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We made the trek out to Pasadena this past weekend. It’s a nice place and quite un-L.A. – 19th century urban fabric, walk-able, lots of shops & restaurants and highly urban. As you walk down the main drag, Colorado Blvd, just past two fairly un-urban highrises (set back from the street, on plinths with no ground-level retail), you come across Paseo Colorado, a 3-block, 15-acre, mega-development that, on first-glance, appears to imitate the urban character of the rest of Colorado Blvd.

In some respects, it is reasonably successful, with shops along Colorado Blvd and incorporating a 19th century building into the complex. One big positive is the incorporation of 400 units of housing into the western end of the complex. Another positive is the re-creation of the axial relationship with Pasadena’s Civic Center, just north of the site. Unfortunately, the central space that re-creates that axis is pretty dreadful (this axis – the “Garfield Promenade” – was originally slated to be just 58 feet, but the City required the developer to make it 78 feet to reflect the original Garfield Street).

Given the hype surrounding it, I had high expectations for Paseo Colorado. Unforunately, on balance, I was disappointed. Unlike The Grove, which has some pretensions of being a real public place, Paseo Colorado – which is billed as an “open-air urban village” – feels much more like a standard mall, with anchor stores on the ends, two levels of shops complete with bridges from one side to the other. The only difference is that it is outdoors – not so much new as it is retro, emulating some of the first malls ever built (except it is two levels). Its outdoor spaces are not well-designed and the whole complex uses more-or-less the same materials. It is not well scaled to human proportions, thus it feels bigger and more commercial than necessary. There is no enough variation in the materials, which also have a cheap feel to them. So, nobody will be fooled into thinking it is anything but one large mall complex.

Despite claiming to replicate the traditional fabric of the surrounding area, it still brings people off the street into a large mall-like central spine, and the impact for on-street retail is obvious – I saw few people along Colorado Blvd, despite the presence of shops. Urban design is sometimes a subtle thing – and the urban design-challenged typically heap praise upon the project. By most economic accounts, it is successful, being 96% leased, fetching $400/s.f. rents and generating a modest amount of additional tax revenue for the city. But I can’t help but think that its financial success owes more to its location next to ‘Old Pasadena’ than to its banal design.

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