This walk around Old Town Pasadena takes you to Jensen's Raymond Theatre, through City Hall and more.
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-0817-la-walks-pictures,0,7588517.photogallery
By Charles Fleming, August 16, 2013
This walk is easy on the legs but full of wonders for the eyes and
mind — beautiful buildings, weird history and more — through the
lesser-known side of Old Town Pasadena.
1. Begin near the corner
of East Green Street and South Raymond Avenue, along Pasadena's Central
Park. Walk north past the lovely Hotel Green and Castle Green Apartments
— a 1903 construction financed by Col. G.G. Green, who made his fortune
in patent medicines. Continue north across Colorado Boulevard.
2. Turn right on East Holly Street, pausing to look left at Jensen's
Raymond Theatre, which at the time of its 1921 debut was the West
Coast's premier vaudeville theater, containing 2,000 seats, sweeping
spiral staircases and interior fountains. It was later a movie theater
and a concert venue. Now it's condos. Also check out Memorial Park, with
its sweeping lawns and a historic band shell, where on weekends music
is often performed.
PHOTOS: Old Town Pasadena's lesser-known side
3. Continuing straight on East Holly Street, walk toward Pasadena's
stately City Hall. Plaques inside explain that the noble dome, designed
in the early 1920s by the architectural firm of Bakewell and Brown, is
meant to replicate the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute in Venice.
It's designed around a central courtyard containing rose bushes, old oak
trees and a spraying fountain. Circular staircases rising to the right
and left of the central arch present nice views of both yard and dome,
and are worth the short climb.
4. Continue east, through City Hall, across the street and past the
square Norman tower of All Saints Church on North Euclid Avenue.
Continue to North Los Robles Avenue and turn left.
5. After one block, turn right onto Ford Place, and enter what
remains of Pasadena's first "exclusive" subdivision, conceived in 1902
by W.J. Pierce as the city's most upscale residential neighborhood. The
road is lined with Craftsman, Prairie, Shingle, Tudor Revival and
Mission Revival homes, and was a private street until 1951.
6. Turn right onto North Oakland Avenue, onto the campus of Fuller
Theological Seminary, which since 1971 has owned all of the original
Ford Place subdivision. It was founded in 1947 by evangelist Charles E.
Fuller, creator of the "Old Famous Revival Hour" radio show.
7. After continuing down North Oakland Avenue, passing the fine
Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art and the back side of Pacific Asia
Museum, turn right onto East Green Street. Enjoy a shady walk back to
your starting point.
To hear some people talk
about restoring the river, you'd think it was once the mighty
Mississippi with flotillas of steamboats churning their way upstream.
Anyone who grew up here long ago, as I did, knows the natural condition of the L.A. River — dry.
As a kid searching the river for polliwogs in the 1950s, I could bound from one side to the other without getting my feet wet. Broken glass and debris would sit all year on the baked concrete waiting for the winter to wash it away.
In time, as I traveled to great cities whose identities are inseparable from their rivers, I came to understand that our lack of a "real" one was a flaw in L.A.'s otherwise grand sense of self.
So, I'm solidly behind the people today who extol a river where vegetation abounds, wildlife flourishes and kayakers drift through the heart of the city. I just think the ebullience should be tempered by some plain talk about where the water for all this comes from.
It is an essential question about every river. If you don't know the answer, you don't know the river.
So, like John Hanning Speke, who trekked through unexplored Africa 160 years ago to find the source of the Nile, I found myself driven to discover the headwaters of the L.A. River.
It didn't take long. It was mostly a matter of considering and dismissing traditional views of what makes a river.
History books tell us that long before the Los Angeles River looked like an empty freeway, it was a tiny tree-lined creek flowing through a swampy bed that in times of intense rain could become wilder than the roaring Colorado.
That river expired after the disastrous flood of 1938 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the concrete banks that still define the river channel today — barren and ugly for all but the few stormy days when they fill to the gunnels with raging water.
It's been said that the river's official starting point is in Canoga Park at the intersection of two concrete channels, Bell Creek and Arroyo Calabasas. But both are usually just trickles.
To find the water I had to venture to the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in the middle of the San Fernando Valley.
As it turns out, most of the water in the channel today is industrial and residential discharge. It's sewage.
John Mays, a soft-spoken man about my age who also grew up around here, is engineering supervisor of the Tillman plant. In that capacity he is, in some ways, the steward of the Los Angeles River.
Mays recalls the old river of the 1950s much as I do. "It's dry for nine months," he said.
The Tillman plant changed that. It receives water from two giant pipes that collect the sewage from the homes of 800,000 San Fernando Valley residents. That water originally comes from as far away as the Colorado River, but mostly the Owens River, which drains the Eastern Sierra.
The sewage-filled water goes through a series of holding tanks, digesters, filters and sanitizers before crashing over a man-made waterfall into Lake Balboa. That body of water, along with two smaller ones, puts 23 million gallons of water a day into the river at Sepulveda Basin.
When Mays and I were growing up, that water was already coming to Los Angeles through William Mulholland's aqueduct. We just didn't see it because it was going from the houses of the San Fernando Valley straight into the city's underground sewer system, and then on to the Hyperion Treatment plant near El Segundo.
Mays introduced me to "Brown Acres, an Intimate History of the Los Angeles Sewers." In one section, author Anna Sklar recounts the sadly obscure story of the birth of today's L.A. River.
Back in the 1960s, that sewer system was under duress. Episodes of intense rain would make it overflow, dumping raw sewage into the storm drains. The overload forced the city to halt all construction in the San Fernando Valley for a time.
The city engineer proposed solving the problem by drilling a huge new sewage tunnel under the Santa Monica Mountains.
But his rival in the city, an upstart retired Navy captain named Donald C. Tillman, proposed an alternative — building a water treatment plant behind Sepulveda Dam.
Tillman sold his idea to then Mayor Sam Yorty, who got President Richard Nixon to force the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build it.
After much delay, the plant opened in 1985, four years after Tillman had retired. Thus was born the L.A. River that modern-day enthusiasts say they want to restore.
For years, a lobby of environmentalists, urban dreamers and poets has been pushing for removal of as much concrete as possible and creation of parkways to make an urban amenity of the vast, and most of the time, empty spaces of the river.
They're careful not to overplay the "restoration" angle, but they have a tough time finding the right words to describe a natural phenomenon that couldn't actually exist in nature
Like Hollywood, the Los Angeles River is part of invented L.A.
There is nothing to restore; nothing to rehabilitate or renew.
The L.A. River is creation and invention. We owe its existence to our forebears — engineers who had the vision and drive to bring water here, build a city with it, then reuse it to make a dry river run.
That, in the end, is all that is native.
[All photos via the amazing LA Public Library photo collection]
Anyone who grew up here long ago, as I did, knows the natural condition of the L.A. River — dry.
As a kid searching the river for polliwogs in the 1950s, I could bound from one side to the other without getting my feet wet. Broken glass and debris would sit all year on the baked concrete waiting for the winter to wash it away.
In time, as I traveled to great cities whose identities are inseparable from their rivers, I came to understand that our lack of a "real" one was a flaw in L.A.'s otherwise grand sense of self.
So, I'm solidly behind the people today who extol a river where vegetation abounds, wildlife flourishes and kayakers drift through the heart of the city. I just think the ebullience should be tempered by some plain talk about where the water for all this comes from.
It is an essential question about every river. If you don't know the answer, you don't know the river.
So, like John Hanning Speke, who trekked through unexplored Africa 160 years ago to find the source of the Nile, I found myself driven to discover the headwaters of the L.A. River.
It didn't take long. It was mostly a matter of considering and dismissing traditional views of what makes a river.
History books tell us that long before the Los Angeles River looked like an empty freeway, it was a tiny tree-lined creek flowing through a swampy bed that in times of intense rain could become wilder than the roaring Colorado.
That river expired after the disastrous flood of 1938 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the concrete banks that still define the river channel today — barren and ugly for all but the few stormy days when they fill to the gunnels with raging water.
It's been said that the river's official starting point is in Canoga Park at the intersection of two concrete channels, Bell Creek and Arroyo Calabasas. But both are usually just trickles.
To find the water I had to venture to the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in the middle of the San Fernando Valley.
As it turns out, most of the water in the channel today is industrial and residential discharge. It's sewage.
John Mays, a soft-spoken man about my age who also grew up around here, is engineering supervisor of the Tillman plant. In that capacity he is, in some ways, the steward of the Los Angeles River.
Mays recalls the old river of the 1950s much as I do. "It's dry for nine months," he said.
The Tillman plant changed that. It receives water from two giant pipes that collect the sewage from the homes of 800,000 San Fernando Valley residents. That water originally comes from as far away as the Colorado River, but mostly the Owens River, which drains the Eastern Sierra.
The sewage-filled water goes through a series of holding tanks, digesters, filters and sanitizers before crashing over a man-made waterfall into Lake Balboa. That body of water, along with two smaller ones, puts 23 million gallons of water a day into the river at Sepulveda Basin.
When Mays and I were growing up, that water was already coming to Los Angeles through William Mulholland's aqueduct. We just didn't see it because it was going from the houses of the San Fernando Valley straight into the city's underground sewer system, and then on to the Hyperion Treatment plant near El Segundo.
Mays introduced me to "Brown Acres, an Intimate History of the Los Angeles Sewers." In one section, author Anna Sklar recounts the sadly obscure story of the birth of today's L.A. River.
Back in the 1960s, that sewer system was under duress. Episodes of intense rain would make it overflow, dumping raw sewage into the storm drains. The overload forced the city to halt all construction in the San Fernando Valley for a time.
The city engineer proposed solving the problem by drilling a huge new sewage tunnel under the Santa Monica Mountains.
But his rival in the city, an upstart retired Navy captain named Donald C. Tillman, proposed an alternative — building a water treatment plant behind Sepulveda Dam.
Tillman sold his idea to then Mayor Sam Yorty, who got President Richard Nixon to force the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build it.
After much delay, the plant opened in 1985, four years after Tillman had retired. Thus was born the L.A. River that modern-day enthusiasts say they want to restore.
For years, a lobby of environmentalists, urban dreamers and poets has been pushing for removal of as much concrete as possible and creation of parkways to make an urban amenity of the vast, and most of the time, empty spaces of the river.
They're careful not to overplay the "restoration" angle, but they have a tough time finding the right words to describe a natural phenomenon that couldn't actually exist in nature
Like Hollywood, the Los Angeles River is part of invented L.A.
There is nothing to restore; nothing to rehabilitate or renew.
The L.A. River is creation and invention. We owe its existence to our forebears — engineers who had the vision and drive to bring water here, build a city with it, then reuse it to make a dry river run.
That, in the end, is all that is native.
25 Photos of the Los Angeles River Before It Was Paved in 1938
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2013/08/25_photos_of_the_los_angeles_river_before_it_was_paved_in_1938.php
By Adrian Glick Kudler, August 15, 2013
Ca. 1937: View from the Glendale/Hyperion Bridge
This is the year and especially the summer of the Los Angeles River--on January 1, it officially became a river again (not just a flood control channel); this May it opened for recreation for the first time in 75 years; at the end of this month the Army Corps of Engineers will announce their plans for some kind of enormous makeover
that could involve unpaving large sections; and it finally just feels
like there's a critical mass of politicians, planners, architects, and
plain old Angelenos who are working to make the river great. (Also it caught fire
at one point.) The river hasn't been great in a long time--since before
it was ever encased in concrete; for Los Angeles's first several
decades, it was mostly either a parched little trickle or a terrifyingly
swollen menace.
Then, after an especially destructive flood in March 1938, officials took action, as described in The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth:
Then, after an especially destructive flood in March 1938, officials took action, as described in The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth:
The first Los Angeles River projects paid for by the federal government and built under the direction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were completed a few months after the flood. Work was finished in October 1938 on three projects to lower the river's bed twenty feet, widen its channel and pave its banks for a little over four miles upstream from Elysian Park. Three months later, construction was completed on the first segment of what would eventually be a continuous trapezoidal concrete channel to carry the river from Elysian Park to Long Beach.We know what that concrete channel looks like, now let's take a look back at a more natural river in a very young LA (and then, after that, forward to a river we can hang by without worrying about our houses falling in). Here's our slideshow soundtrack recommendation.
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Ca. 1937: An almost completely dry section in Studio City -
1912 -
Ca. 1937 -
Ca. 1938: The Dayton Avenue Bridge -
1937: Looking north from the Seventh Street Viaduct to the Sixth Street Viaduct -
Ca. 1938: Looking north from the Seventh Street Viaduct -
1931: The then-new Fourth Street Bridge -
Ca. 1920: Aerial of Cypress Park with Glassell on the left and Elysian on the right -
1929: Olympic Boulevard Bridge -
1938: "A crowd was on hand to greet two adventurers when they brought their boat to shore from the muddy Los AngelesRiver. Eldridge and Watson were congratulated for maneuvering the dangerous rapids on the river. They sailed between a tractor and a ditch digger lying in the river. The duo set sail again." -
1938: "While sailing on the muddy Los Angeles River, two adventurers' boat overturned on a shoal. After righting their boat, "Foghorn" Eldridge is seen up to his chest in mud, blowing the distress horn. "Wharf Rat" Watson waves the flag he had intended to plant on the shores of Long Beach, if and when they sailed the length of the river." -
Ca. 1880: From Boyle Heights -
Ca. 1898: From Elysian Park toward Cypress/Glassell -
1938: Destroyed Lankershim Bridge in Universal City. -
1926: Vernon -
1933: Washed-out Vineland Avenue -
1926: South of Compton Boulevard -
1912: "The Los Angeles River cutting into the bank supporting the Los Angeles Pigeon Farm near north Figueroa Street in what would become the Cypress Park area." -
1914: A house slipping into the river during a flood -
1938: East of Downtown -
1928: The Riverside Drive-Dayton Avenue Bridge -
1938: "Shown is an artist's sketch which graphically portrays the system of dams, underground storage basins, etc., that were set up by the Los Angeles County engineers to prevent floods and to conserve hitherto wasted rain water for domestic purposes." -
1938?: Workers building the channel -
December 2, 1938: Workers rushing to finish the flood control channel, at the Twenty-Third Street Bridge
