WHY THE PLAYHOUSE VILLAGE MATTERS

I have been hooked on the spirit of Pasadena much of my life, but that feeling grew in recent years with a focus on the Playhouse Village. These are the 10 blocks or so immediately around the Playhouse on El Molino. There is something umbilical about this particular area that leads me to see it as the future to  Pasadena’s next golden period, much as it was the promise of Pasadena before World War II. George Bernard Shaw visited the neighborhood in 1933, watching a play showcase at the Playhouse. He admired Pasadena’s commitment to a thoughtful, well-designed community with arts at its essence, and returned to London calling Pasadena “the Athens of the West.” A century later we may see ourselves that way again.

Brantwood, one of the newest buildings in the Village, is the culmination of several forces. There is a demographic shift of baby boomers wanting to downscale and live in stimulating, but not overwhelming, downtowns: adults who aren’t ready to retire, who now have more time to explore subjects like history, theater and art; those who can’t imagine living in a retirement home which might cut them off physically from diversity of all sorts. 

One of the biggest forces behind building Brantwood is the long-awaited transformation of the Playhouse Village itself; back to the urban community it once was until the Great Depression ended the area’s progress. If you walk into the Bank of the West at Madison and Colorado (built as the First Trust Bank of Pasadena in 1927), you see a glimpse of the kind of inspiration that initially stirred the area: Alson Clark’s giant plein air murals of Southern California’s economic pillars. These murals are extraordinary. You can look at the Singer Building at Oakland and Colorado, the Cadillac Building at El Molino and Green (now Jacob Maarse), or the magnificent Playhouse building and think about the investment in creativity. Below is the original building for the San Francisco retailer I. Magnin, located on Colorado near Madison, an empty park lot since this beautiful building was razed. 

The seeds of the Brantwood idea were planted in 1985. A friend asked me to lunch and took me to the top of the parking structure at the old J.W. Robinson’s department store, now Target, along Oak Knoll. His family, the Sheldons, had owned Vroman’s for nearly a century. Vroman’s current location near the Playhouse was their third. They started in Old Pasadena, moved to the Civic Center area between the wars, and then acquired the new location near El Molino in the 1950’s. From the Robinson’s garage, we saw parking lots in every direction we looked. Joel convinced me that all this land would change in our lifetime, either for the better or the worse, depending on what we did about it. 

Joel and others had a vision of something better than the tired buildings and depressing tarmac we saw. The area was in a slump. They wanted to rebuild an urban village on the cornerstones of a revitalized Playhouse and stores like Vroman’s, Jacob Maarse and the Arcade. I was working primarily in England at the time, and Joel’s vision intersected with what I was learning about European cities. The vitality of cities seems to ebb and flow depending on how they respond to the evolving human spirit - man’s need to find inspiration through connection with one another, to create community. 

Cities provide a centering to our thoughts, envelopes for churches, businesses, government and the arts. Natural elements often account for much in a city’s survival - a river or a port - but often equally important are good architectural bones that pull people together: retail designs, broad sidewalks, street trees, small parks, well-designed civic and private buildings, gracious residences that insulate residents from “too much city” but leave them connected through passageways, courtyards and vistas. 

Over the next few years we hired urban planners to help shape the vision of revitalization. Like all things Pasadena, a City task force was formed and certain principles were adopted. A brilliant leader and head of U.C. Berkeley’s architecture department, Donlyn Lyndon, gave us a blueprint in 1992. Joel and others founded a business improvement district in the early 1990’s that still functions today, the Playhouse Village Association (the PVA), cleaning the sidewalks regularly, providing security, launching initiatives. But things moved slowly - cities take time. Recessions, politics, internet competition and changing ownership slowed progress to a crawl at times. 

Now Covid-19 has hit. Vroman’s itself faces an existential crisis. Having survived Barnes & Noble, Borders and Amazon, and countless other market forces since it was founded in 1894, Vroman’s needs its customers back to survive and thrive as an independent bookstore. Laemmle’s may need to sell. 2022 can’t come fast enough. 

In the meantime, however, the economic downturn of the pandemic has enabled restaurants to spill out on to Colorado, exciting many about outdoor dining in the Village. And after 32 years since the first drawing of a neighborhood park was presented to City Council for the parking lot at Union and El Molino, Council is poised to approve the Village’s first green space. Construction starts next year. A beautiful new apartment building designed by Stefanos Polyzoides is going up across the street on El Molino. Some things in the neighborhood are looking up. 

Most importantly, the Playhouse itself is going through an unparalleled revival. Under an extraordinary young leader, Danny Feldman, who reflects the passions and skills of the first Playhouse leader, Gilmore Brown, the Playhouse, which had to shutter live performance with the pandemic, is surviving, transforming into a digital theater (Playhouse Live) and quietly rebuilding as never before. More on that story will come in another column.