Thursday, May 7, 2026

The School Children Chose the Tower

By PETER LATHAM

Built in 1931 after Altadena schoolchildren picked it over a swimming pool, the Eliot Tower has stood as their community’s civic landmark for nearly a century. Pasadena Unified School District has now indicated it may not survive the school’s rebuild in the wake of the Eaton Fire

In 1930, the schoolchildren of Altadena were given a choice. The new junior high school rising from a tract of land along North Lake Avenue could include either a swimming pool or a tower. They picked the tower.

The story has been preserved as oral history by the Altadena Historical Society, attributed to Sara Carnahan, a longtime board member and Eliot alumna. However the choice was put, the result has shaped the skyline of North Lake Avenue ever since.

Ninety-five years later, in May 2026, almost seventeen months after the Eaton Fire tore through the foothill community on January 7, 2025, a Pasadena Unified School District official has signaled to residents that the tower may not survive the planned rebuild of the campus, now operating as Eliot Arts Magnet Academy.

The disclosure has stunned a community already grieving the homes, the businesses, and the trees lost in the fire — and it has reactivated a network of preservationists, alumni, and parents who say the tower is not a feature to be weighed against the cost-benefit math of reconstruction. It is, they argue, the building itself.

The campus was originally named Charles W. Eliot Junior High School after the long-serving president of Harvard University, who was regarded in his later years as the father of the junior high school plan. It opened to students in September 1931 and was formally dedicated on December 11 of that year.

The architects were Marston and Maybury, the Pasadena firm also responsible for Altadena Elementary on Calaveras and a long catalogue of other Pasadena schools and library branches. Construction began in February 1931 — in the depths of the Great Depression — and was carried out by Wopschall Construction, according to oral history preserved by the Altadena Historical Society. The society’s 2014 Echo article on the school notes that it was the first in the area built without a bond issue. The campus was planned for six hundred students, on parcels assembled in 1929 from the George E. Meharry home, then one of Altadena’s earliest landmarks, along with property from John C. and Edith Loef and a parcel associated with Robert Vandegrift Cruickshank.

The tower was never ornamental. From the start, the campus was conceived not only as a school but as Altadena’s civic center, a dual purpose described in both the Altadena Historical Society’s local history materials and the Los Angeles County historic context document. The community needed a marker. The tower was the marker. Its tall rectangular shaft, its paired upper openings, its position rising directly behind the front-stair approach — all of it served the same function, which was to tell residents and visitors at a glance where Altadena’s center could be found.

Within months of its completion, that judgment was ratified by national publications. Architectural Digest featured the school in 1931, in Volume VIII, Issue 4 of its archive, under the title “Charles W. Eliot Junior High School, Altadena — Marston & Maybury, Architects.” Architectural Record followed in August 1932 with a three-page spread in its “Portfolio of Schools,” presenting first- and second-floor plans alongside photographs credited to Hiller. The American Institute of Architects awarded the campus an Honor Award in 1933, according to the Altadena Historical Society and the county historic context document.

The architecture itself bridges two eras. The lower campus, with its tile roofs, arcaded openings, and courtyard planning, draws on the Spanish elements of Southern California’s regional school architecture. The tower belongs to a different decade entirely — its vertical emphasis, its simplified surfaces, its geometric massing align it with the early streamline moderne work that would dominate civic architecture by the mid-1930s. Few campuses of the period attempted both at once. Eliot did, and the result has been a North Lake Avenue landmark for nearly a century.

It has also been recognizable from much further away than that. The Altadena Historical Society documents that the campus has stood in for a series of fictional schools across film and television: Haddonfield Elementary in Halloween, Santo Donato High School in Apt Pupil, and Rancho Rosa High School in The Mentalist. Audiences across the country have seen the Eliot Tower without knowing they were looking at it.

Inside the tower, however, those audiences would never have been allowed. Access to the top has always been restricted, reached only by the front staircase, an original chrome spiral banister, locked tower rooms, and a final ladder climb. The space has functioned for generations as a rite of passage, an earned ascent — and those who reached it have signed their names inside. In a February 2023 account of a rare tour, the local publication ColoradoBoulevard.net captured what the practice has come to mean: “The top of the tower has been a sacred space for students and faculty over the last century. Those that have earned the right to reach its heights have signed their names in respect and with pride.”

That description sits uneasily against the present moment. The Eaton Fire destroyed thousands of structures across Altadena and the western San Gabriel foothills, including civic and cultural buildings of decades-long standing. The rebuild now under way is the most consequential reconstruction the community has faced in living memory. Decisions made in 2026 will define the streetscape of North Lake Avenue for the rest of the century.