Pasadena City Hall and the Rose Bowl: The Parade and What It Hid

The Tournament of Roses began on January first, eighteen ninety, when members of Pasadena's Valley Hunt Club decorated their carriages with cut flowers and paraded through the streets to celebrate the fact that while the rest of the country was buried in snow, the San Gabriel Valley was in bloom. It was a booster event, an advertisement for Southern California winters.

By nineteen oh two, the parade had acquired a football game. By nineteen twenty-three, the game had acquired the Rose Bowl stadium. Pasadena City Hall, completed in nineteen twenty-seven to a design by Bakewell and Brown, the same partnership that designed San Francisco City Hall, is the civic monument to the version of Pasadena the Tournament promoted: Spanish Baroque Revival, a dome on a hill, grand civic confidence.

That version of Pasadena coexisted with a different history. The neighborhoods of Northwest Pasadena held substantial Black and Latino populations who were excluded by covenant and practice from the civic institutions the Tournament celebrated. In nineteen seventy, a federal court ordered the Pasadena school district to desegregate. The full history of the city does not appear in the flower imagery.