Three Quaker Meeting Houses in Pasadena, California: An Architectural Study

Between 1882 and 1909 Quakers established three meetings in the American frontier town of Pasadena, California, incorporated in 1886—two quite progressive, and one very conservative. During that quarter century each of the three groups in question built radically different places of worship in the city, each drawing upon and/or resisting the long Quaker architectural tradition they inherited. This study thus starts by tracing that inheritance from its beginning in George Fox's England to colonial North America. It savors an American Quaker architectural invention, the "ideal Quaker plan" that emerged in the mid eighteenth century (and dominated Quaker building for more than a century thereafter). The paper then goes to Pasadena to examine, in chronological order, meeting houses built by the evangelical Quakers at First Friends Church, then to that erected by conservative Friends at the Pasadena Monthly Meeting, and finally to the meeting house of the Orange Grove Monthly Meeting, the setting for liberal Quakers in the city. Each of these speaks (or spoke) clearly of its builder's intentions and commitments. Only two of the original three meetings still survive today (the Pasadena Monthly Meeting was laid down in 1988). First Friends Church, moreover, moved in 1949 to a new property in the city, then slowly evolved thereafter to become the Foothills Community Church in the late 1990s. Among the three meeting houses in Pasadena, that belonging to the Orange Grove Monthly stands out for its novelty and originality. This study aims to reveal and celebrate that special achievement.

Early Friends Meeting Houses in Britain

From the start Quakers gathered in their houses to worship, pray, and seek the light within.¹ But as followers of George Fox (1624–1691) grew in number, household dwellings could no longer have sufficed. Although Quakers did meet outdoors for worship on occasion, even ideally, shelter for meetings was needed. As with so much else of established religion in seventeenth-century England, Fox scorned the religious architecture of his own time, growling about its excessive pretention. He found nothing to admire in the Anglican churches of his day—not even those that the celebrated architect Sir Christopher Wren built all over London after the Great Fire in 1666 (fig.1). "Steeple houses" (Fox's words) could not serve the Religious Society of Friends.

Figure 1.

St. James, Piccadilly (1672–84), designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Photo: Tony Hisgett, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

But more to the point, architectural pretention aside, no ordinary church could ever have met Quaker needs.² Like other early dissidents who had long objected to the remaining aspects of Catholicism in the Anglican church, like Puritans and Presbyterians who thought the Anglican Protestant church not Protestant enough, Quakers too rejected any notion that a place of worship might itself count as holy. The Anglican church, like Roman Catholic churches throughout medieval and modern times, housed altars in impressive settings presented as the venerable tombs and memorials of the saints where believers gathered on special feast days dependent upon priests to mediate their joining with God in the eucharist. Zealous English and Scottish protestants during the last half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth rejected the altars, the saints' relics, and the sanctoral liturgy that spun around them.³ (By Fox's day, during the second and third quarters of the century, Quakers had dispensed with the temporal liturgy as well.⁴) The seventeenth-century dissidents pushed instead to focus worship upon personal transformation, to provide each member of a congregation the fullest opportunity to take responsibility for their own salvation—by their own light or knowledge. Among the dissidents it was the community of believers itself that comprised the "church," properly speaking, and not any kind of building. They saw places of worship as mere "meeting houses."

This Pauline dogma that all believers, past, present, and future, constituted members of Christ's body and were all thereby equal in holiness, all thus "sanctified," underpinned Christian doxa from the beginning, and in the seventeenth...