Powell, Ritchie & the "San Pasqual River"

By Ted Trzyna

Copyright © 2021 T. C. Trzyna. Citation: Trzyna, Ted. "Powell, Ritchie & the 'San Pasqual River.'" Ted Trzyna. trzyna.info.

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I lived for a year right next to the Congo River and I’ve been on the Amazon, but the little intermittent streams we have in California still fascinate me. Urban ones tend to get channelized, covered over, and forgotten. In South Pasadena, the Raymond Fault runs east-west just north of the Arroyo Seco Parkway and south of Raymond Hill (see the map below). Along the fault earthquakes have formed a scarp, or dike, a small vertical offset that holds back rainwater built up in the alluvial plain north of it. Water flowing through breaks along the scarp feeds springs and south-flowing streams. Storm drains have been built to control flooding.  

My family lived in the square block bounded by Oak, Milan, Laurel, and Marengo (maps below). I didn’t know it then, but two giants of the book world had lived nearby. They went to the local public schools together, both graduated from SPHS in 1924, and they became lifelong friends and colleagues. 

Lawrence Clark Powell (1906-2001) grew up on the Marengo side of our block. He became a “Librarian with a capital L,” heading up the UCLA library and quadrupling its holdings, and was a prolific writer, especially on authors of the American West. The Powell Library Building at UCLA is named after him.

Ward Ritchie (1905-1996) lived a couple blocks up Milan. Starting with a printing press in the garage, he became a “prolific and world-renowned printer, book collector, writer and historian of the book arts, who wrote nearly 100 books, designed about 750, [and] published thousands.” [1]

Powell and Ritchie always remembered they were shaped by their experiences growing up in South Pasadena. 

In 1986, Ritchie reminisced that he and his pal Powell “made the groves and wilderness areas of the southeastern part of South Pasadena into our own hunting and stalking preserve. The area in which we lived was still mostly orange groves with only a sprinkling of homes built among the trees. … The San Pasqual River at that time trickled down from Pasadena through our territory.” Eventually a covered drain was built as far as Oak Street. “Below Oak, however, it was an open concrete flume as far as Huntington Drive.” Beyond Huntington, the stream became a deep gorge with a pool where they would catch polliwogs and frogs. [2]
 

The “open concrete flume” ran through our square block. By the time my family moved there it was covered, but my brother and I and neighbor kids knew how to find our way in. Since then, the “San Pasqual River,” properly called the San Pascual Wash, has been diverted eastward, and the water that used to flow through our old block comes from west of Raymond Hill and runs through a newer storm drain under Marengo Avenue, half a block west of the old one. Sadly, our “river” is now County Storm Drain BI 0261. I was curious about what happened to the old one and found a note deep in the county's online archives stating that the section of now-abandoned storm drain running under our block was a "possible disposal site."  

What would Powell and Ritchie think? 

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Notes: (1) “Ward Ritchie; Master Printer, Bibliophile” (obituary), Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1996. (2) Ward Ritchie, Growing Up with Lawrence Clark Powell (Sacramento: California State Library Foundation, 1987), 10-11. 

Photos, top row (L-R):  (1) Map of the Raymond Fault [Los Angeles Times]. (2) Powell and Ritchie as young men [South Pasadena Public Library]. (3) The newer San Pascual Wash looking south from Wilson Avenue in San Marino [TLND].

Bottom row: (4) 1903 hand-colored land sales map showing our square block and the "River" (the diagonal line) [Huntington Library]. (5) Our block in the 2020s. The diagonal driveway near the bottom center of the photo is a remnant of the "River." (6) The skull and anchor pressmark of the Ward Ritchie Press, designed by Paul Landacre in 1929, is on the title page of this book about Landacre by Ward Ritchie.  [More about Landacre]