Go early, is my advice. Old Town Pasadena at eight on a Saturday morning belongs to the dog walkers and the espresso machines, and for one quiet hour you can see the neighborhood underneath the neighborhood: twenty blocks of brick and terracotta built for a young city that took itself seriously. The shops change. The bones have not changed in a hundred years, and the bones are the reason we are all still here.
The architecture underneath
Most retail districts in Southern California were built fast and meant to be replaced. Old Town was built to last by people who assumed Pasadena would matter, and the details repay attention. Cornices and arched windows above the storefronts, painted brick advertisements ghosting on side walls, and the alleys, which might be my favorite streets in the city. They were working corridors once; now they hold some of the best doorways and quietest corners in Pasadena. Turn off Colorado Boulevard whenever you can. The boulevard is the postcard, but the alleys are the diary.
An anchor older than the bridge
Vroman's has been selling books in Pasadena since 1894, which makes it older than the Colorado Street Bridge and, by the measure of Southern California, nearly geological. A neighborhood is only as durable as its anchors, and Old Town's are remarkable: a century-old bookstore, the Moorish domes of Castle Green rising over Central Park, a food scene that turns over just enough to stay interesting. These are the institutions that keep a district from becoming a mall with weather.
Living here, or near enough
People assume Old Town is a place to visit rather than live, and they are missing the best arrangement in Pasadena. There are lofts above the storefronts for those who want the hum, and for everyone else there is the neighborhood trick I recommend constantly: buy or rent within a fifteen-minute walk. Madison Heights and the streets just south of Del Mar put you close enough to stroll in for dinner and far enough to sleep in silence. Add the A Line, which will carry you from Memorial Park to downtown Los Angeles without a freeway, and the case starts to write itself.
Value follows walkability, and walkability follows good bones. That is the whole economics lecture. The rest is Saturday morning, a coffee, a stack of books from a store older than the bridge, and the particular pleasure of a place that decided long ago exactly what it was.
Thalia
