Why Union Street matters.
Union Street is a storied corridor where Old Pasadena's mercantile character meets surviving turn-of-the-century commercial architecture, the grand Civic Center and an east-west streetscape extending from the city's nineteenth-century core toward its institutional districts.
Running through Old Pasadena between the Arroyo Seco edge and Playhouse Village, the urban corridor follows a predominantly east-west line across Pasadena Avenue, Fair Oaks Avenue, Raymond Avenue, Arroyo Parkway, Marengo Avenue and Lake Avenue before continuing toward Hill Avenue. Western stretches pass through compact blocks of brick and stucco commercial buildings where narrow storefronts, upper-story windows and closely spaced intersections preserve a finer grain than the broader avenues crossing them. Traveling east carries the street past increasingly substantial civic, residential and commercial buildings as the San Gabriel Mountains rise directly beyond the city grid and Pasadena's central district opens around Garfield Avenue. Farther east, apartment buildings, offices and neighborhood businesses create a more residential scale before the roadway approaches the institutional landscape surrounding Pasadena City College. The result is a corridor whose intimate historic blocks, mountain-oriented sightlines, changing building scale and sustained east-west alignment reveal Pasadena's growth from nineteenth-century commercial center into a mature metropolitan district.
What defines Union Street.
Union Street is best known for preserving one of the strongest secondary commercial streets within Pasadena's historic center, including building fabric that escaped some of the physical changes imposed on nearby Colorado Boulevard. Pasadena incorporated in 1886 and entered a major expansion after direct railroad service from Los Angeles arrived in 1888, with population rising from 9,117 in 1900 to 30,291 by 1910. One-story storefronts and two-story business blocks multiplied across the central district from the mid-1880s through the 1920s, and Union retained intact pre-1920 examples as Colorado underwent later alteration. Architect Joseph J. Blick designed the Union Building at 119 East Union Street in 1911, placing a substantial commercial block directly within this early construction period. City Hall occupied a building at Union and Fair Oaks that same year, giving the intersection a municipal role before Pasadena created its later Civic Center. A far larger civic campaign emerged after voters approved a $3.5 million bond in June 1923 for a library, City Hall and auditorium arranged through the Bennett, Parsons and Frost plan. Bakewell and Brown's City Hall opened in 1927 immediately beside Union, placing the street against a new Mediterranean Revival governmental center whose construction shifted investment eastward from the older commercial core. The corridor carries commercial Pasadena from its compact early business blocks directly into the grand civic architecture that announced the city's ambitions during the 1920s.
Preservation and reinvestment created another complete chapter along the western blocks after Pasadena's historic commercial center declined during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Pasadena Heritage formed in 1977 amid battles over threatened buildings, and the city created the Old Pasadena historic district in 1980 as part of a broader attempt to revive the deteriorated commercial core. The Old Pasadena Historic District entered the National Register of Historic Places on September 15, 1983, with designated Union Street properties extending across both sides of multiple blocks. One of the most contentious redevelopment episodes centered on the Marketplace block bounded by Colorado Boulevard, Fair Oaks Avenue, Union Street and De Lacey Avenue, where preservation and commercial redevelopment collided during the 1980s. Rehabilitation ultimately treated surviving nineteenth and early twentieth-century building fabric as an economic asset, helping turn the formerly weakened center into a major retail and entertainment district. A new transportation chapter followed decades later when Pasadena selected Union for its first two-way protected bicycle facility, advancing the concept through the 2015 Bicycle Transportation Action Plan and securing Caltrans grant funding in 2017. The completed 1.5-mile bikeway between Arroyo Parkway and Hill Avenue opened ceremonially in September 2023, adding a continuous modern transportation layer to a street already shaped by more than a century of commercial, civic and preservation history.
How Union Street fits.
Union Street works as the anchor for a Pasadena sequence connecting a Beaux Arts residence created by an artist and patron with a City Beautiful library conceived through a major architectural competition and a theater that helped establish Pasadena as a nationally important center for dramatic arts.
Begin at Fényes Mansion, the 1906 residence of artist, collector and patron Eva Scott Fényes and her husband, physician and entomologist Dr. Adalbert Fényes. Robert Farquhar designed the Beaux Arts house, and Sylvanus Marston added a conservatory and Eva's studio in 1911. Eva assembled an important California plein-air collection and pursued her own painting there, and Richard E. Miller depicted the estate garden in his 1917 painting Dappled Light. Her interest in early cinema brought filmmakers including D.W. Griffith to the property, beginning a screen history that has continued for more than a century. Another international chapter began in 1948 when Eva's grandson-in-law Y.A. Paloheimo became the first Finnish Consul for Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico, turning part of the mansion into a consular office until 1964. Continue to Pasadena Central Library, born from the Bennett, Parsons and Frost Civic Center plan and the $3.5 million bond approved by voters in 1923. Ten California architectural firms entered the competition for Pasadena's three principal civic buildings, and Myron Hunt and H.C. Chambers won the library commission in 1924 with a design praised for its entrance, patio, facade and capacity for expansion. Construction began May 19, 1925, and the building was dedicated on Abraham Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1927, becoming the first component completed within the new Civic Center. Its Spanish Colonial and Italian Renaissance architectural language helped carry Pasadena's preference for Mediterranean design into an institution conceived as part of a unified municipal composition. Conclude at Pasadena Playhouse, whose producing organization was incorporated in 1917 before moving into its purpose-built theater in 1925. The institution became closely associated with Pasadena's extraordinary cultural expansion during the 1920s, the same decade that brought the Civic Center, major scientific work on Mount Wilson and the creation of the Pasadena City Junior College District. Its professional productions and training programs subsequently gave the theater influence extending far beyond the city, embedding dramatic arts within a Pasadena cultural world already distinguished by architecture, science and private patronage. The progression moves from Eva Fényes's private convergence of art, collecting and early filmmaking through Pasadena's municipally financed investment in public knowledge and culminates in an institution devoted to theatrical production, tracing the widening cultural ambitions that accompanied the city's transformation during the early twentieth century.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Enjoy editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
Foresyte may earn a commission when you book.
