Since they live in an age of less-than-instant communication, the Taylors have vaguely heard of Pasadena’s yearly celebration but really don’t know what to expect. “A quaint little procession with some flowers.” is what Mr. Taylor predicted it would be. But they are both overwhelmed by the beauty and variety of the participants in the line of march. The 1909 parade is the largest in history, helped by the fact that it has been advertised in railroad depots all the way to the East Coast. The parade is organized in six divisions: first come ladies and gentlemen on saddle horses, next are one- and two-horse vehicles, next are larger four- and six-horse conveyances, next are floats and tandem saddle horses, then marching clubs and novelties, and finally automobiles, placed at the end of march so as not to frighten the horses. Ezra Meeker, a pioneer traveler who had crossed the continent with an ox team by the Old Oregon Trail in 1852 and who had repeated the trip in 1906 is a special attraction as he drives an ox cart in the parade. Of course, all the vehicles, whether horse- or gas-powered, are decorated with roses and other seasonal flowers and a lot of greenery, especially smilax, also known as greenbrier, which is known for its bright green leaves. E.W. Knowlton used five hundred American Beauty roses to decorate his two-seated surrey drawn by two Arabian horses. Walter Raymond, owner of the Hotel Raymond, decorated his automobile so that it resembled a huge sea shell. But it was the Hotel Green that won first place in the six-horse coach class, and the most outstanding float was entered by the Pasadena Realty Board. Their trophy was a giant basket of roses – “one of the largest single bouquets of roses ever seen in the state.”
 
After a quick lunch it’s off to Tournament Park on the eastern outskirts of the city to see an afternoon of sports. (These are the days before the Rose Bowl football games – they didn’t start until 1923.) Over 20,000 pack the park – no mention is made in historical sources as to the traffic and parking problems that must have ensued. Everyone streams in through the entrance with its mission-styled arch at the southwest corner of Wilson Avenue and California Street (a structure I remember still standing in the mid-1950s, by the way). The Taylors find their seats in the grandstands just in time, as the games start exactly at 1:30. First on the program are cowboy sports performed by members of the Out West Club. Then comes the first of three heats of the four-horse chariot race that pits the horses of Richard Carman against those of E.J. “Lucky” Baldwin. The Taylors are especially interested in Baldwin’s team because they understand they will be visiting is ranch later in the week. The competing red and white chariots generate a lot of dust and shouts from the crowd as they careen down the course. Each heat lasts only about 1 ½ minutes, and Baldwin’s chariot wins the first one. Next on the program is a half-hour game of push ball on horseback, which pits two five-man teams against each other. The rules of the game are lost on the Taylors, but the winners do get a $100.00 prize. The second heat of the chariot race is won my Carman, although they finish in a dead-heat. Next comes a re-creation of the Oremond Mountain Stagecoach Robbery, complete with a fleeing heroine and a posse chase, again put on by members of the Out West Club. The final heat of the chariot race is won by Baldwin. He won two out of three and his representative claims the $1,000.00 first prize. The runner-up must be satisfied with $500.00 – not a bad piece of change in 1909.
 
The next day, Saturday January 2, the temperature is again in the low 70s. The vast network of the Pacific Electric car line is at the Taylors’ disposal to go just about anywhere in Southern California; but being city folk at heart, they decide to take the “car” into downtown Los Angeles, meet there a pre-arranged automobile tour of the city, and perhaps stop at a few hardware stores to see how Mr. Taylor’s store in Chicago compares. (We should keep in mind that when people spoke of going anywhere by “car” in 1909, they meant streetcar. Automobiles were still known formally as “automobiles.” But even in 1909, Los Angeles supported more automobiles than any other city its size in the world.)

Los Angeles seems like a big city compared to Pasadena, and indeed with a population of nearly 400,000 in 1909 is well on its way to becoming one. The tour guide tells the Taylors that Los Angeles is now served by three transcontinental railroads, has become the greatest lumber port in the United States, and is the largest shipping port in the world for oranges, beans, and olive oil. Add to this six million pounds of butter, 7.5 million gallons of wine and brandy, and 9,000 tons of dried fruit, and you’re talking big business. The Taylors’ excursion takes through the Broadway business district where they are impressed by the size and excellence of the shops, along the northwestern edge of the city at Elysian Park with its country views, to the verdant and waterfowl-filled Westlake Park, and through the fashionable and exclusive Wilshire Boulevard tract and West Adams district. They make the whole trip over asphalted streets and oiled roads. The tour stops for refreshment of iced grape juice at the Hollenbeck Café in the Hollenbeck Hotel at 2nd and Spring, said to be the most popular café in Southern California. The excursion then proceeds to the permanent exhibit of Southland products in the building of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, also known as the “Glad Hands Club.”
 
Another stop is made at the Benham Indian Trading Company on South Hill. This company has an interest in twelve Indian trading posts, mostly Navajo. According to G. Wharton James, it is “one of the few companies that has traded with the Indians of America without exploiting them.” You can buy rugs, blankets, beadwork, and baskets “transplanted from the squaw’s desert home to yours.” Mr. Taylor informs Mrs. Taylor that she has purchased enough souvenirs already and he isn’t going to transport anything more from anybody’s house to their's.
  
Before catching the car back to Pasadena, the Taylors stop in to have a look at the Alexandria Hotel at the corner of 5th and Spring. Built in 1906 for the small fortune of two million dollars, another wing is underway that will cost an additional one million. When completed the hotel will have a total of 700 rooms, with three- and four-room suites at each corner. The largest suites have a parlor, dining room with separate serving room complete with a steam table, a bedroom, a bathroom, and wardrobe room. The ballroom is a gigantic space measuring 196 feet long by 50 feet wide made all the more impressive by there being no supporting columns to impede the view. Five Hundred guests can be served at one sitting in that room. Overlooking the ballroom is a 3,600 square-foot assembly room off which are cloakrooms, and a children’s nursery and dining room. The kitchen in the basement measures 96 by 165 feet and has a 14 foot ceiling. A separate café has a 28-foot ceiling and is also 96 feet long. It is beautifully decorated with exquisite French windows and draperies and beautifully upholstered chairs. Connected to this room by two large French doors is the Roman Room, very Pompeiian in appearance.
 
The next day is Sunday and Mr. Taylor looks forward to sleeping in all morning. But his wife insists they attend church. With each day in this healthy climate she is getting stronger and stronger and feels she should thank God for it. Not to look ungrateful and knowing that domestic peace was the oil on which a long journey runs smoothly, Mr. Taylor gets out of bed and accompanies his wife to services at the First Methodist Episcopal Church. She points out to him the shops she visited a couple of days before as they make their way up Colorado to the hill where the church stands at the southeast corner of Marengo. After services in the semi-circular sanctuary, so like the Methodist churches back home, the Taylors stroll a little further east along Colorado, past the Hotel Maryland with its pagoda draped with climbing roses, past the soaring 85-foot tower of the United Presbyterian Church at Los Robles and into the still-domestically peaceful part of Colorado – “a broad avenue lined with beautiful residences surrounded by deep lawns, and flowering shrubs and trees.” Little did they know that a scant fifteen years later, this area will be completely transformed into a commercial zone and even the church in which they just worshiped will be dismantled stone by stone, shipped east along Colorado, and rebuilt as the Holliston Avenue Methodist Church that still stands today.

In the afternoon the hotel packs up a meal for their guests and sends them off to the upper reaches of the Arroyo Seco, first by automobile and then by horse-and-wagon. The water in the arroyo is always flowing, and a delightful place is found to dine al fresco among the oaks, sycamores, and laurels. Nobody wants to admit that 67 degrees is a trifle chilly for eating outdoors – this is California and winter’s cold can only be a figment of one’s imagination.
 
Not being much of a sportsman, Mr. Taylor has not signed up for any fishing or hunting excursions while he is here. But many of his fellow tourists will indulge in fishing the mountain streams for brook and steel-head trout or hunting further up the canyons for quail, doves, rabbits, squirrels, and ducks and geese in season. In fact, Mr. Taylor has heard that deer, bear, and mountain lion can be had for the taking way up in the foothills.
 
The high-point of the Taylors’ whole holiday comes the next day with the excursion to Mt. Lowe. From Hotel Green the Taylors go by car north to Altadena Junction, a location that is now at the corner of Calaveras and Lake Avenue. There they change lines to wend their way up to Rubio Canyon and the start of the Incline Railway. I will let G. Wharton James, who, after all, was the publicist for the railroad describe the trip in his usual understated way: “Up we spun, past prolific orchards and groves; by the blossoming poppy of California, up higher until we come to where the forces of Professor Lowe had blasted and hewn a way into the very heart of the mountain. On we rode into one of the most wild and picturesque canyons of America, darting here through deep cuts, winding there around precipitous cliffs, whilst below, the mountain stream lashed itself into fury as it regarded our impertinent intrusion. Now our car seems to be darting out into bottomless space, and, with a thrill, we hold ourselves in awful expectancy; but a graceful curve, and we glide merrily along, while fear gives place to laughter. What a delightful ride it is! Trees and chaparral clothe the disintegrating granite rocks. Larks and mocking-birds give delight by their songs of careless rapture. Gray squirrels dart on the tracks ahead of us, and then whisk into the gaunt sycamore trees and fearlessly peep out at us as we glide along. Now we are on a mere shelf cut out of the unyielding rock where, from a thousand feet above, men [had been] suspended dangling on ropes in mid-air preparing their blasts, ready to make our trip [possible]. Ahead of us we saw the first part of the Cable Incline and, suddenly, with a graceful curve, we swept around on to the Rubio [platform]…”
 
Passengers alight from the streetcar, and there, directly in front of them, in the Great Cable Incline Railway, often called the “roadway to the clouds.” Everyone then transfers to the “white chariots “of the Incline. Again, Mr. James: “We are noiselessly and easily conveyed to the summit of Echo Mountain. And what an outlook as we climb higher and higher! The valley opens up at our feet, one, two, and more thousand feet below, laid out in streets and avenues and farms and villages and towns and cities with, here and there, a reservoir like a silver mirror reflecting the brilliancy of the sun. The Incline is about 3,000 feet long and makes a direct assent to upwards of 1,400 feet on a grade as high as 62 per cent.”
 
I imagine everyone in this room has flown at least once. But imagine if you had never experienced a take-off before, where the world miniaturizes below you as you watch. What an amazing once-in-a-lifetime thrill it must have been for this crowd of tourists to break through the foothills and be able to see increasingly all the way to the ocean, San Pedro, Redondo, and Catalina Island.

After reaching the summit of Echo Mountain and having the obligatory picture taken before alighting from the car, the Taylors explore what is left of Echo Mountain House and the Chalet, which were destroyed a number of years before. Most of us who visit Echo Mountain today do the same thing and, I swear, it’s the only place I have ever visited I feel is haunted.
 
Soon heeding the cry for “All aboard for Alpine Tavern!” the crowd climes into the cars that will take them on the four-mile route to the end of the line. Again, Mr. James: “The cars whirled around below the summit, past stunted pines, over bridges, through cuts, and by the side of apparently bottomless canyons, rounded capes, and made turns and twists innumerable, until the Circular Bridge was reached. This is a wooden bridge of most solid construction, and, as its name implies, is circular in form to allow the cars to double back upon themselves and continue the ascent of the same slope, but at a higher level and in the opposite direction. The Garden of the Gods is entered, where gigantic frogs and turtles and alligators and bears (in stone) can be discerned by the imaginative spectator. Through a forest of California live-oaks, and into another of spruces and giant pines, where hundreds of thousands of doves make their nests, and squirrels merrily run to and fro on the branches; by rivers of rock, caused by the toppling down centuries ago, of gigantic pinnacles of granite; along the deep recesses of the Grand Canyon of the Sierra Madre and in sight of the majestic tri-crested Mt. Lowe – on and up the cars ascend, until, at last, Alpine Tavern is suddenly revealed. All is a revelation of beauty. There is not a more delightfully located mountain hotel in the country, nor one that is more dainty and charming in its exterior and interior appointments. All around are tents, which, during the summer, are crowded to overflowing.”

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