San Marino, CA

San Marino, California enters the register by way of an editorial correction: its event records were originally filed under the Republic of San Marino, from which the "Huntington Gardens Loggia" venue has been reassigned (see A3). The confusion is forgivable — the town took its name from a plantation named for the republic — but the reality is thoroughly Californian: a small, immaculate garden city beneath the San Gabriels, laid out around the estate of Henry E. Huntington, the railway magnate whose Pacific Electric "Red Cars" built greater Los Angeles.

Huntington's estate became one of the great cultural institutions of America: The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, where a Gutenberg Bible and the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer share the grounds with Gainsborough's Blue Boy, and where 130 acres of gardens — the scholarly Chinese Garden of Flowing Fragrance, the Japanese Garden's moon bridge, the world-famous Desert Garden's forest of cacti — draw a million visitors a year. Concerts in the garden pavilions and loggia, the setting documented in this archive, belong to the estate's oldest traditions. Around the walls lies the town itself: quiet avenues, Lacy Park's great lawn in a former lakebed, and the Michigan Boulevard sense that here, at least, Southern California decided to stay a garden.