice was capable of executing at its strongest moment.

The Building Today

The Mardian Building is, at the time of writing, an active commercial property within Pasadena’s mid-Washington Boulevard retail corridor. The current configuration — 1517-1521 East Washington Boulevard — operates as a Storefront Retail/Residential property type, with approximately 6,550 square feet of gross leasable area divided between ground-floor retail and upper-floor residential. The building has an offered parking ratio of approximately 0.61 spaces per 1,000 square feet, consistent with the urban building patterns of the 1920s when most commercial occupants and many residential occupants relied on streetcar transit and pedestrian access rather than automobile parking.

The ground-floor retail space — approximately 3,900 square feet, configured as a single tenant space with one office, a showroom, two large open areas, back storage, and two restrooms — features high ceilings, concrete flooring, a display window facing East Washington Boulevard, and a back entrance opening onto the alley behind the building. The retail buildout is contemporary, but the basic spatial configuration — high-ceilinged ground-floor retail with display window frontage on the boulevard — corresponds to the original 1924 program.

The upper-floor residential portion of the building continues to function as the apartment accommodation that the Mardian commission contemplated. The building’s amenities include exterior signage, a roof terrace, a balcony, and storage spaces — features that reflect the building’s continuing function as a multi-tenant urban building with both commercial and residential occupants. The building’s recent commercial real estate history includes a 2023 sale offering at three million two hundred thousand dollars; the property’s continuing investment-grade commercial status reflects its ongoing relevance within Pasadena’s commercial real estate market.

The 1517-1525 original address range and the 1517-1521 current address range together suggest that some portion of the building’s original 1924 footprint may have been altered, subdivided, or partially lost over the past century. The full documentary record of any such change is not, at this time, available in publicly accessible records, and the building’s current physical configuration would benefit from formal architectural-historical documentation to establish what relationship it bears to the original 1924 commission’s complete envelope.

The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story

The Samuel Z. Mardian Store and Apartment Building occupies a singular position within the Greene & Greene catalog as the firm’s only documented mixed-use commercial-residential commission. The building is the clearest available evidence that Henry Mather Greene’s solo practice in the mid-1920s was prepared to take on programs that the firm’s earlier Pasadena Peak Period had not engaged with — programs of urban commercial-residential development that responded to the building types emerging in 1920s American cities, rather than to the single-family residential building types that had defined the firm’s earlier reputation.

The building is also one of the relatively small number of Greene & Greene commercial commissions that survive in their original use. Many of the firm’s commercial commissions — the Earle C. Anthony Automobile Showroom interior in Los Angeles, the various Pasadena Ice Company structures — have been substantially altered, demolished, or converted to other uses across the past century. The Mardian Building, by contrast, continues to operate as the mixed-use commercial-residential building that the 1924 program contemplated. Its ground-floor storefronts continue to host retail tenants. Its upper-floor apartments continue to house residential occupants. The building’s continuing function in its original program is a kind of survival that more architecturally celebrated commercial commissions have not always achieved.

The commission is also a piece of evidence about Henry’s relationship to mid-1920s Pasadena commercial development. East Washington Boulevard was, in 1924, a developing commercial corridor serving the residential neighborhoods to the north and south. Samuel Z. Mardian’s decision to engage Henry Mather Greene’s solo practice for the design of a five-storefront mixed-use building on this corridor reflects something specific about how Henry’s practice was understood by Pasadena property owners of the period — as a firm capable of designing not only the substantial single-family residences that had defined its Peak Period reputation, but also the mixed-use commercial-residential urban buildings that were emerging as a defining element of the city’s interwar built environment.

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Closing Reflection

A hundred years after its completion, the Mardian Building is doing what it was designed to do. The ground-floor storefronts continue to house retail tenants. The upper-floor apartments continue to house residential occupants. The building’s pedestrian-scale frontage on East Washington Boulevard continues to participate in the daily commercial life of the residential neighborhood that surrounds it. The 1924 program — storefronts below, apartments above, on a five-storefront stretch of a developing Pasadena commercial corridor — continues to make sense as a building program in 2025, and the building continues to accommodate it.

That kind of programmatic continuity is, in the broader context of urban American architecture, a substantial achievement. Many mid-1920s mixed-use commercial-residential buildings have been demolished and replaced with parking lots or single-use structures. Many others have been converted to single-use occupancy — either entirely commercial or entirely residential — losing the mixed-use character that defined their original program. The Mardian Building has done neither. It has remained a mixed-use commercial-residential building, on a mixed-use commercial-residential corridor, in a city that has continued to recognize the value of pedestrian-scale, mixed-use urban architecture.

Henry Mather Greene drew the building in 1924, in the most productive year of his solo Pasadena practice, on a commission from a property owner whose name appears in the firm’s records as Samuel Z. Mardian, for a piece of East Washington Boulevard frontage that was, at the time, an emerging commercial corridor serving the residential neighborhoods to the north and south. A hundred years later, the building is still there, the corridor is still active, the storefronts are still occupied, and the apartments are still rented. The Bungalow Heaven Landmark District across the street has, in 1989, been formally designated as a historic district. The neighborhood that the Mardian Building was designed to serve has been recognized as worth preserving.

The building that was designed to serve it remains, somewhat quietly, in service.

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