Fast Digs: The Pasadena Athletic Club Track

 I don't much like gps. I do like maps. You might know both those things because of what I have written here before. I like maps because they let me find my own way from here to there. But I also like maps - old maps in particular - because they are full of information, they provide a picture of the way things were but, probably, are not anymore. Topo maps have guided me along indistinct trails and led me to long-abandoned mines.

Maps have been rather indispensable when it comes to researching Fast Digs; they helped me pinpoint the locations of Los Angeles Athletic Park, Santa Ana Athletic Park, the Lincoln Avenue track, Fiesta Park, and others. Now, I believe, another map has helped me to locate the grounds and track of the Pasadena Athletic Club. I knew the track had been located on South Fair Oaks Avenue as early as 1890, but Fair Oaks is a long street and I wasn't seeing anything that looked like an athletic field. That is until I found a bird's eye view of Pasadena from 1893. Locating Fair Oaks south of Colorado I scanned along its length, zoomed in, and... there! That looks suspiciously like the oval of a track - and right on Fair Oaks.

The track and grounds only existed at this location for a few years before the club needed to find a new home.

The second map (below), from 1903, does not show the oval. Of course not, because it was gone by then. Where the Athletic Club grounds were in 1890 is, in 1903, a mostly empty lot just north of the new Central Park (created in 1902).