The Adventures of Robin Hood | Busch Gardens, South Orange Grove Boulevard — where the golden arrow was split

The archery tournament — Robin in disguise, splitting the leading arrow down the shaft and winning a golden prize he cannot safely collect — was shot in a brewer's pleasure garden in Pasadena. Adolphus Busch laid it out on the slope running west from South Orange Grove Boulevard down toward the Arroyo Seco, between Bellefontaine Street and Madeline Drive: some thirty acres of terraces, sunken gardens, ponds, stone stairways and storybook tableaux, opened to the public before the First World War and rented to the studios afterward. Hundreds of pictures used it. Frankenstein used it. So did this one.

It is gone. Busch died in 1913 and his widow in 1928; the Depression finished the family's appetite for maintaining the place, the city twice declined to buy it, and by 1938 — the year the film was released — the land was being cut into house lots. What is left survives inside private gardens along the street: a retaining wall in the wrong place, a terrace that leads nowhere, steps down to a pond that was filled in.

Walk South Orange Grove between those two cross streets and read the ground instead of the houses. The slope is the same slope, and it still falls away west exactly as it does behind the archery butts on screen. Then go down into Lower Arroyo Park, where the Pasadena Roving Archers have run a public range since 1935, and watch people miss.

Photo: Adolphus Busch's sunken gardens, Pasadena, c.1916, Wikimedia Commons.