Tuberculosis brought many to the Pasadena area but few were as talented as Alexander Stirling Calder, pictured here in OutWest Magazine for September, 1909. The article was written by Hector Alliot, curator of the Southwest Museum. The occasion was the construction of Pasadena Hall (later named Throop Hall) at the new site of Throop Polytechnic Institute, now Caltech.

Calder had studied in France and at 39 had a national reputation. When architects Hunt and Gray decided on the need for a decorated arch entrance to the building, the trustees chose Calder for the design. Dr. Norman Bridge, chairman of the board of trustees, and another tuberculosis refugee, came up with the $5,000 fee for Calder.

Alliot wrote, “Expression in plastic art is the touchstone of a commonwealth’s culture. It is, therefore, gratifying – yet somewhat remarkable – that in Pasadena, a city removed from the great art centers of the world, there should be nearing completion a superb sculptured entrance, different in character and conception from anything heretofore executed.”

“Modern education,” wrote Alliot, “can be resolved into six great representative themes: Nature, Art, Law, Energy, Science, and Imagination. The sculptor has embodied these essential principles in powerful and telling figures, which form the three archways composing the entrance to the Institute.”

“Concrete, marble, and bronze are in this equable climate practically everlasting, so that these monumental archways of Throop Institute will, no doubt, remain in all their beauty for centuries to come.”

Around 1969, Throop Hall was demolished for seismic reasons and the Calder arches were cut apart and lay in the City yards for some time.

In 1986, the arches were restored and mounted around windows of the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Laboratory of Chemical Synthesis at Caltech where they can be seen today.

For the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, Calder completed sculpture groups called “The Nations of the East”” and “The Nations of the West “ and a “Fountain of Energy.”

For the Washington Square arch in New York City, Calder did “George Washington as President, Accompanied by Wisdom and Justice.”

So the art of Alexander Stirling Calder brought little rural Pasadena into the company of the great cities of the country.

Sid Gally is a Pasadena Museum of History volunteer.