L.A. Scene / The City Then and Now : Playhouse Area a Site of Drama Onstage and Off

Redevelopment, sensational crime, domestic abuse, urban decay. Together they constitute a litany of ills and issues that easily could have been ripped from this morning’s headlines. But whenever the contemporary urban world seems too much with us, it’s at least slightly helpful to recall that we have, in fact, been here before.

Take, for example, one of Southern California’s hottest new centers of gentrification, the area around the Pasadena Playhouse, just east of the already booming Old Pasadena district.

In the first few decades of this century, Pasadena was a center not only of the now famous Arts and Crafts Movement, but also of the progressive City Beautiful movement. Its proponents held that by combining landscape architecture and civic design, planners could create a better environment that would, in turn, create better citizens.

And the sun around which Pasadena’s City Beautiful believers chose to spin their new and better urban system was the Pasadena Community Playhouse.

The campaign to construct the facility was organized in 1917 by Gilmor Brown, an actor and director, who set up a nonprofit educational corporation to promote the theater. The cornerstone for the building on El Molino Avenue was laid May 31, 1924.

The following year, after a citywide effort that raised about $400,000 through door-to-door solicitations, the playhouse opened with a forgettable--indeed, forgotten--comedy called “The Amethyst.”

Its inauspicious first night notwithstanding, the classic Spanish-style stucco, brick and tile playhouse, whose wings face a courtyard with a fountain and curving staircase, became the centerpiece for Pasadena’s expanding cultural life.

It also stimulated nearby property values and, over the succeeding years, encouraged new buildings in the area, including what is now called the Kaplan Building on Green Street.

A number of years later, the area’s aura of high culture was eclipsed by one of the sensational crimes that were a staple of the era’s hyperactive press.

The incident began Sept. 23, 1948, when Thomas Zunich, a taxi driver, entered the cleaners where his estranged wife, Velma, 42, worked. Just months before, the husband had been jailed for 90 days for abusing his wife. After his release, she filed several police reports, charging that Zunich was “annoying” her.

On that day, an argument broke out, Velma began to scream and Zunich, who was armed with a knife and gun, stabbed her three times in the stomach. As Zunich stood there watching with his gun pointed at her, Velma crawled, bleeding, across the hallway to the beauty shop. Someone grabbed her and pulled her inside, where many customers waited with her in fear. A crowd of at least 200 spectators quickly gathered on the street outside.

Shortly after the police arrived, tear gas canisters were shot into the building before a photographer and model were able to evacuate the upstairs suite. When the air cleared the police found Zunich on the floor in the cleaners. He had shot and killed himself.

For a time, the playhouse area seemed to shake off the unwelcome notoriety of the Zunich case, but, as the years wore on, urban blight set in and crimes--petty and not so petty--became a constant problem.

Today, all that is a part of the playhouse district’s colorful past, as it is for most of Pasadena’s historic core.

The streets around the Pasadena Playhouse are once more a center of precisely the sort of progressive, engagingly bohemian urban life the original City Beautiful proponents envisioned. The so-called playhouse district is bounded by Lake and Los Robles avenues and Union and Green streets. As redevelopment continues, the district is once again emerging as the cultural heart of the city, boasting many specialized bookstores, art galleries, small theaters and music outlets.

A gallery that specializes in Pasadena’s turn-of-the-century artists has replaced the cleaners in the Kaplan Building, a national landmark that pays tribute to Pasadena’s heritage.

Of the unhappy Zunichs no trace remains.