Boom May Turn Old Pasadena Into ‘Westwood East’

Tamara Porter, the owner of a chic clothing store in Old Pasadena, used to look out her window at a scene of such decay and filth that it often brought tears to her eyes.

Just three years ago, nearly every building on both sides of Colorado Boulevard between Fair Oaks Avenue and DeLacey Street was either boarded up or gutted, the streets were filthy and the only lights on at night were her own and those of the restaurant next door.

She was trying to sell $50 hand-decorated sweat shirts and $100 dresses, and the only thing that even faintly resembled a customer was the occasional transient who would walk by.

“We used to have these little religious rituals out in front of abandoned buildings,” Porter said with a smile. “I’d get out there and chant for development.”

Someone must have been listening.

In the past six months, there has been a dramatic upturn in business in Old Pasadena, transforming what was once the city’s Skid Row into a booming nightspot that some say is quickly becoming Greenwich Village West or Westwood East.

Business people from one end of Colorado Boulevard to the other say the catalyst for this boom was the December opening of the six-screen United Artists Theater, which finally brought the nighttime crowds that shop owners have dreamed of for years.

“My business went up the day it opened,” Porter said. “I get goose bumps thinking about it.”

Business people add that Old Pasadena had been steadily rebuilding itself since 1980 and that at least 99 new retail businesses have opened during that time. The completion of the theater and other projects such as the Rose City Diner have given it a final push.

“There’s been a breakthrough here,” said January Winchester, manager of the Z Gallery. “Everything has gone boom.”

Night Lights Up

From teen-agers gulping milkshakes at the Pasadena Creamery to businessmen in three-piece suits sipping white wine at the Ritz Grill’s outdoor patio, Old Pasadena has become one of the hottest spots in the western San Gabriel Valley.

Drifting out of the area’s 37 restaurants, the aroma of barbecued ribs and Peking duck mingles with the smell of sizzling burgers and fries.

Neon lights advertising boutiques and ice cream shops light up the night and bathe Old Pasadena’s turn-of-the-century brick buildings in shades of electric blue and red.

The sound of rock ‘n’ roll and disco tunes filters out into the street from bars such as the Loch Ness Monster and the Romeo Restaurant and Nightclub.

“I’m glad to see people finally walking around here,” said 73-year-old Doris Rex recently as she strolled down Colorado one night with her husband for the first time in years. “We’re delighted it’s happening.”

Located in 12 square blocks surrounding Colorado between Pasadena Avenue and Arroyo Parkway, Old Pasadena has developed into a quirky melting pot of more than 140 old and new businesses, including 30 that have opened in the last year.

The area is still in a period of transition from Skid Row to upscale and is experiencing the growing pains of redevelopment, which has destroyed some low-income housing, forced out several longtime businesses and displaced the colony of artists that once lived in Old Pasadena’s second-story lofts.

But for most people who lived through the lean years of decay and neglect, the rejuvenation arrived just in the nick of time.

“There was a time when on the entire block, the only light on was mine,” said Sammy Zaribaf, the owner of Rosicler’s restaurant, 24 W. Colorado Blvd. “I don’t think anybody would want it to stay the way it was.”

The signs of change are everywhere, with the hulks of boarded- up buildings standing in contrast to the refurbished Victorian, Mediterranean and Art Deco storefronts that now fill the area.

Since February, the 1950s-style Rose City Diner, at the southern fringe of the area, has been serving up meat loaf and egg creams to the tunes of Elvis Presley blaring from the jukebox.

Gleaming Beacon

The neon-lit diner replaced a mattress factory and has become a gleaming beacon, attracting teen-agers, old-timers and yuppies out for a quick bite to eat, said owner Sal Casola.

“There’s been a great mix of people down here,” he said. “That’s the whole fun of it.”

The diner has joined dozens of other restaurants that run the gamut from fast food at Gil’s Grill on Colorado to the chic Ritz Grill two blocks to the west.

For the well-heeled crowd, restaurants such as Rosicler’s, Cafe Jacoulet or the Italian Fisherman have brought an array of dishes: frog legs Provencal, zuppa di pesce or breast of charbroiled duck with raspberry sauce.

On East Union Street, toward the eastern fringe of Old Pasadena, Clothes Heav’n, The Ritz and Silent Partners have formed a small colony of used-clothing stores where new and used outfits by Anne Klein, Chloe or Valentino hang next to T-shirts.

“It’s sort of a treasure hunt here,” said Larayne L. Brannon , the owner of Clothes Heav’n, where a Chloe outfit that originally sold for $1,500 goes for $249. “A lot of career women who don’t want to look like cookie cutters come here.”

Lonely Outpost

In the heart of Old Pasadena, near the corner of Fair Oaks and Colorado, the 11-year-old Mount Greylock Trading Co. maintains its lonely outpost on a block of vacant buildings, selling a strange collection of toy soldiers, Shirley Temple pictures, old lunch boxes and antique toy trains.

“We were kind of embarrassed at first selling this stuff, but we later found out we were unique,” said co-owner Larry Jordan.

Old Pasadena’s longtime community of antique dealers now totals 24 stores ranging from swap-meet-style shops to the glittering Design Center Antiques, which displays a $10,000-, 100-year-old opium bed from Hong Kong in its front window.

The streets are dotted with clothing boutiques, hair salons, art galleries, auto repair shops and even an indoor combat maze run by Mad Combat Inc., where patrons spend $20 to shoot at each other with paint pellets for three hours.

Fitness Enthusiasts

Tucked in a renovated 1904 carriage house, the Brignole Fitness Center Training Club opened in October, 1984, bringing a new crowd of fitness enthusiasts into the area.

“This building is like what you would see in a movie. It’s an inspirational setting,” Doug Brignole said. “I’ve gone to places where all you see is row upon row of Lifecycles. It just seems out of place to sweat in a place like that.”

There is even a brewery on the drawing boards that is scheduled in August to begin producing a malty, heavy-flavored, European-style beer called Pasadena Lager.

“You’re not really with it these days unless you have your own brewery,” said company President Ed Ojdana.

The beer is now brewed at the Granville Island Brewery in Vancouver, B.C., and is available in pubs and restaurants in Pasadena.

Ojdana said the new Pasadena brewery will produce up to 12,000 barrels of beer a year, compared to the roughly 5 million barrels a year that come from the Miller Brewing Co. plant in Irwindale.

“We’re going to make about as much each year as they spill,” Ojdana said.

Calvin Smith, the owner of one of the oldest businesses in Old Pasadena, Bickley Printing Co., said no one ever imagined that the decades of talk would lead to the development taking shape in Old Pasadena.

From his storefront on Fair Oaks, still filled with the noisy clacking of the same Linotype machines his father had when he opened the shop in 1946, Smith said that in the lean years of the 1950s, most business people had no grander plans than putting on a fresh coat of paint.

“We were at rock bottom,” he said.

Downtown Shifted

In the 1930s, the area was a thriving retail center, serving what was then the richest city, per capita, in the United States. But as the city grew, downtown began to shift eastward toward the Bullock’s department store that opened in 1947 on South Lake Avenue.

Light manufacturing shops and antique stores, taking advantage of cheap rents and large buildings, moved in later to take the place of fancy retail stores.

As early as 1956, when the Pasadena Central Improvement Assn. was formed, business people had begun talking about renovation and were successful in getting three parking lots built.

But the real push came more than 20 years later, in 1978, when the city banned the demolition of historic buildings in Old Pasadena and later designated the area a historic preservation district, which allowed business people to apply for tax-exempt financing to restore old buildings.

Within a year, the Braley Building became the first large-scale renovation in Old Pasadena.

But not every plan has succeeded.

The most ambitious proposal for Old Pasadena was developer John Patrick Wilson’s plan to take an entire block of old buildings and turn them into a 350,000-square-foot mall that would retain the historic exteriors and fill the interiors with upscale clothing shops such as Papagallo and Capezio.

Longtime business owner Jack Siegal, who has run Jay’s Antiques on Colorado Boulevard since 1947, said the plans gave the city and business people a sense of optimism.

“It gave us our big push,” Siegal said. “As soon as I saw Wilson’s plans for the Marketplace, I knew it would go.”

But Wilson’s project has been stalled by delays in securing financing.

Despite the uncertainty about the Marketplace, the enthusiasm for Old Pasadena has continued.

“Five years ago, the Marketplace was going to be the anchor and pull everyone along,” said Jim Plotkin, owner of Pasadena Vacuum and Sewing Center. “Well, people got tired of waiting and started developing on their own. There’s all kinds of exciting things happening, and the whole area is becoming a marketplace.”

Transients Kept Away

Pasadena police Officer N.L. Ware and his partner, Jim Shear, who began walking a foot beat in Old Pasadena in April, said the theater crowds have kept transients and drunks away from the area and given the streets a breezy feeling at night.

“It reminds me of walking down Main Street at Disneyland,” Shear said one night while walking the beat.

Parking has been a perennial problem, but the city has begun construction of two new parking lots at a cost of $23.5 million, said the city’s project manager, Marsha V. Rood.

With the addition of a third 840-space lot that Wilson built last year, there will be 2,240 parking spaces by the end of the year, Rood said.

Rood said the city is expecting a big payoff from the rejuvenation. The estimates now point to more than $1 million in additional sales tax revenue for the city by 1990 and about 2,300 additional jobs, she said.

Cultural Prize

But regardless of the monetary payoff, many say the city has already reaped a healthy cultural and historical prize through the rejuvenation.

Claire Bogaard of Pasadena Heritage, a historical preservation group, said the architectural flavor of the area has been preserved, bringing with it a vibrancy and stability that has been missing for years.

Jennifer Butcher, a South Pasadena student who was eating dinner at the Rose City Diner recently, said Old Pasadena has given residents a sense of pride because they no longer have to drive to Los Angeles to have a nice night out on the town.

“It’s nice to be in a familiar town,” she said. “It looks like this is becoming the spot.”

Problems for Some

But despite the improvements, the development of Old Pasadena has caused problems for some business owners and residents.

Jordan of the Mount Greylock Trading Co. said skyrocketing rents have forced out many longtime business people who did not own their own buildings.

Jordan said he has been told that he may have to move to make way for renovation of the building. His lease ran out in April, and he has been staying on a month-to-month basis since then.

“We’re in a position of limbo now,” he said. “This development has been the death of smaller established businesses.

“The whole area is being ‘cutesified,’ ” he said. “It has no flavor left. I don’t think it’s going to be a place where you’d want to go without money.”

Rent Increases

Even owners of the newer shops catering to the young, monied crowd are worried about the almost certain rent increases as the area become more popular.

Fritz Claase, the owner of the Alter Ego, a hair salon on East Union Street, said his rent has gone from “an almost dismissible” $350 a month when he opened in 1980 to $1,200 today.

Glass craftsman Willie Dilling-ham said the rejuvenation has also played a role in dismantling what was at one time a thriving community of artists who lived in the area’s cheap second-floor studios.

Dillingham said he and four others who have studios in his building are among the last of the artists who came into the area in the 1960s and 1970s because of the cheap rents.

Now, after 16 years in the area, he is being evicted Monday.

“I’ve been expecting this for the last four or five years,” he said. “I knew it was just a matter of time.”

Bohemian Community Gone

A few lights still shine from the second floor late at night, marking the studios of illustrators or photographers who have come into the area.

But Dillingham said most of the artists who formed the bohemian community in Old Pasadena and their hangouts, like Chromo’s and Vitale’s, are gone.

“There was an excitement here; then everything got a little too clean and spruced up,” he said. “The artists made this a chic place to hang out, and then people turned it into a little Westwood.”

Redevelopment also destroyed the many cheap hotels, such as the Ritz and the Marine, that were home to the city’s poor and elderly.

YMCA Hotel to Close

Cindy Abbott, associate director of Union Station & the Depot, a social service agency that provides food and shelter for the needy, said the only low-income hotels left are the Holly, the Pierce and the YMCA. The 130 YMCA rooms, which rent for between $58.75 and $73.75 a week, are scheduled to close when a new facility is built across the street.

“I go down to Old Pasadena a lot for dinner or shopping, but my problem is that we are not replacing the housing stock,” she said. “We’ve gotten a lot of support from the city. But it hasn’t solved the problem.”

Rood, of the city’s Development Department, said the city anticipated the housing problems and has set aside a portion of redevelopment revenue specifically for low- and moderate-income housing.

Finance Director Mary Bradley said redevelopment revenue last year provided $46,000, most of which was allocated to three emergency shelters in the city, Hill House, Hestia House and Union Station & the Depot.

Armory for the Arts

Rood said the city has also tried to keep the presence of the arts strong in the area by recently turning over the 55-year-old, city-owned National Guard Armory, 145 N. Raymond Ave., to the nonprofit Armory Center for the Visual Arts. The tenants will include the Pasadena Art Workshops, the Pasadena Art Alliance and others.

But she added that the city neither can nor wants to keep the area exactly as it was.

Plotkin, of Pasadena Vacuum and Sewing Center, said: “We’ve lost some flavor, but maybe we’ve gotten some new flavor too.”

Even many who will be forced to leave the area say that the city is benefiting from redevelopment of the area.

“It’s really a shot in the arm for Pasadena,” Dillingham said.

‘Boutiqueville’

Bogaard of Pasadena Heritage said the hope is that the area will avoid the pitfall of becoming a “boutiqueville” by maintaining a mix of new and old, rich and poor.

By most accounts, Old Pasadena has succeeded so far.

Older businesses such as Gil’s Grill, the Holly Street Bazaar and the Loch Ness Monster have found a degree of protection through their leases that allows them to coexist with the hordes of well-funded newcomers waiting in the wings.

But with at least 500,000 square feet of building space still awaiting redevelopment, no one, including many newcomers, is completely sure if that mix will survive.

“You have to have something for everybody,” said Betty Lopez, the owner of the Holly Street Bazaar. “It would be boring as hell without us.’

Added Claase: “The transformation has been coming so quickly. I just hope there is a niche for us so we can all fit in.”