Why you should experience Old Pasadena in Los Angeles, California.
Old Pasadena is a mercantile enclave where Central Pasadena's urban character meets the city's original commercial center, an unusually intact concentration of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century architecture and a street grid that preserves the scale of Pasadena before its eastward expansion.
Positioned between West Pasadena, the Civic Center, and South Arroyo, the neighborhood occupies the western side of Central Pasadena, where Colorado Boulevard crosses Fair Oaks Avenue amid compact blocks extending toward Walnut Street and Del Mar Boulevard. Two- and three-story brick commercial buildings, narrow storefront bays, upper-floor windows, recessed alleys and successive architectural treatments create continuous façades whose accumulated alterations expose more than half a century of downtown construction. Colorado Boulevard supplies the primary encounter through long commercial blocks whose closely spaced buildings retain the dimensions and frontage patterns of Pasadena's early business center. Fair Oaks Avenue creates a secondary passage across the district, intersecting smaller streets and alleyways that reveal rear elevations, former service passages and older masonry beyond the principal storefronts. The result is a neighborhood whose surviving urban fabric compresses Pasadena's transition from agricultural colony to prosperous regional city into a remarkably coherent collection of streets and buildings.
What you should know about Old Pasadena.
Old Pasadena is best known for preserving the commercial center that emerged around Colorado Street and Fair Oaks Avenue as Pasadena transformed from the Indiana Colony into an incorporated city during the 1880s. Businesses had already gathered around the intersection as the agricultural settlement expanded, and incorporation followed in 1886 during the decade when rail connections and winter migration accelerated Pasadena's growth. The auction of the Schoolhouse property that same year released the block bounded by Colorado, Raymond, Green and Fair Oaks for large-scale development, triggering a surge of investment as substantial brick construction replaced earlier wood-frame buildings. The Arcade Block rose on Colorado in 1888, the Schneider & Black blacksmith property developed on West Union during the same period and the Vandervort Block appeared on South Raymond in 1894, giving the young center commercial architecture of increasing permanence. Hotel development reinforced the district's regional importance as Pasadena became a winter destination for affluent Eastern and Midwestern travelers, with the Green Hotel complex joining a broader resort economy linked to rail travel and Southern California's climate. Commercial growth continued through the opening decades of the twentieth century, producing buildings in numerous architectural styles as merchants, manufacturers and entertainment businesses occupied the expanding downtown. The surviving district consequently contains structures associated with successive phases of Pasadena's development between 1886 and the 1930s, preserving the architectural consequences of the city's transition from agricultural settlement to a major San Gabriel Valley commercial center.
Economic gravity shifted eastward during the middle twentieth century, leaving the former business center with declining property values, high vacancies and an aging building stock by the 1960s. A proposed redevelopment program in 1971 threatened substantial demolition across the old center, sharpening the conflict between clearance and architectural preservation during the following decade. Pasadena Heritage emerged in 1977 amid broader concern over the destruction of the city's older architecture, and preservation efforts helped redirect attention toward rehabilitation of the surviving commercial blocks. Local protection arrived in 1979, followed by Old Pasadena's addition to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 for its significance in commerce and architecture. Rehabilitation advanced through the 1980s, and the completion of One Colorado at the end of 1992 joined seventeen older buildings across one and a half city blocks into a renewed commercial complex. The 1993 Streetscape and Alleyways Project extended that revival through sidewalks, lighting, trees and the conversion of neglected alleys into pedestrian passages, financed partly through revenue generated inside the district. Old Pasadena emerged from this period with its historic building stock functioning as the physical basis of its renewed commercial center, making the district a consequential American example of downtown preservation tied directly to economic revival.
How to fold Old Pasadena into your trip.
Old Pasadena works as the anchor for an outing connecting the consummate residential work of Greene and Greene, a museum shaped by two radically different chapters of twentieth-century collecting and an extraordinary Chinese-inspired cultural building created by a pioneering Pasadena art dealer.
Begin at Gamble House, completed in 1908 for David and Mary Gamble of the Procter & Gamble family as the most complete surviving residential work of brothers Charles and Henry Greene. The architects developed the house as a unified Arts and Crafts composition, integrating architecture, custom furniture, leaded art glass, lighting fixtures and intricate wood joinery into a project whose craftsmanship helped establish Greene and Greene internationally. The Gamble family transferred the house to the City of Pasadena and the University of Southern California in 1966, protecting an unusually intact ensemble that later received local, state and national historic recognition. Continue to Norton Simon Museum, whose institutional lineage began with the Pasadena Art Institute in 1922 before the organization became the Pasadena Art Museum and earned international attention through exhibitions devoted to Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and the Bauhaus. Ladd & Kelsey designed its 85,000-square-foot building, opened in 1969, but construction debt destabilized the institution; industrialist Norton Simon assumed its financial obligations and management in 1974, combined his extensive holdings with the museum's collection and reopened the building in 1975. Simon's acquisitions ultimately joined European painting, modern art and South and Southeast Asian sculpture, and Frank Gehry later redesigned the interior galleries during a major 1996 to 1999 renovation. Conclude at USC Pacific Asia Museum, where collector and entrepreneur Grace Nicholson commissioned Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury in 1924 to translate her study of Chinese architecture into a courtyard building modeled on imperial precedents. Nicholson imported roof tiles, stone and marble carvings, bronze and copper work from China, opened the first portion in 1925 and completed the courtyard in 1929; the building subsequently housed the Pasadena Art Museum before the Pacificulture Foundation arrived in 1971 and later became Pacific Asia Museum. Its 2013 partnership with the University of Southern California continued a cultural lineage extending from Nicholson's private galleries through successive museum institutions devoted to art in Pasadena. The progression moves from Greene and Greene's comprehensive Arts and Crafts domestic design through the institutional reinvention surrounding Norton Simon's collection and culminates in Nicholson's Chinese-inspired cultural complex, connecting three distinct forms of architectural patronage that developed around Pasadena's historic center.
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