Why Alexandria II matters.
Alexandria II is an enduring metaphysical bookstore where Pasadena's South Lake Avenue character meets four decades of spiritual literature, ritual traditions and an unusually broad marketplace for esoteric practice.
Set along South Lake Avenue near Cordova Street and just steps from the commercial blocks leading toward the former Bullock's Pasadena, the bookstore occupies the northern reaches of a retail corridor transformed by postwar department stores and subsequent generations of specialty shops. Thousands of books span ancient and contemporary spiritual paths, religions and philosophical traditions within a store whose shelves extend into crystals, tarot decks and ritual objects. Jewelry made with natural stones, incense gathered from international traditions and crystal and Tibetan singing bowls broaden the physical collection beyond printed material. Scheduled intuitive readers, Reiki practitioners and psychics add a person-to-person component to a business fundamentally organized around spiritual exploration. The result is a Pasadena bookstore whose unusually long tenure has turned an esoteric retail concept into one of South Lake Avenue's enduring independent institutions.
What defines Alexandria II.
Alexandria II is best known for operating as one of the Los Angeles region's oldest metaphysical bookstores since October 19, 1985. Its original location stood on East Colorado Boulevard near Rosemead Boulevard, and by April 1986 the young store had already become part of Pasadena's metaphysical scene with material spanning astrology, reincarnation and other esoteric subjects. Alexandria II relocated to South Lake Avenue in August 1988, beginning a 21-year tenure near California Boulevard before moving several blocks north in July 2009. The name reaches deliberately to the ancient Library of Alexandria, linking the Pasadena store with an ideal of learning and exchange across different beliefs, teachings and philosophies. Ralph Chakalian later became the owner associated with an operation that continued expanding its books and complementary collections in response to changing spiritual interests. More than forty years after its founding, Alexandria II remains on South Lake Avenue with the same telephone number attached to the business in 1986, an uncommon continuity for an independent specialty bookstore across multiple locations and generations of Pasadena retail.
Ancient and contemporary religious titles share the shelves with works on metaphysics and spiritual practice, allowing traditions with radically different origins to occupy the same bookselling program. Crystals extend that exploration into mineral specimens and natural-stone jewelry, and the store carries crystal singing bowls across multiple sizes, notes and colors alongside Tibetan bowls that are available to play in person. Incense arrives from producers around the world, with sage sourced from Native American suppliers and palo santo harvested in Ecuador and Peru under government-regulated practices. Aromatherapy, intention, ritual and crystal-infused candles place scent, fire and mineral objects within another branch of the collection, joined by crystal, metal and wooden pendulums. Indian tapestries, leatherbound and bookbound journals, greeting cards and ritual items extend the inventory into objects used for personal spaces and individual practices. Psychic readings, Reiki sessions and intuitive practitioners complete the store's shift from bookseller toward a gathering point where printed traditions, physical objects and individual spiritual guidance coexist under the same roof.
How Alexandria II fits.
Alexandria II works as the anchor for an outing connecting South Lake Avenue's postwar retail revolution with a community theater that became a training ground for Hollywood and a collector's extraordinary architectural experiment in Asian art.
Begin at Bullock's Pasadena, the 1947 department store that transformed South Lake Avenue from a predominantly residential street into a major suburban shopping district. Walter Wurdeman and Welton Becket designed the Late Moderne building across an eight-acre property, devoting six acres to automobiles at a moment when department-store retail remained concentrated in downtown districts. Interior designer Raymond C. Dexter joined the architects in developing 61 departments with individual finishes, and landscape architect Ruth Shellhorn surrounded the building with gardens conceived as part of the architecture. The project became Wurdeman and Becket's first department store and received architectural recognition before its 1996 entry in the National Register of Historic Places. Continue to Pasadena Playhouse, founded by Gilmor Brown in 1917 before more than 1,000 Pasadena residents helped finance its permanent home. Elmer Grey designed the Spanish Colonial Revival theater that opened in 1925, and the complex eventually encompassed five stages, a scene shop and a theater college. Brown's company completed the entire Shakespeare canon by 1936, helping lead the California Legislature to designate the Playhouse the State Theater of California in 1937. Its School for Theater Arts fed actors and theatermakers into radio, film and television as studios sent scouts to productions and contracted with the school to teach voice and diction during Hollywood's transition from silent pictures to sound. Conclude at USC Pacific Asia Museum, whose building grew from collector Grace Nicholson's fascination with Native American and Asian art. Nicholson moved to Pasadena in 1901, invested her remaining inheritance in Indigenous baskets and entered the American Anthropological Association in 1904 before commissioning Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury to create her extraordinary Chinese-inspired complex in 1924. Roof tiles, stone and marble carvings, bronze and copper work came directly from China or were executed locally from Chinese precedents, and the arched entrance copied a Buddhist library in Beijing. Nicholson opened the first section in 1925, completed the courtyard in 1929 and gave the property to Pasadena in 1943; it subsequently housed the Pasadena Art Institute, Pasadena Art Museum and Pacificulture Foundation before becoming Pacific Asia Museum and joining USC in 2013. The progression moves from architecture that redirected Pasadena's retail geography through a community-funded theater that became a conduit into Hollywood and culminates inside a collector's cross-cultural complex whose architecture, art and institutional succession span a century of the city's intellectual life.
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