Pasadena old & new - Pasadena, California - includes visitor's guide

Sunset, Jan, 1994 by Peter Fish

And somehow it all worked. A common reaction for anybody who recalls downtown Pasadena from the '70s or early '80s is simple disbelief at how much the area has improved. The block-long One Colorado project, with shops, restaurants, and theaters, is now completed. Jazz clubs and coffee-houses host the would-be and truly hip. Clothing stores run the garment gamut from elegant to grunge. And Southern Californians, who aren't supposed to appreciate any urban activity that doesn't involve a mall, are strolling around as if all their lives they wanted nothing more than to be boulevardiers.

"God is in the details," explains Pasadena mayor Rick Cole when asked why Old Pasadena succeeded when so many similar downtown revitalization projects fail. "A lot of cities add the infrastructure. But they forget the details--lighting, steam-cleaning the streets, maintaining a diverse group of tenants that brings visitors back more than once."

Now Old Pasadena faces the stresses of success. With crowds thick on the sidewalks, cars thick on Colorado Boulevard, and parking spaces at a premium Friday and Saturday nights, worried comparisons are being made to Melrose and Westwood--hot spots whose very popularity has made them vulnerable to complaints of noise, congestion, and crime. "Old Pasadena is a very good thing," says Bill Evans, managing editor of the Pasadena Weekly. "But a very fragile thing."

"We want to draw people off Colorado Boulevard," says Cole. "There's a lot to do on other streets. We want to draw more families. We don't want to be one of those places where people say, Oh, it's so crowded, nobody goes there anymore."

"A MICROCOSM OF AMERICA" LOOKS FORWARD AND BACK

When his interviewer slips and refers to downtown as Old Town, Mayor Cole reminds him, "The politically correct term is Old Pasadena. Not Old Town. Lots of cities have Old Towns, but only Pasadena has Old Pasadena."

Cole's correction rings with the city's characteristic certainty of its own worth. It is a fact that Pasadena was never merely a rich man's retreat; it has usually possessed a sense of purpose. Pasadena, writes historian Kevin Starr, was where "the genteel tradition grafted itself onto Southern California circumstances." It was, as a 1907 editorial in the Pasadena Daily News boasted, "Beautiful, Clean, Cultured, Moral, and Esthetic."

The aura of uniqueness lingers, although the city has witnessed some major demographic changes. Cole refers to Pasadena as "a majority minority city," with a population that is 46 percent white, 18 percent black, 27 percent Latino, and 8 percent Asian. Says Bill Evans, "Before I moved here, my image of Pasadena was the same as everybody else's. Little old ladies, a lily white enclave of conservative thought. There's still an element of that. But the city is changing really fast."

Old Pasadena is not the only place where Pasadena is trying to hang onto the landmarks of its past while becoming a city of the 21st century. City Hall is the focal point of the new Plaza de Las Fuentes, a redevelopment project that includes a hotel and two restaurants. The Pasadena Playhouse, famous in the '30s and '40s but then dark for decades, is again launching productions and careers. Though preservationists protested when, in 1985, the Huntington Hotel was torn down to be replaced by a replica of itself, the lavish new version successfully summons up the aristocratic heyday of Pasadena tourism. The Colorado Street Bridge across Arroyo Seco was made earthquake resistant, and it reopened last month.