Why The Shops on Lake Avenue matters.
The Shops on Lake Avenue is a modernist retail center where South Lake's midcentury commercial character meets landscaped pedestrian passages, low-rise architecture and the legacy of Pasadena's pioneering suburban shopping district.
Set along South Lake Avenue near Del Mar Boulevard and just north of California Boulevard, the center occupies the western side of Pasadena's principal South Lake retail corridor, where larger commercial parcels transition east toward Caltech and south toward the residential streets approaching San Marino. Two-story retail buildings extend behind the street frontage through open-air passages, terraces and courtyards that break the development into smaller pedestrian-scaled volumes. Broad stairways and upper-level walkways create layered circulation through the property, giving the complex a vertical composition despite its low-rise form. Landscaped edges soften the concrete, glass and stucco architecture as storefronts turn toward both Lake Avenue and the internal passages. The result is a shopping center whose low-rise modernism, open-air circulation and integration with South Lake's established commercial fabric extend the architectural character that has distinguished this Pasadena corridor since the mid-twentieth century.
What defines The Shops on Lake Avenue.
The Shops on Lake Avenue is best known for transforming part of the immense automobile-oriented property created for Bullock's Pasadena into a new retail district designed around the architectural inheritance of one of Southern California's most consequential postwar department stores. Bullock's had opened on the site in September 1947 after Walter Wurdeman and Welton Becket spent years developing a radically suburban alternative to the traditional downtown department store. Their building occupied only two acres of an eight-acre property, leaving six acres for automobiles and positioning its principal entrances toward motor courts at a time when the established Pasadena shopping district remained six blocks away. Landscape architect Ruth Shellhorn surrounded the store with gardens that helped soften the enormous parking field, joining architecture, landscape and automobile circulation within a commercial composition conceived around Southern California's emerging suburban lifestyle. The experiment proved commercially powerful enough to draw additional retailers toward Lake Avenue, accelerating the conversion of a largely residential street into Pasadena's leading postwar shopping corridor. Bullock's architectural significance brought National Register recognition in 1996, several years after South Lake had begun losing commercial momentum to the revival of Old Pasadena. Forest City Development California subsequently advanced a major redevelopment of the surrounding property, retaining the former Bullock's building as the architectural anchor while converting substantial portions of its automobile landscape into The Shops on Lake Avenue. Johnson Favaro Architecture & Urban Design designed the new complex, and construction moved forward in 2001 as a project valued near $32 million. The center opened in 2002, completing a second major transformation of the property more than half a century after Wurdeman, Becket and Shellhorn first established the commercial model that had changed South Lake Avenue.
Johnson Favaro approached the new construction as an architectural extension of the modernism already embedded in the Bullock's property, developing 135,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space through low-rise buildings gathered around pedestrian circulation. The project occupied ground that had originally belonged to Bullock's vast parking landscape, allowing the 1947 department store to survive as the dominant historic mass while new construction increased the commercial intensity of the property. Another layer of authorship arrived through conceptual artist Vito Acconci, whose Mobius Bench became a permanent sculptural component of the development. Acconci shaped the fiberglass work as a continuous twisting band whose seating surface folds, rises and reverses through the pedestrian environment, collapsing the distinction between functional street furniture and public sculpture. The center's opening also became connected with Pasadena's broader arts community through commissioned works by Alexis Smith, Betye Saar, Charles Arnoldi, Frank Gehry, Mark Ryden and William Wegman for an auction benefiting Pasadena Museum of California Art and Pasadena Playhouse. Johnson Favaro's architecture and Acconci's sculptural intervention gave the redevelopment a creative program extending beyond conventional retail construction, placing contemporary design and public art inside a property already carrying one of Pasadena's most important chapters of postwar commercial architecture.
How The Shops on Lake Avenue fits.
The Shops on Lake Avenue works as the commercial anchor for an outing connecting Pasadena's formative theater institution, an Asian-art collection rooted in the work of a pioneering dealer and the scientific institute that transformed a small local school into an international research center.
Begin at Pasadena Playhouse, founded by Gilmor Brown in 1917 after his acting company established itself in Pasadena and attracted enough community support for more than 1,000 residents to help finance a permanent home. Architect Elmer Grey designed the Spanish Colonial Revival theater that opened in 1925, and the institution expanded into a complex containing five stages, a scene shop and a theatrical college that trained performers during the growth of Hollywood's film industry. Brown's production of the complete Shakespeare canon helped secure the Playhouse's designation as the State Theatre of California in 1937, and its stages became a recruiting ground for studios during the transition from silent cinema to sound. Financial collapse closed the theater in 1969, yet preservation efforts protected the building until its reopening in 1986; decades later, the institution received the 2023 Regional Theatre Tony Award. Continue to USC Pacific Asia Museum, occupying the building created by collector and entrepreneur Grace Nicholson as her residence, galleries and Treasure House. Nicholson moved to California in 1901, developed an early business around Native American baskets and became sufficiently knowledgeable in the field to join the American Anthropological Association in 1904. Her Pasadena complex opened in stages beginning in 1925 around a courtyard inspired by Chinese architecture, housing galleries, an auditorium and Nicholson's private rooms before she transferred the property to Pasadena in 1943 for cultural purposes. The building subsequently housed the Pasadena Art Museum before Pacific Asia Museum emerged in 1971, carrying Nicholson's collecting legacy into an institution devoted to the arts of Asia and the Pacific Islands. Conclude at Caltech, whose institutional lineage begins with Pasadena philanthropist Amos Throop establishing Throop University in 1891 with 31 students and six faculty members. Astronomer George Ellery Hale joined its governing board in 1907 and redirected the small school toward advanced scientific research, eventually working with chemist Arthur A. Noyes and physicist Robert A. Millikan to shape its intellectual ambitions. The institution adopted the California Institute of Technology name in 1920, and Millikan arrived the following year to direct the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics before receiving the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on the elementary electric charge and photoelectric effect. Hale, Noyes and Millikan turned a local Pasadena school into a research institution whose development permanently tied the city to twentieth-century physics, astronomy and engineering. The progression moves from Gilmor Brown's transformation of community theater into a nationally consequential dramatic institution through Grace Nicholson's conversion of collecting and commerce into a center for Asian art and culminates in Hale, Noyes and Millikan's reinvention of Throop as Caltech, connecting three Pasadena institutions built through unusually ambitious cultural and intellectual patronage.
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