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Greene & Greene

The L. C. Johnson Garage

On a residential block of Concha Street in Altadena, in the upper San Gabriel Valley north of Pasadena’s central residential blocks, stands the small accessory structure that Henry Mather Greene designed in 1935 as the L. C. Johnson Garage. The commission, cataloged in the firm’s records under the client’s name, was one of the smallest-scale architectural projects in Henry’s documented late-career portfolio. The building program was a garage — a single-purpose accessory structure for the storage and shelter of automobile or other vehicular use — rather than the residential commissions that had defined the firm’s broader catalog across forty years of California practice.

The 1935 dating places the L. C. Johnson Garage commission squarely in the depths of the Great Depression. The American residential commission market had, by 1935, contracted dramatically from the levels that had supported the firm’s late-1920s practice. New residential construction had fallen to a small fraction of pre-Depression volumes; substantial private residential commissions of the kind that had defined Henry’s solo practice through the 1920s had become substantially less common. Within this transformed economic context, smaller-scale accessory commissions — garages, alterations, additions to existing buildings — represented a continuing avenue of architectural professional engagement at a scale that the contracted economy could still support.

The L. C. Johnson Garage commission’s location at Concha Street in Altadena is documented in the firm’s records under the address designation “1066 Concha Street” in the spreadsheet inventory of the firm’s commissions. Los Angeles County property records identify a structure at 1065 Concha Street, Altadena, with a 1935 construction date and an approximately 375 square foot footprint — dimensions consistent with a single-car or compact two-car garage program — which may represent the L. C. Johnson Garage commission under a slightly differing modern address designation, or may represent a separate but contemporaneous Concha Street structure. The relationship between the firm’s 1066 address designation and the 1065 modern property record may reflect a one-digit transcription difference in the firm’s records, an address-renumbering of the parcel at some point in the subsequent century, or a placement of the garage commission on the parcel opposite the address it was associated with. Researchers consulting both the firm’s records and the contemporary property documentation should treat the 1065-versus-1066 distinction as an open question worth verification.

The Garage as a Building Type

The garage as an architectural building type emerged into American residential design as a function of automobile ownership. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before automobile use had become widespread, residential properties typically did not include dedicated automobile-storage structures; horse-drawn carriages were sheltered in carriage houses or stables, often integrated with the property’s broader outbuilding program. As automobile ownership expanded across the early twentieth century — driven by the Ford Model T’s mass-market production beginning in 1908 and the subsequent broader automobile-industry development — residential properties increasingly required dedicated automobile-storage structures that became known as garages.

By the 1920s, garages had become a standard component of substantial American residential properties. The firm’s Pasadena Peak Period residential commissions of the 1907-1910 period had typically included garage programs, often executed as standalone structures designed in coordinated architectural language with the principal residences. The Gamble House, the Blacker House, the Cordelia Culbertson House, and other Peak Period commissions included garage outbuildings designed as part of the integrated architectural program. The garage, in these contexts, was a part of the broader residential commission rather than a discrete project.

By the 1930s, however, the architectural treatment of the garage had begun to shift. As residential automobile ownership had expanded and as the American suburban development model had moved toward incorporating attached or directly-adjacent garages within the principal residential envelope, the standalone garage as a separately designed structure had become a more limited residential building type. The L. C. Johnson Garage commission’s 1935 dating places it in this transitional period, when standalone garages designed by professional architects were becoming less common and the category as a whole was being absorbed into the broader residential building envelope.

The commission’s program — a discrete garage, separately designed from any associated residence (the existing main house at the Concha Street site, if it is the 1928-built structure documented in the property records, would have been designed by another architect) — suggests that the L. C. Johnson Garage was not part of a complete residential commission Henry had executed for the client, but rather a discrete garage commission for a client whose residence was already standing. This pattern — adding a separately designed garage to an existing residence designed by another architect — was a relatively common professional engagement for established architects in the 1920s and 1930s, providing a smaller-scale commission opportunity that did not require the broader residential program of a complete house design.

Henry Mather Greene in 1935

By 1935, Henry Mather Greene was sixty-five years old and substantially past the most active phase of his solo professional career. His Pasadena office, operating under his solo professional designation Henry M. Greene, Architect, had produced its most active years of late-period output through the 1920s — the substantial 1924 portfolio that included the Thomas Gould Jr. House, the Arthur Savage Duplex, and the Samuel Z. Mardian Buildings; the 1925 commissions including the William Thum House and the Mrs. Frances B. Swan relocation; the active 1929 portfolio including the Estelle Strasburg House. The volume of new commissions had begun to decline through the early 1930s as the broader American residential commission market contracted under the pressure of the Great Depression.

Henry’s residential life, in 1935, remained centered in Pasadena, where he and his wife Emeline Augusta Dart Greene continued to live in the home they had occupied across his professional career. Their four children — Henry Dart Greene (born c. 1901), W. Sumner Greene (born c. 1907), Isabel H. Greene (born c. 1908), and Elbert M. Greene (born c. 1911) — were variously established in their adult lives, with Henry Dart Greene having begun his own professional career in architecture. The decision Henry would later make, in 1940, to move from his Pasadena home to live with Henry Dart Greene’s family at 1405 La Solana Drive in Altadena — a decision that followed Emeline’s death in 1940 — would not occur until five years after the L. C. Johnson Garage commission. In 1935, Henry was still maintaining his Pasadena office and his independent residential and professional life.

The commissions that Henry’s 1935 office produced reflected the constrained commission market of the period. Large new residential commissions had become substantially less common; smaller commissions — additions, alterations, accessory structures like the L. C. Johnson Garage — represented the kind of work that the contracted economy could support. Henry’s continued professional engagement with such smaller commissions, even at the reduced scale that the period required, demonstrates that he maintained his Pasadena practice through the difficult mid-1930s years. The L. C. Johnson Garage was one piece of evidence about that continuing engagement.

The Concha Street Site

Concha Street in Altadena is a residential street in the upper San Gabriel Valley, north of Pasadena’s central residential blocks. The street’s residential development occurred substantially across the 1920s and 1930s, with houses on the block dating from the mid-1920s through the post-World War II period. The neighborhood is characterized by single-family residences on relatively narrow lots, with mature trees and the kind of established residential character that the upper San Gabriel Valley’s pre-war residential development produced.

The specific address of the L. C. Johnson Garage commission — designated as 1066 Concha Street in the firm’s records — corresponds to a residential property in the central residential blocks of Concha Street. The Los Angeles County tax records show a structure at 1065 Concha Street built in 1935 with an approximately 375 square foot footprint, the dimensions of which are consistent with a small detached garage. The same parcel includes a primary residence built in 1928 with an approximately 1,520 square foot footprint, which would have been the main house on the property at the time of the 1935 garage construction. The 1928 main house, if it is the original property at this address, was built seven years before the L. C. Johnson Garage and was the work of an architect other than Henry Greene.

The placement of the L. C. Johnson Garage as a 1935 accessory structure to an existing 1928 main house represents a particular kind of architectural commission relationship. The client, L. C. Johnson, owned an existing residence on Concha Street that had been built by another architect; the client engaged Henry Greene to design a discrete accessory garage rather than to renovate or expand the existing residence. The commission represents Henry’s professional engagement with a single program element of a residential property rather than with the property as a whole.

The biographical record of L. C. Johnson, the client, has not surfaced extensively in publicly accessible historical sources. The firm’s records preserve the client’s identification by initials and surname, but additional information about the person — first name, occupation, family circumstances, prior or subsequent residential history — does not appear in widely accessible online archives. The selection of Henry Greene as the architect for what was, by 1935 standards, a small accessory commission, indicates that L. C. Johnson was likely a Pasadena-area resident with some awareness of the firm’s reputation, willing to engage Henry’s solo practice for what would have been a limited-budget design project.

The Documentary Record

The principal documentary record of the L. C. Johnson Garage commission exists in the firm’s archival collections, with the project’s specific drawings and any associated correspondence preserved either at the Charles Sumner Greene Collection at the Environmental Design Archives at the University of California, Berkeley, or at the Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. The relatively small scale of the commission — a garage rather than a residence — would suggest a correspondingly small documentary record, perhaps consisting of a limited set of drawings rather than the more extensive design documentation that substantial residential commissions typically produced.

The publicly accessible online archives of these collections do not, on the available evidence, include detailed cataloging of the L. C. Johnson Garage drawings comparable to the more extensively documented commissions described in earlier entries in this directory. The commission appears in the firm’s spreadsheet inventory as a documented project, but the specific design contents — the architectural style of the garage, the materials specified, the relationship to the existing 1928 main house, and any decorative or formal architectural elements — are accessible primarily through direct consultation with the relevant archival repository rather than through widely available online resources.

The contemporary status of the L. C. Johnson Garage building, if it is the 1935 structure documented in the Los Angeles County property records at 1065 Concha Street, would indicate that the building has remained in continuing use as an accessory structure on its parcel for approximately ninety years. The 375 square foot footprint and the relatively low building valuation in the property records (approximately $18,000 in 2012 assessment) are consistent with the continuing presence of a small mid-century garage structure that has not been substantially altered or rebuilt. Whether the structure visible at 1065 Concha Street is, in fact, the original Henry Greene garage, or a subsequent rebuild on the same site, would require physical inspection and consultation with property records.

The 1935 Depression Context

The Great Depression’s impact on American residential and architectural practice, by 1935, had been substantial and sustained. The October 1929 stock market crash had triggered an economic contraction that, by the mid-1930s, had reduced American residential construction starts to a small fraction of their late-1920s levels. Architects across the United States had experienced dramatic declines in commission volume; many established architectural practices had reduced their staff, restructured their professional engagements, or closed entirely. The federal government’s response to the Depression — the New Deal programs initiated under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration beginning in 1933 — included substantial investment in public architectural programs (the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and related agencies) but did not generally support the private residential architectural commission market that had defined the firm’s traditional practice.

Within this transformed professional environment, Henry’s solo Pasadena office had adapted to the contracted commission market by accepting smaller-scale work. The L. C. Johnson Garage was one such smaller commission. The continued willingness of his office to take on limited-scope commissions — a discrete garage rather than a complete residence — reflects the practical reality of mid-1930s architectural practice, when professional engagement at the scale of complete new residences had become substantially less common.

The 1935 commission’s small-scale program also reflects the changed economic position of the firm’s traditional client base. The clients who had supported substantial 1920s residential commissions — the upper-middle-class and wealthy professional and business families of Pasadena, Altadena, and the broader Southern California residential context — had, in many cases, experienced substantial reductions in their disposable wealth through the early Depression years. Discretionary commissions for new construction had become substantially less common; smaller commissions for additions, alterations, and accessory structures became the principal residential architectural work that the contracted economy could support. The L. C. Johnson Garage represents one piece of evidence about how this changed economic environment shaped the kinds of commissions that established Pasadena architects continued to receive in the mid-1930s.

The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story

The L. C. Johnson Garage occupies a particular position within the Greene & Greene catalog as one of the smallest-scale documented commissions in the firm’s record, and as one of the few mid-1930s commissions executed by either of the founding architects. The building’s significance within the broader catalog lies less in any individual architectural distinction — the garage’s specific design details, materials, and relationship to the existing residence are not extensively documented in widely accessible published sources — and more in its position as a piece of evidence about how Henry’s solo practice continued to operate during the Great Depression years.

The commission also documents a particular aspect of the firm’s relationship to the residential architectural program. The garage as a building type had been part of the firm’s residential commissions since the Pasadena Peak Period, when garages had typically been designed as integrated components of complete residential commissions. By the 1935 L. C. Johnson Garage commission, the garage had become a discrete commission program in its own right, separable from the residential commission that traditionally would have produced it. Henry’s willingness to accept the discrete garage commission demonstrates the adaptability of his late practice to the contracted commission environment of the Depression era.

The commission represents, finally, the kind of professional continuity that defined the firm’s late-career engagement with the architectural marketplace. Even at the smallest scales, Henry’s office continued to receive commissions, continued to produce designs, and continued to deliver completed buildings to clients who had engaged the firm’s services. The L. C. Johnson Garage is one of the smallest of these continuing commissions, but it is, in its existence, evidence that the firm’s professional practice continued to function through one of the most difficult economic periods in the history of American architectural practice.

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Closing Reflection

A garage is, in the broader architectural-historical record, a small thing. It does not appear in coffee table books. It is not the subject of major monographic treatment. It does not draw architectural pilgrims to its location, and it does not feature on city historic walking tours. The L. C. Johnson Garage at Concha Street in Altadena, designed by Henry Mather Greene in 1935, sits within this category of architectural-historical small things — a documented commission in a major firm’s catalog, but a commission whose specific architectural details are accessible only through archival consultation and whose contemporary identification requires verification through physical inspection.

The smallness of the commission is, in some sense, the point. The Pasadena Peak Period of Greene & Greene had produced the Gamble House, the Blacker House, the Cordelia Culbertson House — substantial residential architectural achievements that announced themselves immediately and have remained recognized across the subsequent century as among the most significant American Arts and Crafts residential designs. The 1924 Thomas Gould Jr. House in Ventura, the 1925 William Thum House in Pasadena, the 1929 Estelle Strasburg House in Covina represented Henry’s continuing late-period engagement with substantial residential architecture across the 1920s. By 1935, with the Great Depression having transformed the American residential commission market, the kind of architectural production that the firm had become known for was substantially less available.

What was available, in 1935, was the L. C. Johnson Garage. A small accessory structure on a Concha Street parcel in Altadena, for a client whose biographical record has not been preserved in widely accessible sources, designed by Henry Mather Greene at age sixty-five, executed at a scale consistent with the contracted commission environment of the mid-1930s, and completed as one of the small additions to the architectural fabric of Altadena’s mid-twentieth-century residential development.

The structure, in its assumed location at 1065 Concha Street, has stood for approximately ninety years. The drawings, presumably preserved somewhere in the archival collections of the firm’s records, document Henry’s specific design intentions for this small commission. The client, L. C. Johnson, presumably parked his automobile in it through his subsequent ownership of the Concha Street property. Subsequent owners, presumably, used the same structure for the same purpose across the changing automotive history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

A career has chapters, and within those chapters, the smaller passages — the L. C. Johnson Garages, the Mary J. Moore furniture commissions, the small mid-1930s accessory commissions that the contracted economy could still support — represent the continuing professional engagement that defined the firm’s late practice. They do not have the architectural drama of the Peak Period commissions. They are not the buildings the firm is celebrated for. But they are part of the documented record of how Henry Mather Greene continued to work, even in the most economically constrained years of his career, even at the smallest scales, even for clients whose biographical details have not been preserved in the broader historical literature.

The garage is there. The records are there. The work was done. The career continued.

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