Steve Baker Kept Monrovia's History in His House. This Fall It's on the Calendar.

"It's very deliberate to call this a restoration and not a renovation," André Reyes told the Los Angeles Times this August, standing in a house the late city historian Steve Baker once filled with oil lamps, pump organs and 19th-century etched glass. "We are preserving and restoring the past for future generations to see what happened in 1887 in Monrovia, and how and why."

Baker was Monrovia's official historian from 1991 until his death in 2022. For most of those years, much of what he knew about the town lived in a few places: his Ivy Avenue property, his collection and his own retelling. In the four years since, that material has become three things a resident can use this fall. One is a bistro you can book. Another is a cemetery tour two days after this post publishes. The third is an archive you can search from your couch for the history of your own block.

Two houses that moved before they stayed

The inn starts with two 1887 houses that both arrived on South Ivy Avenue from somewhere else.

The Blair House at 508 S. Ivy Ave. was designed and built by Luther Reed Blair, a pioneering Monrovia architect, as his family's home. It is an Eastlake Queen Anne with a tower, stained glass and an ornate front porch. According to the Monrovia Historical Museum, it was moved once in 1927, to Duarte Road, and again in 1993, when it faced demolition. Baker bought it that year, had it relocated beside his own house and spent decades restoring it.

The house next door at 512 S. Ivy Ave. goes by two names. The museum calls it the John and Julia Brossart House. It was built on Heliotrope Avenue, moved to Lemon Avenue in the early 1900s and eventually reached Ivy, where it became Baker's longtime home. The Times calls it the Arthur House, after Baker's great-grandfather Bradford Arthur, who bought it in 1888. The inn's name joins the two families: Arthur and Blair.

The people who finished Baker's project met him by accident. In 2021, Joshua Cain and Reyes had left the front door of their own restored 1887 Monrovia home open, and Baker walked in wearing his signature top hat. The three spent the morning comparing notes on restoration techniques, including where the couple had found redwood for their shingle roof. After Baker's death, Cain, Reyes and Cain's business partner Jeff Godbold bought both houses. Saxony Design Build carried out the work, which took three years.

The restoration choices are worth knowing about because you can see them from the sidewalk. The Blair House porch spindles had been removed. The team found one original, had a carpenter replicate it with its complex cutouts, pulled the porch apart to reinstall them and then painted them eight different colors. Original roofing, porches and even light switches that had been taken out over the years were returned.

"We restore for a sense of time and place." Joshua Cain, quoted in the Los Angeles Times

What a resident can walk into

Viola's Bar & Bistro is named for Baker's grandmother, and the Times describes its food as French with Southern touches, served on the vintage servingware Baker collected. The bistro's reservation page lists these hours:

• Monday, Tuesday and Sunday: brunch, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
• Wednesday: closed
• Thursday through Saturday: brunch, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., and dinner, 4 to 10 p.m.

Dinner runs only three nights a week, so Thursday through Saturday is your window for an evening visit. Brunch runs six days. The Arthur House parlor is open to the public for drinks and dining, and it has a pump organ guests can play. The two Blair House parlors, with their restored 1880s Eastlake mahogany parlor sets and a circa 1874 Haine Brothers rosewood square grand piano, are reserved for overnight guests.

For residents with family coming for Thanksgiving, the inn is the other half of the offer. It has 11 guest rooms across three buildings. The third building is the Saxony Cottage, a new carpenter gothic structure with board-and-batten siding, modeled on a 19th-century Sears kit house. There are no TVs on the property. Guests can borrow robin's-egg-blue Viribus bikes to ride to coffee shops and parks around town, and there's a 4-foot cocktail pool with a limestone border out back. Bookings go through the Arthur Blair Historic Inn website.

The opening showed how much local interest the project had. More than 200 people came to the July 4 grand opening, which was held as a fundraiser for the Monrovia Historical Society. For comparison, the Monrovia Historic Preservation Group reported 216 members in its October 2026 newsletter, a number it says has held steady for several years. In one afternoon, the inn drew nearly as many people as the group has members.

Two days later, the tour Baker started

The second public form of Baker's work happens outdoors. On Saturday, Oct. 24, at 3:30 p.m., the Monrovia Historic Preservation Group hosts a tour of the old section of Live Oak Cemetery. Baker originated it. The group's president revived it in 2024, which makes this year the third run since his death. It lasts about an hour and a half and visits 20 to 25 graves of notable Monrovians.

The tour is run on a small scale. Tickets cost $25, it's limited to 25 people, it runs only that one day, and the proceeds benefit the Monrovia Historical Society. Tickets have been on sale since Sept. 23 at the Monrovia Community Center, 119 E. Palm Ave., at 626-256-8246. With 25 seats and a month of sales behind it, call before you go.

The tour picks up a habit Baker was known for. He liked to tell residents the history of their own homes and about the founding Monrovians who had lived in them before.

The archive he amassed, searchable from home

The third form can be used from anywhere. The Monrovia Historical Society's Legacy Project, at monrovialegacyproject.org, holds more than 17,000 historic photographs and documents. Most of them came from the collection Baker amassed, which was passed down to him from earlier city historians.

The pace of use has picked up. The archive has logged 142,000 searches since it launched in 2016. A third of those, 46,922, came in the 2025-26 project year alone, and 79% of them found a match. This summer's upload added 1,776 items, including:

1. City directories and Monrovia High School newspapers
2. High school commencement programs from 1892 to 1953
3. Monrovia's 1914 newspaper, The Chronicle
4. Yucca Hiking Club albums
5. McDonald's Giant Orange, which once stood at Monrovia Airport
6. The W.N. Monroe family's time in the Alaska gold rush

The project's director says the collection can be used to research questions about Monrovia, learn about your family or home, and download and print images. New items are highlighted under "Featured Collections" and "What's New in 2026" on the homepage. For an owner of an older Monrovia house, the city directories can show who lived at your address in a given year. Baker used to answer that question for people in person.

The preservation group is also tracking an application to place downtown Monrovia on the National Register of Historic Places. As of its September board meeting, the application was still with the California State Office of Historic Preservation.

The fall around it

Baker's three legacies fit into a busy stretch on the town calendar. These dates are confirmed for 2026:

The tree giveaway on Nov. 14 is at the Monrovia Historical Museum on Lemon Avenue. The Brossart House stood on that street for a while before it moved to Ivy. Viola's serves brunch until 2 p.m. that Saturday, so you can pick up a native tree and have lunch at the inn on the same morning.

Restoring the Arthur Blair houses meant tracking down a single original spindle and choosing to rebuild the porch around it, and that kind of decision is the work we enjoy most. If you own an older Monrovia house and are thinking about what to keep, what to bring back and how its history shapes its value, Sabatella Delair Group would be glad to walk through it with you.