Partying Is Such Sweet Sorrow
Some disgustingly fine Monday morning in early December--are you listening, Cleveland?--Pasadena will rev up city vehicle No. 2202, the municipal paint striper, and start laying long blue lines down the edges of Colorado Boulevard.
When the blue lines that mark the crowd barrier are done, they fill up No. 2202 with pink paint for the line down the center of the street, the line that float drivers steer by. So many times have these lines been applied that even by Labor Day of the following year, it is possible to see faint traces of blue and pink color on the pavement.
L.A. has size, New Orleans has soul, but, in odds calculable only on a googol-RAM computer, Pasadena has become Event Epicenter, on a scale unimaginable in a comparably sized city; think Boise or Winston-Salem. Even apart from an occasional Super Bowl or World Cup, a routine twelvemonth brings to Pasadena the Emmy Awards, UCLA football games, Galaxy soccer games, the Doo Dah parade, 24 flea markets, movie shoots, the weekend spenders and strollers in Pasadena’s vieux carre--and the fame of the Rose. Both game and parade are so central to the city’s identity that the police nestle the blossom into the P of their logo like a Victorian nosegay.
For properly behaved fun, Pasadena is it, a Perle Mesta at organizing civic parties and an Emily Post at policing them. Its reputation is such that its first seminar on “The Art, Science and Politics of Special Event Planning,” organized with Cal State Northridge, brought some 30 cops, from Toronto to Wailuku, Turlock to Texas, from places where the biggest thing to blow into town is a hurricane.
They saw videos. They took notes. It matters not that the Super Bowl doesn’t go to Yuma or Costa Mesa. The Sun Carnival, in its scale, is demanding enough; the “month from hell” shopping frenzy at South Coast Plaza delivers its own measure of aggravation.
How does Pasadena manage parking, the California birthright? There’s the two-stack vs. five-stack style, the 15-year-long battle over parking on the municipal golf course, the dozen different World Cup parking passes, and the driver who holds everyone up complaining that he lost his or didn’t get one in the first place.
How about event organizers who gripe about the price and mutter to take their merriment elsewhere, like the Coliseum or Anaheim? One organizer calls their bluff thusly: “Fine, we’ll order you an escort, so you’ll get back here OK to sign our deal.”
And aren’t all crowds alike? Soccer fans come late, football fans show up early and may dine a la tailgate. Rolling Stones fans are not Moody Blues fans. As one events supervisor reenacted, in a lamentable English accent, a Moody Blues singer scolded rowdy fans, “Sit down, we’re not the bloody Stones.”
*
Like the joke about the Scottish island that was so poor that its people had to take in each other’s laundry, tourism is when the rest of the world visits you while you visit them. The best evidence of this is Paris in August.
The joke about Pasadena tourism is the Rose Parade’s inviolate million. Every year, police solemnly declare that a million people lined its streets to witness the splendor of yadda yadda yadda. So many generations of L.A. reporters have heard this that the figure shows up automatically in parade accounts, like that hoary multipurpose disaster quote, “It sounded like an atomic bomb went off.” Even though three Cal Tech PhDs long ago calculated the outside capacity at perhaps 600,000, accounting for lawn chairs and winter coats and camera gear, Pasadena sticks to its mythic million.
What is not in dispute is that Pasadena fills and disgorges its own 130,000-ish population at least 10 times over every year: Galaxy games, the Rosy events, UCLA games, diners at its 500 restaurants, fast to fine.
Where are those 130,000 in the meantime?
*
For years, my commute took me into traffic range of Dodger Stadium. I kept the Dodgers’ schedule taped to my dashboard--not with a fan’s devotion, but to calculate when I needed alternate routes home on game nights.
So I sympathize with residents of Pasadena’s much-frequented regions, especially those around the Rose Bowl and at the end of the parade route, where good floats go when they die.
Every new event that jingles Pasadena’s cash registers can also jangle neighbors’ nerves and property values. It has happened that locals are told just a couple of weeks beforehand that some huge event is coming, “and we hope you don’t have a wedding planned,” a local mimicked acidly.
This friction, all the cops knew firsthand. Tourists come and tourists go, preferably several dollars lighter than when they arrived. They put the frosting on the fiscal cake. But residents--the ones who, come Monday morning, can pick up a phone or a pen--are the bread and butter.
Lose sight of that, and run the risk that they may get riled enough to park an 18-wheeler at a critical intersection on Game Day or Parade Day or Festival Day and, oh my, will you look at that, 10 flat tires, how ever did that happen?
