City Crews Repair Damaged Pergola at La Pintoresca Park

Pasadena’s Public Works Department has repaired the pergola at La Pintoresca Park, replacing beams that had rotted with newly installed lumber, the city said in its June 18 weekly newsletter.

The work was a joint effort by two city divisions — the Parks, Recreation, and Community Services Division and the Carpentry, Paint, and ProTeam shops of the Building Systems and Fleet Management Division — according to the newsletter. It was reported by Greg de Vinck, the city’s director of public works.

Crews installed new main beams and cross beams and braced the structure, then primed and painted the wood, the city said. The Parks, Recreation, and Community Services Division supplied the heavy machinery used to move the lumber.

The pergola is among the park’s oldest features. A California state historic-resources inventory describes it as standing at the north end of the park, running east to west, supported by twelve pairs of tall square piers that form five open bays spanned by wood beams. The same record notes the structure resembles pergolas seen in historic photographs of other Pasadena parks, suggesting it followed a design used across the city’s park system.

The pergola sits among the park’s other features, which the city lists as a library, basketball court, skate area, picnic tables, playground, splash pad, restrooms and drinking fountains. La Pintoresca Park covers 2.9 acres at 45 E. Washington Blvd. and is open daily from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

The park traces its origins to the Painter Hotel, built on the block in 1888 and later known as La Pintoresca — Spanish for “picturesque.” The hotel burned in 1912, according to The Cultural Landscape Foundation, and the city later acquired the land for a park. In 1924, the foundation says, the city commissioned landscape architects Ralph Cornell and Theodore Payne to design the site, and a wood-and-concrete pergola was part of the original plan. A perimeter rock retaining wall and several mature trees from the hotel grounds remain on the site today.

The branch library on the park grounds, designed by the firm Bennett and Haskell in 1930, is a City of Pasadena cultural heritage landmark, according to a historical marker the city erected in 1986.

The park’s recreational amenities were the focus of a separate, roughly $1.3 million construction contract the City Council awarded in December 2020, which city staff reports and reporting by Pasadena Now described as covering the splash pad, skate park, basketball court, a playground shade structure, restroom interiors and site drainage. The pergola was not among the elements listed in that project’s scope.