On the eastern side of North Marengo Avenue, in the residential blocks north of Colorado Boulevard, stands the only surviving Henry Mather Greene-designed house of three he completed on the same street in the same year. The address is 605 North Marengo. The year was 1911. Henry’s other two North Marengo houses — the Charles G. Brown House at 665 and the Charles P. Wilcox House at 675 — were demolished, the Wilcox in 1948, the Brown in 1966. The house at 605 outlasted both. It is, today, the only place on the street where the architecture Henry Greene drew in 1911 still stands.
The commission appears in the firm’s records as job number 286. Twelve sheets of drawings survive from it in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University — a mix of blueprints with crayon markings, ink-and-pencil drawings on cloth, ink drawings on cloth, plain blueprints, pencil drawings on paper, and a single pencil drawing on tracing paper. Some are at the standard architectural scale of one-quarter inch to the foot; others are detail drawings at three-quarters inch to the foot. They are the documentary record of Henry Greene’s work for the Huston family, executed in the same closing year of the Peak Period that produced the Cordelia A. Culbertson House and the Earle C. Anthony Automobile Showroom.
What is unusual about the documentary record is the name. The commission is filed in the archive as the J. K. Huston House — for Joseph K. Huston, the husband. But many of the drawings, the cataloger notes, use a different name: Mrs. Lena W. Huston. Two clients, on the same set of sheets, for the same address. The architectural record has, to its credit, retained both, and the project is now indexed in scholarly catalogs under both names.
The Mrs. Huston Sheets
The dual-naming convention is not, in early-twentieth-century Pasadena, common. Most Greene & Greene residential commissions are documented under the husband’s name, with the wife appearing — if at all — only on later correspondence about furniture or interior matters. The Huston commission is different. On a substantial portion of the surviving drawings, the client is named as Mrs. Lena W. Huston rather than as J. K. Huston. The change in convention, repeated across the sheets, suggests that Lena Huston was the active client in the design process — that she was the person Henry Greene was actually drawing the house for, regardless of which spouse’s name appeared on the formal contract.
This is more than a clerical detail. The Greene & Greene office was not casual about its drawings; the convention by which a project was named on its sheets reflected the firm’s understanding of who the client was. If Henry Greene was naming his sheets to Mrs. Huston, it is reasonable to read those sheets as a record of his working relationship with her. The Lena W. Huston House — to use the name that would most accurately describe the project as Henry was drawing it — is, in this small but specific way, a portrait of an architectural client whose contribution to her own house has been preserved in the firm’s documentary record long after the conventional wisdom of the period would have erased it.
The North Marengo Cluster
In 1911, Henry Greene designed three houses on North Marengo Avenue. They were not commissioned simultaneously and do not appear to have been the work of a single coordinated developer; what they share is a block, an architect, and a year. The Charles G. Brown House occupied 665 North Marengo. The Charles P. Wilcox House sat next door at 675. The Lena W. Huston House — the third, slightly to the south — was 605. The block, in 1911, would have presented to a passerby an unusual concentration: three new Greene & Greene houses, all by Henry, all in the same year, distributed along a few hundred feet of street.
The cluster is documented evidence of Henry Greene’s reputation along the block. By 1911, Pasadena had any number of working architects, and any number of Craftsman-style residences on offer. That three different homeowners on the same street commissioned the same architect, in the same year, is best understood as a kind of architectural neighborhood effect — one homeowner’s choice making the next neighbor’s choice easier, a successful design on one lot producing a commission on the next. Henry Greene’s standing in the Pasadena residential market, sustained across the long Peak Period, was the basis of it.
The cluster’s survival rate, however, has not been high. The Wilcox House was demolished in 1948, thirty-seven years after its construction. The Brown House lasted longer, but was demolished in 1966, fifty-five years after its construction. By the late 1960s, two of the three Henry Greene houses on the block were gone. The Huston House, alone among the three, remained.
What Survived
The reasons for differential survival among houses of the same vintage on the same street are rarely simple. Demolition decisions tend to involve a mix of factors: the condition of the structure, the development pressures of the period, the financial circumstances of the owner, the path of the surrounding neighborhood. By the mid-twentieth century, North Marengo Avenue, like much of Pasadena’s older residential fabric, was facing precisely the redevelopment pressures that erased so many smaller Greene & Greene commissions. The 1948 Wilcox demolition came during the postwar housing boom that transformed Southern California. The 1966 Brown demolition came during the urban-renewal era that reshaped American downtowns.
The Huston House — across both periods — was not demolished. The house remains standing at 605 North Marengo today, more than a century after its 1911 commissioning. The reasons for its survival do not need to be reconstructed in detail to be appreciated. It is enough to say that the building Henry Greene drew, on the sheets that named his client as Mrs. Lena W. Huston, is the one Greene & Greene 1911 house on North Marengo Avenue that the twentieth century did not take.
The Documentary Record
For a Pasadena residence whose physical detail has not been the subject of extensive scholarly publication, the documentary record at Columbia is unusually substantial. The Avery archive’s twelve sheets cover the architectural drawings sufficient to reconstruct the building’s design intent: orthographic studies, sketches, detail drawings, blueprints, and the single pencil drawing on tracing paper that is so often, in Greene & Greene work, the document on which a critical detail was first worked out. The mix of media — ink on cloth alongside pencil on paper, blueprints alongside crayon-marked sheets — is characteristic of how the firm’s drawings evolved through a project: from initial sketches to final blueprints, with crayon annotations recording revisions made on site.
Job 286 sits in the firm’s project sequence between residential commissions of similar scale and date, in the period when the Peak Period output was beginning to taper. The Greene & Greene archive at the Avery library — which contains the drawings, papers, and photographs of the firm’s full career — is the institutional record of how Henry Greene worked the Huston commission, and it remains the primary documentary source for the building.
Henry Greene in 1911
The Lena W. Huston House belongs to the same architectural moment that produced Henry’s other 1911 work: the Cordelia A. Culbertson House (in which his role was substantial alongside Charles’s), the Pasadena School District Longfellow Elementary School (a Classical Revival public commission entirely his own), the Charles P. Wilcox and Charles G. Brown houses elsewhere on this same North Marengo block, and a handful of additional Pasadena residences executed in the firm’s now-mature Craftsman vocabulary. Across these projects, Henry’s particular design instincts — clarity of plan, restraint in ornament, careful proportional relationships, the dignified arrangement of mass and opening — were consistently visible.
The 1911 work also represents a turning point in the partnership. Within four years, Charles would relocate to Carmel-by-the-Sea, and the firm’s residential output would continue increasingly under Henry’s hand alone in Pasadena. The Huston House, drawn for Lena W. Huston in the closing year of the Peak Period, is one of the documents of Henry’s growing autonomy as the firm’s Pasadena partner. The HMG attribution that appears in the Greene & Greene records is, in this sense, not a footnote: it is a substantive identification of authorship at a moment when authorship within the partnership was beginning to differentiate.
The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story
The Lena W. Huston House does not appear on the standard Greene & Greene tours. It is not the kind of commission that is featured in coffee-table books on the Ultimate Bungalows. It is, in its own way, exactly the kind of commission that explains how the Greene & Greene reputation actually worked in Pasadena: a successful residential commission for a distinguished local family, in a desirable block of the city, by an architect whose practice had become so locally embedded that the next-door neighbor and the neighbor next to that one would also commission him in the same year.
It is also a commission whose archival record preserves a story about a client. The drawings name Mrs. Lena W. Huston. They preserve, on their face, the documentary trace of an early-twentieth-century woman who participated meaningfully enough in the design of her own house that her architect labeled the project for her. The Lena W. Huston House — the name the drawings themselves use — is the right name for the building, and it is the name under which the house deserves to be remembered.
Quick Reference
- Location: 605 North Marengo Avenue, Pasadena, California
- Date: Designed and built 1911
- Architect: Henry Mather Greene (Greene & Greene partnership era)
- Greene & Greene job number: 286
- Drawings preserved: 12 sheets in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, in mixed media (blueprints with crayon markings, ink-and-pencil on cloth, ink on cloth, blueprints on paper, pencil on paper, pencil on tracing paper)
- Documented client names: J. K. Huston, Esq. (formal title); Mrs. Lena W. Huston (used on many of the drawings)
- Style: Craftsman
- N. Marengo Avenue context: one of three Henry Greene-designed houses on the same street in 1911 (with the demolished Charles G. Brown House at 665 and Charles P. Wilcox House at 675)
- Current status: Existing — the only one of the three 1911 N. Marengo Henry Greene houses still standing
Closing Reflection
A century after Henry Greene drew the sheets, the house at 605 North Marengo is still there. The two houses Henry designed for the lots up the street are not. What is remarkable about the survival is not that the building escaped some specific demolition order but that, across two distinct waves of Pasadena redevelopment that took its neighbors, this house simply went on standing. It was not preserved because of its architect. It was not protected because of its client. It survived in the way that a great many ordinary things survive, which is to say imperfectly and without ceremony — by being on a particular lot, owned by a particular owner at a particular moment, when the particular pressures that came for the houses up the street did not, on this lot, prevail.
Henry Greene died in 1954. The Wilcox House had already been demolished by then; the Brown House would follow twelve years later. The Huston House outlasted its architect and outlasted its neighbors, and it continues to stand, beneath the street trees, on a residential block in Pasadena where the documentary memory of two adjacent Greene & Greene houses no longer has any physical purchase.
The drawings, in the archive at Columbia, bear the name of Mrs. Lena W. Huston. The building, on North Marengo Avenue, bears it as well — quietly, on its own lot, in 1911 and in 2026.