Neighbors in the Canyon and Mesa to the East

For years before the Allens arrive, the only homes above Pasadena and east of Eaton Canyon are the Hotel and some of the buildings of Leonard J Rose's vast holdings.

The Sierra Madre Villa Hotel was built by the Cogswell family in 1877. It operated as a hotel until 1890 when it took its final breaths as a sanitarium. Abbot Kinney reportedly slept on the pool table in the music room one night and fell in love with the area and it’s climate. Kinney moves to where the old Sierra Madre Villa Hotel stood and built Kinneloa above it in 1882. His mother was a Cogswell. Kinney would go on to design the canals of Venice and garnish everlasting fame for his work in that development.

Leonard J. Rose, In 1861, Bavarian entrepreneur L.J. Rose purchased and set up his 2000-acre Sunny Slope Ranch, from part of the western portion of the old Rancho Santa Anita covering Victory Park and part of East Pasadena. Rose established the small township of Lamanda Park on his ranch around 1880, today an existing neighborhood within the city of Pasadena. Rose will supply cuttings from his vines to the Sphinx as well as purchase their raw grapes for juicing.

After some early gold strikes in the San Gabriels, you have some miners and shacks down in Eaton Canyon and down in the Meadow, the Ruiz family build a cabin and reside where the chumash used to grind acorns.

Henninger flats is what is called geologically a hanging basin also inhabited and utilized by the native Tongva tribe. It is a large flat area the argonaut William Henninger must have seen in his prospecting the San Gabriels. He was given the moniker Captain Henninger by his fellow miners. He married a descendant of the keyholder at the mission and built a house and orchard on what became known as his flat and he would trek his produce down the hill to Pasadena for sale. Lukens and Busch, two forward thinking fellows, began the first experimental forest up here with the Captain's full support and they would go on to build others in the San Gabriels in the decades to come.