CMain St to Alhambra Rd

This is where the town of Alhambra was first laid out. In 1871 Benjamin Davis Wilson bought 275 acres of dry, uncultivated land that belonged to the State and was thought to be worth little because nothing could irrigate it. With his son-in-law James De Barth Shorb he ran iron pipe to it, said to be the first aqueduct in Southern California to carry water under pressure to a tract opened for settlement. [Context p.63] [Context p.72] The Alhambra Tract's original extent ran from Alhambra Road south to Mission Road, and from North Story Place and South Almansor Street east to roughly North Vega Street, El Molino Street, and South Granada Avenue. [Context p.63] Lots sold at about a hundred dollars an acre and were gone by 1877. [Context p.64]

Among the city's surviving houses from before 1903, the City's context statement lists the Francis Quarles Story residence of 1883 on North Story Place, an 1886 Queen Anne on the 100 block of North Stoneman Avenue, and an Italianate house at 300 North Granada Avenue that the survey dates to the late 1880s and found eligible for the National Register. The context statement calls that house Shorb's residence, but the survey says it was identified as Shorb's in error: his actual home stood on the San Marino Ranch and was razed after Henry Huntington bought it in 1903. [Context p.80] [Survey p.500] [Survey p.836] Story was a citrus grower. [Context p.155] When the Alhambra Orange Growers Association formed in 1896, it built the town's packing house on North Granada Avenue along the Monrovia rail line. [Context p.67] The Lindaraxa Tract was recorded in 1911 and sold as Lindaraxa Park, its name borrowed from Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra. [Context p.112] The 2023 survey identified the Lindaraxa Park and Orange Blossom Manor neighborhood, 182 properties between Lindaraxa Park and East Alhambra Road, as a potential historic district, with two thirds of its houses contributing. [Survey p.34] The fire department's headquarters stood on North Stoneman Avenue from 1908 to 1966, [Context p.188] and in the 1950s the retail center of Main Street moved east from Garfield toward Chapel Avenue as Liebergs', J. C. Penney, and Woolworth's opened there. [Context p.192]