On a residential block of West Adams Park Drive in Covina, in the eastern reaches of the San Gabriel Valley some twenty miles east of Pasadena, stands the residence Henry Mather Greene designed in 1929 for the client identified in the firm’s records as Mrs. Edward Strasburg, whose own first name was Estelle. The commission’s address is 225 West Adams Park Drive — listed in the Avery archive’s catalog entry, in the older nineteenth-century convention of trailing directional indicators, as “225 Adams Park Drive West.” The building is one of Henry’s substantial late-period residential commissions in a Southern California city outside the Pasadena-Altadena-Sierra Madre core that defined most of the firm’s output across its three decades of California practice, and it is one of the firm’s only documented commissions in Covina.
The commission was executed in the same year as Charles Sumner Greene’s last complete original commission, the John Langley Howard House and Studio in Monterey (House 19 in this directory), and Charles’s beginning of the twelve-year Martin A. Flavin engagement at Spindrift in the Carmel Highlands (House 18). The 1929 portfolio of the Greene brothers — Charles working from his Carmel studio, Henry from his Pasadena office — represented one of the most active years of either architect’s late career, with new construction commissions, sustained ongoing engagements, and substantial new residential designs in geographically distributed California locations. Henry’s Strasburg commission in Covina contributed to that active 1929 portfolio with what the documentary record indicates was one of his most extensively drawn residential projects of the late period.
The Avery Archive’s Documentary Record
The Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers Collection at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University preserves a substantial documentary record of the Strasburg commission. The collection, cataloged as “Residence for Mrs Edward Strasburg, 225 Adams Park Drive West, Covina, [Calif.],” consists of ninety-nine sheets of drawings on various media. The collection’s specific composition includes forty-three drawings in graphite on tracing paper; twenty-one drawings as blueprints on paper; eleven drawings as blueprints with crayon markings on paper; seven drawings as blueprints with crayon and graphite annotations on paper; five drawings in graphite and ink on tracing paper; seven drawings as blueprints with graphite annotations on paper; three drawings in graphite and crayon on tracing paper; one drawing in graphite on paper; one drawing as a positive photostat on paper; and one drawing as a negative photostat on paper.
The variety and the volume of drawings indicate a fully developed architectural project. Detail drawings, sketches, perspective drawings, preliminary drawings, architectural drawings, site plans, orthographic drawings, and design plans all appear within the collection. The presence of preliminary drawings and sketches alongside the working architectural drawings and blueprints documents the full design development process — from Henry’s earliest design ideation through the working construction documents that the contractor would have used to execute the building. The presence of perspective drawings indicates that presentation-grade renderings were produced as part of the commission, suggesting the kind of formal client-presentation process that characterized substantial Greene & Greene residential commissions.
The Avery cataloger’s note that many of the prints in the set are damaged reflects the ordinary archival condition of working drawings that have been in storage for nearly a century, and does not diminish the significance of the documentary record as a whole. The Strasburg drawings, with their nearly hundred sheets of architectural development, constitute one of the more extensively documented late-period Henry Greene commissions in the firm’s archival holdings.
The archive’s subject indexing identifies the building types preserved in the drawings as “Houses; Garages; Cottages.” The plural building-type designations indicate that the Strasburg commission was not a single-residence project but a multi-building estate composition — a main residence accompanied by garage structures and cottage buildings, all designed by Henry as part of the integrated 1929 commission. This kind of multi-building residential program was, within the firm’s broader catalog, characteristic of substantial estate commissions where the property’s program required not only the principal dwelling but accommodation for staff, guests, vehicles, and ancillary domestic functions.
Estelle Strasburg, the Client
The principal client of the 1929 commission was identified in the Avery archive’s catalog under both of the names that early-twentieth-century convention provided for a married woman: as Estelle Strasburg (using her own first name) and as Mrs. Edward Strasburg (using the formal convention of identifying a married woman by her husband’s first name). The dual cataloging — with both names appearing in the archive’s subject index — reflects the standard practice of the period, when married women were identified in formal records both by their own personal names and by their husbands’ names depending on the social and professional context.
The dual-naming pattern in the Strasburg commission is consistent with several other Pile B commissions in this directory. The 1911 Lena W. Huston House, the 1912 Mary Maud Earle Apartment Building, and the 1917 Mrs. Howard F. Mundorff House each show similar dual-naming patterns in the firm’s records, where the wife’s name appears in the firm’s commission records but related civic and property records identify the property under the husband’s name. The pattern reflects the actual professional and social agency that wives often held within the architectural commission process during the early twentieth century — they were frequently the family members most actively engaged with the design process, with the resulting commissions appearing in the firm’s records under their names — even though formal property and legal records typically identified the husband as the property owner.
The biographical record of Estelle Strasburg and her husband Edward Strasburg, beyond their identification as the clients of the 1929 Henry Greene commission, has not surfaced extensively in the publicly accessible historical record. The selection of Henry Greene as the architect for their substantial Covina residence indicates that the Strasburgs were among the San Gabriel Valley clients with both the financial resources to commission a major Pasadena architect and the cultural orientation to value Henry’s particular professional reputation — a combination that would have placed them within the upper tier of Covina residential property owners in the mid-1920s.
Adams Park, Covina
The site of the Strasburg commission, at 225 West Adams Park Drive, places the building within the Adams Park neighborhood of Covina. Adams Park is a recognized residential area in Covina, with a portion of the neighborhood organized around the city park of the same name. The neighborhood developed in the 1910s and 1920s as one of Covina’s principal residential sections, with substantial early-twentieth-century single-family residences on tree-lined streets oriented toward the central park feature that gives the neighborhood its name.
Covina itself is a small city in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, located approximately twenty miles east of Pasadena. The city was incorporated in 1901 and developed during the early twentieth century as one of the principal agricultural and residential communities of the citrus-growing San Gabriel Valley, with the regional economy substantially driven by the orange and lemon orchards that defined much of the surrounding agricultural landscape. By 1929, when Henry was designing the Strasburg commission, Covina had developed into an established small city with substantial residential neighborhoods, civic infrastructure, and a developed cultural identity within the broader San Gabriel Valley settlement pattern.
The Adams Park neighborhood, within this Covina context, represented the kind of established residential area where substantial period-revival and Arts and Crafts residences were being constructed during the late 1920s. The Strasburg commission, with its multi-building estate program (main house, garages, cottages), placed the Strasburgs among the more substantial residential property holders in the neighborhood, with a property of sufficient scale to accommodate the architectural ambition that ninety-nine sheets of Henry Greene drawings would have required to execute.
Henry Greene’s 1929 Portfolio
The Strasburg commission was completed in a 1929 that proved to be one of the more active years of Henry’s solo Pasadena practice. The other documented 1929 commissions in the firm’s record include the Mrs. C. P. Daly House in Ventura (1925-1929), various continuing work on the Mrs. Carrie Whitworth House in Altadena (which had begun in 1918 with subsequent phases in 1920, 1924, and 1927), and the Strasburg commission itself. The 1929 portfolio represented Henry’s continuing engagement with new residential design at a moment when his older brother Charles, working from Carmel six hundred miles north, was completing his last fully original commission with the John Langley Howard House and Studio.
The geographic distribution of Henry’s 1929 commissions — Pasadena (continuing work on existing engagements), Altadena (the Whitworth continuing project), Covina (the Strasburg commission), Ventura (the Daly project’s continuation) — indicates that his solo practice had developed a regional reach across Southern California’s expanding residential markets that the firm’s earlier Pasadena Peak Period had not generally extended into. The Strasburg commission’s location in Covina, twenty miles east of the firm’s traditional Pasadena base, represented Henry’s working engagement with the developing residential markets of the eastern San Gabriel Valley — a market that would, in subsequent decades, develop substantially into one of Southern California’s principal residential growth corridors.
The 1929 commissions also represent the closing phase of Henry’s most sustained late-career productivity. Although Henry would continue to take residential commissions through the 1930s and into the early 1940s, the volume of his output would diminish in subsequent years, and his commissions would shift increasingly toward smaller residential programs and additions or alterations to existing buildings. The Strasburg commission, with its substantial multi-building program and its ninety-nine documented drawing sheets, represents Henry’s late practice working at one of the higher levels of design ambition that his solo office would sustain in the years immediately preceding the broader contraction of his architectural production.
Charles and Henry, the Same Year
The 1929 architectural year of the Greene brothers is, in the firm’s broader history, a moment of unusual structural symmetry between the two architects’ professional lives. Charles, in Carmel, was completing his last fully original commission with the John Howard House and beginning his longest sustained late-career engagement with the Spindrift project. Henry, in Pasadena, was producing his most extensively documented 1929 residential commission with the Strasburg project, while continuing engagement with multiple ongoing client relationships across Southern California. Both architects were, in 1929, sixty or sixty-one years old; both had been working in California for thirty-five years since the firm’s founding in 1894; both were engaged in late-career residential production that, while not at the architectural peak of their Pasadena Peak Period work, represented sustained professional engagement with ongoing residential design.
The 1929 portfolio also represents a moment immediately preceding the structural transformation that the Great Depression would bring to American residential architecture. The October 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent prolonged economic depression would substantially disrupt the residential commission market across the United States, with substantial new-construction commissions becoming dramatically less common as private wealth contracted and discretionary residential investment fell sharply. The Strasburg commission, completed in 1929, was executed at the closing edge of the substantial 1920s residential construction boom that had supported much of the late-period work of the firm; subsequent commissions for both Charles and Henry would face a substantially altered economic environment.
The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story
The Estelle Strasburg House occupies a particular position within the Greene & Greene catalog as one of the firm’s most extensively drawn 1929 residential commissions, executed in a Southern California city outside the firm’s traditional Pasadena-centered residential market, for a client identified through the firm’s standard early-twentieth-century dual-naming convention. The commission’s documentary record at the Avery archive — with ninety-nine sheets of drawings preserved across multiple media and including the full range of design development from preliminary sketches through working blueprints — indicates that Henry’s solo practice approached the project with the level of design care that the firm’s broader tradition required.
The building also documents Henry’s sustained engagement with the developing residential markets of Southern California outside the immediate Pasadena context. While the firm’s Pasadena Peak Period work had been concentrated in the city of Pasadena and its immediate surrounding communities, Henry’s solo practice in the 1920s had extended commissions into Fresno (the 1917 Mundorff House), Ventura (the 1924 Gould House and the 1925 Daly House), Los Feliz (the 1921 Kelly House), Berkeley (the 1922 Schevill House), Piedmont (the 1923 Tolmie House), and now Covina with the 1929 Strasburg House. The geographic extension of the firm’s late practice across diverse California residential markets is an architectural-historical pattern that the Strasburg commission contributes to.
The building represents, finally, the kind of substantial late-career residential commission that the firm’s solo practice was capable of producing in 1929 — a multi-building estate program, executed with a fully developed architectural drawing set, for a client whose social and economic position supported the level of design ambition that the commission required. The Strasburg commission may not have entered the broader popular awareness that the firm’s Pasadena Peak Period commissions have achieved, but its documentary record in the Avery archive preserves it as one of the more substantial late-period Henry Greene commissions whose architectural significance can be evaluated through the surviving drawings.
Quick Reference
- Location: 225 West Adams Park Drive, Covina, California (in the older nineteenth-century convention of trailing directional indicators, as the Avery archive catalogs it: “225 Adams Park Drive West”)
- Date: Designed and built 1929
- Architect: Henry Mather Greene, working from his Pasadena office under his solo professional designation Henry M. Greene, Architect (HMG attribution per the firm’s records)
- Client: Estelle Strasburg, also identified in the firm’s records as Mrs. Edward Strasburg per the formal early-twentieth-century convention of identifying a married woman by her husband’s first name; both forms appear in the Avery archive’s subject indexing
- Avery archive cataloging: “Residence for Mrs Edward Strasburg, 225 Adams Park Drive West, Covina, [Calif.],” in the Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers Collection
- Documentary record: ninety-nine sheets of architectural drawings preserved at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, including 43 graphite drawings on tracing paper, 21 blueprints, 11 blueprints with crayon markings, 7 blueprints with crayon and graphite annotations, 5 graphite and ink drawings on tracing paper, 7 blueprints with graphite annotations, 3 graphite and crayon drawings on tracing paper, 1 graphite drawing on paper, 1 positive photostat, and 1 negative photostat; many of the prints in the set are documented as damaged
- Building program: multi-building residential estate, with the archive’s subject indexing identifying the building types as “Houses; Garages; Cottages” — indicating a main residence, garage structures, and cottage buildings designed as part of an integrated commission
- Drawing types preserved: detail drawings, sketches, perspective drawings, preliminary drawings, architectural drawings, site plans, orthographic drawings, and design plans
- Site context: the Adams Park neighborhood of Covina, an established early-twentieth-century residential area in the eastern San Gabriel Valley approximately twenty miles east of Pasadena
- Period framing: Eighth year of Henry Mather Greene’s solo Pasadena practice following the 1922 dissolution of Greene & Greene; one of multiple 1929 Henry Greene commissions, executed in the same year that Charles Sumner Greene was completing his last fully original commission with the John Langley Howard House and Studio in Monterey (House 19 in this directory)
- Dual-naming pattern: consistent with several other Pile B commissions where the firm’s records identify the wife’s name even when civic and property records typically identified the husband, including the 1911 Lena W. Huston House, the 1912 Mary Maud Earle Apartment Building, and the 1917 Mrs. Howard F. Mundorff House
- Geographic context within the firm’s catalog: one of the firm’s only documented commissions in Covina; representative of Henry’s solo practice extending residential commissions across diverse Southern California markets including Fresno, Ventura, Los Feliz, Berkeley, Piedmont, and Covina
- Current status: Limited published information on the contemporary condition or any historic preservation designation
Closing Reflection
A residence is more than a single building. The Strasburg commission, in 1929, was not the design of a house — it was the design of a residential estate, with the principal dwelling accompanied by garage structures and cottage buildings, all integrated into a single architectural program executed across a substantial Covina property. Ninety-nine sheets of drawings, in graphite and ink and crayon, on tracing paper and blueprint paper, were produced by Henry Mather Greene’s solo office in Pasadena to develop the commission. Many of those drawings have been damaged in the nearly hundred years since they were drawn. But many of them survive, preserved in their archival folders at Columbia University, available for consultation by scholars who continue to study the firm’s late-career architectural production.
A commission is more than a single project. The Strasburg commission was one of a series of late-period Henry Greene residential commissions that extended the firm’s reach beyond the Pasadena residential market into the broader Southern California residential landscape — Fresno, Ventura, Los Feliz, Berkeley, Piedmont, Covina. Henry’s solo practice, working from his Pasadena office, produced commissions for clients whose lives were taking them to cities and neighborhoods that the firm’s earlier Peak Period had not engaged with. The Strasburg commission contributed to that geographic extension of the firm’s late practice, in a small San Gabriel Valley city twenty miles east of the Pasadena office where Henry continued to draw.
A year is more than a sequence of months. 1929 was, for the Greene brothers, the year of Charles’s last fully original commission, the beginning of his longest sustained late-career engagement, and Henry’s continuation of one of his most extensively documented late-career residential portfolios. Charles in Carmel, Henry in Pasadena, both at age sixty or sixty-one, both engaged in the architectural production that the late phase of their respective careers permitted. The October 1929 stock market crash, three or four months after Henry would have signed the working drawings for the Strasburg commission, would substantially transform the American residential commission market in ways that neither brother could have anticipated when the year began. The 1929 commissions, on both ends of the firm’s geographic distribution, represent a moment immediately before that economic transformation — when sustained late-period architectural production could still be supported by the residential commission market that the 1920s had developed.
The Strasburg commission, in 225 West Adams Park Drive, Covina, in 1929, sits within all of these larger contexts. It is the design of a multi-building residential estate. It is one of the firm’s only Covina commissions. It is one of Henry’s most extensively documented late-period residential projects. It is part of the closing year of the 1920s residential construction era that had supported much of the firm’s late practice. The drawings survive at Columbia. The building survives at its address. The architectural-historical record preserves both.
The drawings and the building are, together, what is left of the commission a hundred years after its design. They are the physical evidence that Henry Mather Greene, in 1929, working from his Pasadena office, continued to do the kind of residential architectural design work that had defined his thirty-five-year California career, extending it one more time, into one more San Gabriel Valley city, for one more client whose name the firm’s records preserve in both of the forms that the early twentieth century permitted.