John from Sacramento sent me this photo taken by his grandfather somewhere around 1910-ish. The people gathered in this photo would have been day-trippers on the Tilton’s Trolley Trip, which was a streetcar excursion taking in a lot of Los Angeles – as the sign says: “from Sea to Orange Groves.” This group is standing in front of the San Gabriel Mission, which was the easternmost point on the trip.
The mission is south of Pasadena and is still an active Roman Catholic church. That bell we can see in the background of the vintage photo we can also see in the photo that the Mission uses on the front page of their website:
John also sent me this second photo. Its location hasn’t been positively identified but it’s possible that it was taken at the Foothill Inn in Azusa, which is roughly 12 miles east of San Gabriel. It opened in around 1910, so the timeline fits.
I worked in the San Gabriel Valley for decades, so I’m familiar with the mission. One of my co-workers was a parishioner, so I knew it was still active. The Whittier Narrows quake in ’87 damaged the building, but they spent quite a while bringing it back.
When I visited the Santa Barbara mission a long time ago, they had a history room with images and photographs in a chronological sequence running around the room. It was so interesting to see the captions, such as, the mission as it was in xxxx, destroyed by earthquake in xxxx, regularly part of the sequence.
Does anyone know what happened to the Foothill Inn? I assume it’s no longer with us.
I did a quick search but could find no trace of it.
Larry Paul (@ LarryRPaul.com) has been building a data base of all known American hotels and lodgings for quite some time now. It has never stopped expanding. That may be one place to find facts on lost hospitality ventures.
The Homestead Museum blog borrows from a newspaper article the mention of an Inlet Inn at Los Alamitos where the trolley party had dinner. So if this is not the elusive Foothill Inn, then there might be another possibility. And there is a chef in this image.
Checked with Larry Paul and he says he has Foothill Inn listed as having 29 rooms in 1920 using American Plan. He had no information for the Inlet Inn in Los Alamitos, so it might have just been a restaurant. (Searches yield nothing so far for that name.) The long trolley trip was scheduled to return in mid-afternoon, so any “dinner” was more likely a lunch hour meal in modern terms. [The excursions would eventually become specialized broken into Balloon Route, Triangle, and Mission with the Inland Empire loop added as the lines were opened out to San Bernadino/Redlands & Riverside/Corona with the consolidation of local services across the counties into the Pacific Electric network. The latter served a lunch meal at the Mission Inn. Tilton lost the Los Angeles tour business when PE took over full control, but he did operate in other areas of the Pacific coast.]