Some Things Were Better Then
Who’s to say, in hindsight, just when enough finally got to be too much, and Barbara Conrad closed up shop and got the hell out of quaint, adorable Old Town Pasadena?
Disenchantment surely had its watershed episodes.
The perfume thief who boldly jammed three bottles in her pockets and dared Conrad to call the cops, and Conrad, seeing lawsuits and ruin flash before her eyes, let her go. The parents whose crying child urinated on the shop floor--they strolled off with elaborate casualness until Conrad chased down the father, shoved paper towels into his hand and made him mop it up. The gallons of ice cream in dozens of flavors, dripped and smeared onto the merchandise. The vandal who took a razor blade to a pile of afghans, leaving nasty little snicks in the fabric.
No one was more astonished by Barbara Conrad’s decamping than Barbara Conrad. “Of course I’m crabby. I consider this my town.”
Since the turn of the 1990s, urban planners have been hanging gold medals on Pasadena’s civic make-over. In a few years’ time, Old Town--Old Pasadena, if you please--became the Miss Henderson of cities. You’ll remember Miss Henderson, the prim secretary of 1940s movies who one day took off her glasses and shook down her hair as the boss gasped, “Why, Miss Henderson--you’re . . . you’re beautiful!”
Just so.
Until the Miss Henderson moment, the city the world wants to move to every New Year’s Day bore the grime of years. If its Colorado Boulevard storefronts weren’t empty, they inclined to the funky or even junky. What the Rose Parade floats didn’t obscure, the sidewalk crowds mercifully did.
Now Old Pasadena’s exquisite buildings--like a studio back lot of different eras, Rococo, Art Deco, Greek Revival, Mission style--stand immaculately restored.
The crotchety bookseller is dead and gone, the thrift store burned down. Babies sit in high chairs in what was once the old Mecca Room cocktail lounge. The windows of the longtime adult bookstore are no longer opaque, but neon-bright. It honors the American Express card.
In Pasadena, stucco and tile have developed astounding magnetic properties. Each weekend, thousands throng its sidewalks, hanging out among petition circulators and skateboarders and bums and street musicians, jostling from cappuccino gallery to music store to movie house. For obvious reasons, call it Eastwood.
Miss Henderson wisely knew not to tart herself up; refurbishment can go too far. Pasadena is poised to find that out. Close behind the painters and sandblasters, the chain stores discovered Pasadena. The Gap, J. Crew, Armani Exchange, Victoria’s Secret--upscale, prosperous, homogenized all--have the power to make this city into any city.
Two-point-three miles distant, in the sanctuary of San Marino, where Conrad moved her Impromptu store, there are no sidewalk news racks, no self-serve gas--and no sour grapes, she insists.
“For a while, it was OK. But I think the success has caused a lot of problems. I wonder if you can even call it success any more.”
She had 20 good years as an Old Town shopkeeper, off and on “the boulevard.” She met her husband there. Barbra Streisand limoed over for an Art Deco dressing table Conrad was selling. Barbra Streisand would not limo over to shop at the Gap.
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No lesser California savants than the Beach Boys declared the little old lady from Pasadena to be “the terror of Colorado Boulevard.” That was 30 years ago. Barbara Conrad finds her terror in nightmare parking, late-night cutpurses and rowdies, kids who walk four abreast down the sidewalks like the blades of a bulldozer, yielding for no one.
In weekday daylight, she walks along Holly Street, ticking off the departed--the brass shop, gone, the vintage jewelry shop, gone, her shop before she moved into the center ring, Colorado Boulevard--gone.
She sighs over Eden lost. “I’m so glad to be out of it. There’s a lump in my throat sometimes when I think about it, but the weekends are enough to cure me.”
Less than a year after he was president of the Old Pasadena business district, Jack Daniel Smith up and moved his gift-basket store a few blocks away. The rent is half as high, business about to get twice as good.
Old Pasadena, even in its grotty state, had enchanted him--an uncut gem of a downtown, shops as distinct and offbeat as the characters who ran them. From that to an antiseptic, over-restauranted faux-burg? “Is old Pasadena a victim of its own success? The short answer would be yes. Is it better today than 15 years ago, the streetwalkers and drugs and decrepit buildings? Yes. Do I think it could be a lot better than it is? Yeah, I do.”
In the middle of this city-state of Los Angeles, we yearn for a human-scale urban experience. So detached are we from it that we have to hunt it down, schedule it in, drive to it, vide CityWalk. When we find it, we risk loving it to death, vide Pasadena.
