Ambassador College Campus

The crisply terraced beds of the Italian Garden. Author’s photographs
...the Ambassador College Campus illustrates how to change the cse of a neighborhood without demolishing it in a clean sweep...When fourteen fountain jets play on the central pond, the effect becomes dynamic, even exuberant, a tour de fource in a campus with much to enjoy and appreciate.
Eric Sigg, California Public Gardens

One of Pasadena’s most interesting public garden areas, the Ambassador College Campus is also its most endangered—a soon-to-be casualty of the surging demand for housing in California. The thirty-five-acre property, blessed with dozens of mature trees, several park-like areas, and a half-dozen turn-of-the-century mansions and remnants of their gardens, was assembled in the 1950s and 1960s by the Worldwide Church of God as headquarters and campus for Ambassador College. The school’s twenty-year development process culminated in the construction of Ambassador Auditorium in 1974. A decade ago the church closed the college, and, following an unsuccessful search for an acceptable institutional buyer, the property was sold ...