De-Malling the Mall

People came here to be cured. At its best, Pasadena, with its vistas and exotic flowers, was a restorative place, where one might follow a regime to stave off the chaos of the unruly city to the west and the cruel desert stretching east. It was the civilized, white-gloved version of the American West, not the saloon and shootout version.

A city to walk in, hands folded behind the back. A city to have ideas in.

Somewhere, something went wrong. Like much of Southern California, development in downtown Pasadena betrayed the ideals of its founders, proceeding like a disoriented prairie dog until the success of the revitalization of Old Town in the early 1990s shamed TrizecHahn, the owners of Plaza Pasadena--the ratty three-block shopping mall along Colorado Boulevard--and the city into stepping back and looking for a new vision.

Sometimes architecture involves archeology. Paseo Colorado, the $201-million shopping district going up where Plaza Pasadena came down last April, utilizes many of the ideas and hopes for the city first proposed by Edward Bennett in his 1923 plan for the civic center and Colorado Boulevard. Bennett recommended a classical Beaux Arts axial plan, with two grand boulevards to be anchored by public buildings. It would be grand, surrounded by the San Gabriel Mountains. It would be a civic center in the true sense of the phrase, a place where, wandering, you might mix with people who weren’t exactly the same color and income bracket as yourself. A place for parties and parades.

The project is expected to serve 912,000 residents within the trade area, with a median income of $68,100 per household; 560,000 square feet will be stores and restaurants and movie theaters, the rest public space. There also will be 400 units of rental housing along Green Street. The plan is to preserve Pasadena’s eclectic feel, while restoring human scale to the area. It will provide a link between trendy Old Town and the tony South Lake neighborhood, fitting since the very word Paseo conveys a feeling of passageways.

But Paseo Colorado is also a pioneer project, a postmillennium mall, a model for an urban development that is hoped will revitalize sagging urban areas across the country.

In early 1998, TrizecHahn hired Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn, an architectural firm established in 1959, to design the new, multiuse retail area. It takes a certain kind of architect, a certain kind of firm, to work on a project of this scale--a neighborhood, not just a building. EEK is known for its ability to cut through red tape and work with various bureaucracies; its home office is in New York, while an L.A. office of around 20 people specializes in urban design and mixed-use developments.

The firm also has a national reputation for historic preservation, particularly on the East Coast, where it restored the Woolworth building and the Dakota apartment building in New York, among other major projects. Since the early 1990s, EEK has been working on a variety of redevelopment projects on the waterfront for the city of Long Beach. The firm recently submitted proposals to L.A. County to renovate and adapt three buildings in the Olvera Street area, and in 1998 EEK teamed with Charles Pankow Builders to design and build the $560-million office and entertainment complex under construction at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, also owned by TrizecHahn.

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Gordon Olschlager is project manager for Paseo Colorado. At his previous job at John Ash Group, which specializes in restoration, he restored some of Southern California’s best-loved landmarks, including the El Capitan Theatre and Charlie Chaplin Studios in Hollywood, Mission San Juan Capistrano in Orange County and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis Brown House in Los Feliz.

From the beginning, in 1997, EEK involved the city and the builders--again Pankow--at every stage. The idea was to restore the 1923 Bennett Plan, reopening Garfield Avenue as an open-air public street. The other goal, Olschlager says, was to restore Colorado Boulevard as a “true mercantile street with a rhythm of individual storefronts and buildings,” without competing with the retail shops in Old Pasadena.

“What makes this project unique is the mix. It is an environment that has evolved over time, and we are trying to respond to that history, to reopen the dialogue between historic buildings like the post office and the [Civic] Auditorium,” Olschlager says.

Here’s what Paseo Colorado will look like: Three large open public spaces between Marengo and Los Robles avenues and Colorado Boulevard and Green Street will be connected by a 16- to 20-foot-wide internal street, the paseo, on the interior side of the retail stores along Colorado. Colorado Boulevard will once again look like Main Street America, with storefronts opening at street level; restaurants will be on the second story.

Garfield Avenue has been reopened to become a pedestrian walkway, at its original 77-foot width. This area will include a courtyard, with a mosaic fountain designed by Margaret Nielson, featuring postcard views of Pasadena. Another fountain will be on the second floor, designed by artist Anne-Marie Carlson, who also did the tile work in the North Hollywood subway station.

That area will be framed by a wisteria trellis around an open court with seven restaurants (among them Palamino) and terrace dining. Handrails and balconies will be crafted by Michael Amescua, an artist from East L.A. who plans to include images of Algarve and palms in his metalwork. There will also be two 120-foot-high bell towers; one in the Garfield space and one in the theater forecourt.

A 14-screen Pacific Theatre will sit in the middle of Paseo Colorado, at the top of two grand staircases and surrounded by takeout restaurants and ice cream parlors. The open space on the Los Robles side will have an arroyo garden, with natural rocks and a dry creek bed. Macy’s was originally planning to move from the site (consolidating both Pasadena stores at its nearby Lake Street location) but decided to stay after seeing the plan. Macy’s is not yet prepared to redo its storefront but has allowed the retail stores to stretch along its side of Colorado Boulevard.

Most of the facades will be plaster with stone accents and metalwork balconies. Some of the roofs will be terra cotta tile, but not all. The complex will include a health club and a day spa, as well as a 36,000-square-foot Gelson’s with an entrance on Green Street. Melendez Babalas, a firm in downtown Los Angeles, will do the landscaping, using mostly trellises, potted trees and planters. Escalators and elevators coming up from the parking garage will be tucked away, to avoid the notorious mall-like feeling.

Most L.A. architects will tell you that Southern California, crucible of American individualism, has suffered greatly from the cult of monumentalism--architects and developers who care more about putting their signature on a project than creating something that will last for more than a decade, something that will enhance a whole neighborhood, something that looks back to history and original building materials as much as it does to the future. Something built to human scale, not superego scale.

The cult of individualism didn’t stand a chance in the planning of Paseo Colorado. From the beginning, representatives from the city, TrizecHahn and EEK were included, expanding quickly to include City Council members and the mayor and several local groups, which is why the permit process went so smoothly.

To fulfill the design requirements of the Civic Center Task Force, the Planning Commission, the Design Commission and the Redevelopment Agency, EEK agreed to various design principles, including lush landscaping, the use of “civic” materials such as stone as well as historic architectural detail such as roof overhangs, deeply revealed windows, trellises and colors and materials found in the existing Civic Center district.

“I think I’ve been to several hundred meetings over the last three years of planning,” says mild-mannered Olschlager.

In 1923, the city of Pasadena commissioned a civic center master plan from Edward Bennett, a disciple of the great urban planner Daniel Burnham, who designed the extension of the mall in Washington, D.C., from Lincoln Memorial to Washington Monument and the reflecting pool. In Bennett’s plan, the north-south axis was bisected by Colorado Boulevard, which would be the main shopping street in Pasadena.

But history doesn’t always happen the way you plan it.

In the late 1970s, when the city of Pasadena teamed up on Plaza Pasadena with the Ernest Hahn Co., one of the country’s largest mall developers, three blocks of historical buildings, including the Pasadena Athletic Club, were destroyed. Despite being set in the center of town, Plaza Pasadena was your typical, monolithic, climate-controlled retail mall, typical of the ‘70s and ‘80s, anchored at either end with a department store.

In the process, street-level Colorado Boulevard became a two-story brick wall, three blocks long, with phony storefronts as a nod to historic preservation (for that feature alone, the mall won several architectural awards). It broke the north-south axis of Bennett’s original plan and was built across Garfield Avenue; it also was so unpopular that Pasadena Heritage, a public advocacy group to preserve Pasadena’s architectural heritage, was founded in response to public outcry.

By the early 1990s, Plaza Pasadena was failing, too. In 1997, the city convened a committee to create a plan with a vision for the future of Pasadena’s civic center.

What most architects refer to bitterly as constraints, Olschlager calls challenges. “Our first challenge,” he says proudly, “was to get the city to allow us a variety of heights on the buildings. In 1980, the entire site was zoned with a limit of 60 feet. We persuaded the city to let us use 60 feet as an average height for all the buildings in Paseo Colorado, calling it an ‘urban district.’ ”

The second challenge was money.

TrizecHahn (Ernest Hahn’s company had merged with a Canadian company, Trizec), was beginning to divest itself of its traditional mall properties, exploring multiuse malls like Desert Passage and Aladdin in Las Vegas, which included hotels and tourist attractions and, sometimes, residential areas. TrizecHahn sold the air rights over Paseo Colorado to a residential developer, Post Properties from Atlanta.

To get the city to contribute redevelopment funds not usually given to retail projects, TrizecHahn sold the 3,000 underground parking spaces to the city, and the revenue from this parking facility underwrote what now amounts to a $26-million redevelopment contribution from the city.

“Mall” has become a dirty word in the brave new world of mixed-use retail. “We prefer the term ‘urban village,’ ” says Rick Froese, senior director of development at TrizecHahn. “We don’t like to use the word ‘mall,’ ” Olschlager agrees. “We prefer to call it an ‘urban district.’ Retail is only a piece of it.”

“We wanted,” Froese says “to break the mall paradigm.”

Indeed, says Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard, “Paseo Colorado sets a new standard for urban design in downtown Pasadena--by reopening the view corridor in our civic center, by offering mixed uses including residential, and by promising to animate the area with shoppers and other visitors into the evening hours.”

It would seem that malls across the country have maxed out. It is, in Froese’s words, “a mature business.” His explanation for this phenomenon is reminiscent of forest succession--from beach to grasses to deciduous trees to conifers.

“Retailers want to be where the people are. There’s a lot of movement across the country back into city centers. You don’t see a lot of new malls going up now. Lower-tiered regional shopping centers are ripe for conversion to other uses, combining retail and entertainment and residential projects. The real opportunities lie in projects that connect neighborhoods and go back to an idea of an urban fabric.”

It all makes sense. But then, Plaza Pasadena made sense at the time, too. Public buildings are not exempt from the laws of fashion. It’s easier, however, to rip out a seam or lengthen a hemline than it is to de-mall a mall.

Though the project is not scheduled to open for business until early September 2001, already the site has opened up the old grandeur of Bennett’s axial plan. Plaza Pasadena was torn down last April, beginning with a public ceremony that many observers say had a cathartic feel.

With the first blow from the wrecking ball, the first shattering glass, a cheer went up from the crowd that reverberated off the mountains, sashayed off the storefronts, echoed among civic buildings that had not spoken to each other in 20 years--and probably roused Edward Bennett, asleep in his grave.