Old Pasadena Meets the Reign of Chains

Even on a weeknight, the waiting dinner crowd spills out the doors of the recently opened Cheesecake Factory. Down Colorado Boulevard, a swank new Blockbuster Music store dominates a bustling block, while business thrums at the Barnes & Noble bookstore and Banana Republic across the way. All along Old Pasadena’s once-blighted main drag, the throngs of shoppers have never been larger, the big-name stores have never been more plentiful. The quaint brick-accented neighborhood has become a national model of urban rescue, earning kudos from preservationists and urban designers alike.

Of late, venerable Colorado Boulevard has kicked into overdrive, remolding itself as a hopping entertainment and shopping district, in the process prompting digs that it is becoming merely a roofless shopping mall--altogether too cookie-cutter for the likes of many Pasadenans.

“My concern is it’s not really unique anymore,” said Judith Zitter, a former City Council field representative. “Some of us locals refer to it as the Chain Store Massacre.”

Experts say Old Pasadena’s commercial boom plays on a seemingly incongruous consumer appetite for exciting new destinations, but ones that offer name-brand familiarity. A shopping mall, without the mall. A new place to eat the same bowl of penne; Main Street with a dollop of entertainment gimmickry.

Beyond the buzz of commerce and the happy clatter of sidewalk diners, however, there is gathering angst among merchants, residents and some city officials that Old Pasadena is being swallowed by its own success. Merchants who pioneered its comeback have left, or plan to in coming weeks, complaining of rents that in some cases have doubled, and an overwhelming crush of humanity that includes growing ranks of low-spending youths.

Even those who have profited from Old Pasadena’s stunning conversion from skid row to shopper’s Shangri-La worry that its hometown character is vanishing beneath the lengthening parade of national chain retailers and eateries. Several longtime boutiques on the west end of Colorado Boulevard will close during the next month, joining a sizable list of mom-and-pop shops that moved off the strip in the last few years.

“The old charm is gone,” said Emmeline Liu, who is closing her upscale women’s apparel store, called emmeline, one of the first shops on the block when it opened 10 years ago. Liu said teenagers can’t sustain a shop like hers, which sells $500 outfits for the dress-for-success set.

“We can survive,” she said. “But I don’t want to survive in this kind of climate. . . . There’s no future.”

Closing of Boutiques

The hand-wringing over the march of the big chain stores, which gained a toehold in Old Pasadena five years ago with the introduction of retailers such as the Gap and Victoria’s Secret, has taken on a new urgency in recent weeks. Liu’s store is among three shops in the same building that are being cleared out to make room for a French Connection store, a trendy juniors’ outlet that is part of a nationwide chain. Among the stores being closed is Heatherbloom, a successful lingerie shop whose top-shelf offerings include $170 bras.

Across the street, the owners of a furniture boutique called Cityscapes are moving to downtown South Pasadena to avoid what they said would be a doubling of their $9,000-a-month rent. Miller’s Outpost has reportedly considered the building as a possible site for a store it hopes to open in Old Pasadena by the end of the year.

“There’s no more little shops. It’s all big shops--like the Glendale Galleria,” said Cityscapes owner Anne Chan. “It is a mall.”

Old Pasadena’s bonanza has sent rents sailing--it’s not unusual to pay $4 per square foot along Colorado Boulevard, double the cost of nearby streets. For the owners of the quirky specialty shops that puffed the first breaths of revival into the neighborhood a decade ago, the trend has stoked a sense of betrayal and concern for their future.

“There’s a yellow caution light flashing that we need to pay attention to our independents,’ said Marsha Rood, the city’s development administrator. She proposes teaching the mom-and-pop shops new tactics, such as fresh marketing and keeping later hours, to snag visitors lured by the two movie theaters and the likes of J. Crew and Banana Republic.

But clever business tactics don’t stop rising rents, the prime ouster of small businesses.

City officials note that they are powerless to stop rising rents, which are determined by the roller coaster of real estate economics and not by a single shopping center operator. Tenants accuse developers of greed. Landlords say they’re finally recouping the millions spent to fix ramshackle buildings. And everyone concedes the deep-pockets allure of nationally successful restaurants and stores.

Old Pasadena is hardly alone here. City centers on the rebound nationwide have aggressively sought movie chains and shops like Starbucks and the Gap, proven moneymakers that have cultivated consumer craving for their universally available products. That has left many small businesses in the dust.

Urban planning scholar Marco Cenzatti said Old Pasadena is among an emerging generation of shopping centers that threaten the standard enclosed mall. In this new version, he said, the old department store has been broken into pieces and strung into an entertaining strip.

“What is being really consumed is not so much the goods being purchased as the atmosphere,” said Cenzatti, a professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture who is studying Old Pasadena and three other retail hubs in the region, including the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

Developing downtowns as theme-driven entertainment centers has spawned a new term in urban planning: Disneyfication.

It’s not enough to have a post office, a dry cleaner and a hardware store downtown.

Cities are now competing for the next attention-grabbing gimmick du jour, said Mary Barr, editor of a New York-based publication called Downtown Idea Exchange.

“If everyone gets a Planet Hollywood, what’s going to be unique about your downtown?” asks Barr. “But if you don’t get it, somebody else could get it. It’s a double-edged sword.”

Dan Mellinkoff, who owns two buildings on Colorado Boulevard, said Old Pasadena faces a perplexing balancing act: enjoying its boom without dousing the funky appeal that helped ignite it.

“There’s definitely a phase transition going on here,” Mellinkoff said. “There’s a change from one state of being to another.”

Some observers dismiss the chain-stores-are-coming warnings as so much whining by shopkeepers who simply couldn’t keep up with the times.

“The guy on the corner who says he’s being priced out of the market? Bull. He’s failed out of the market,” said James Plotkin, a landlord whose employees recently bought his longtime vacuum-cleaner store and moved it from Old Pasadena.

Plotkin, who calls himself the unofficial mayor of Old Pasadena, contends that mall retailers have been the salvation of little businesses--not their downfall.

“You know all the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who come down here? They’re not coming for Joe Blow’s candy store,” he said.

And city figures indicate talk of a chain store takeover may be exaggerated, at least for now. About a fifth of the area’s estimated 250 shops and eateries belong to national or regional chains, although those places account for more than a third of the nearly 1 million square feet of stores, restaurants and movies.

Another chain retailer, the Pottery Barn, is set to move into a premier location in the heart of the district, taking over one of the area’s last decrepit properties on the corner of Fair Oaks Avenue and Colorado Boulevard. The development also is to include apartments.

Who Shops in Old Pasadena?

The city has tried to gather a profile of the Old Pasadena shopper. A recent survey found, for example, that most shoppers are locals and list chain stores as their favorites. They also represent a sought-after clientele: affluent with an average age of 38.

But along with the select shoppers are the gawkers. The study, echoing a commonly heard complaint, found that half of Old Pasadena’s visitors left without buying a thing.

Some have suggested that even if Colorado Boulevard ends up the preserve of big-name retailers, smaller shops may find their best opportunities on side streets where the rents run as low as half of those on the main strip. The city is spending $5 million to refurbish the historic alleys, sidewalks and street lights in hopes of enticing strollers to the surrounding 20-block area between Arroyo Parkway and Pasadena Avenue.

“It’s a district, not a street. That’s what we’re building. We’re not a one-street town,” Rood said. She cited plans to boost the area beyond a shopping zone through new apartments and a stop on the planned Blue Line light-rail route.

And, she points out, the notion that chain stores don’t mix with Main Street quaintness is selective nostalgia. In the era before the malls, Rood said, downtowns across America were dotted with national retailers such as Sears and J.C. Penney. “Now the majors are back and they’re in the form of the Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Banana Republic, Disney stores, etc.,” Rood said.

The very idea of debating whether Old Pasadena has overheated shows how much has changed in the 20 years since the area was destined for the wrecking ball, a pocket of flophouses and dive bars that attracted artists, bohemians and only the most stout-hearted of urban adventurers.

Saved by preservationists and guided by the city, the neighborhood began fixing itself during the 1980s, sprouting home-grown shops and restaurants and drawing wider crowds to its village-like ambience. That effort got a big boost when the city built two parking garages and United Artists opened a multiplex on Colorado Boulevard. It kicked up another notch in 1992 with the development of a complex that includes an AMC movie theater and a handful of chain retailers.

Bolstered by $400 million to $500 million in private investment, the neighborhood now earns the city more than $1 million yearly in sales taxes and is roundly declared an urban revival success story. Local officials from around the country routinely come calling in hopes of copying the magic.

But many locals say the magic began disappearing when Old Pasadena hit the big time as a regional attraction. Weekend traffic made for an impenetrable parking tangle. Looky-loos replaced die-hard customers. A new pasta restaurant seemed to pop up on every corner. The village felt a lot less intimate.

“I left with an upset stomach all the time--the noise and the crowds and the agitation,” said Shaun Nelson, who moved his gift store to Sierra Madre two years ago. “It grew too big, too fast.”

Those committed to staying, however, say the current flux might be a necessary, if painful, adjustment until the neighborhood finds an equilibrium.

Jonathan Tolkin, a developer whose firm owns the building now being vacated by the Heatherbloom and emmeline stores, said it’s up to landlords to craft a vibrant mix of tenants.

“People need to realize that the mix is what makes the district attractive,” said Tolkin, whose firm has a dozen properties in Old Pasadena and invested in the Third Street Promenade and Pine Avenue in Long Beach. He said the building now being emptied on Colorado Boulevard simply didn’t work as a multi-tenant complex.

Tolkin predicted that Old Pasadena would thrive because of its architectural diversity and historic charm.

But inside his building, Heatherbloom owner Michelle Round said her high-flying hopes--as a thriving merchant in a soaring market--have curdled into another sentiment entirely.

“I don’t like Old Town anymore,” she said, starting to clear the last of her remaining stock of lingerie. Round said she won’t reopen.

“In six months, so much has happened. I can’t be as optimistic as I was.”