Pasadena

Pasadena sits at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains looking almost improbably composed for a city just eleven miles from downtown Los Angeles — wide boulevards, immaculate Craftsman bungalows, and a civic pride built around one enormous annual parade. Lia and I arrived in early January, still catching the tail end of Rose Parade bunting on lamp posts along Colorado Boulevard, and quickly understood that this city takes its traditions seriously. Beneath the postcard imagery, though, Pasadena also holds serious institutions — Caltech, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a genuinely excellent museum scene — that give it more intellectual weight than its floral reputation suggests.

Old Pasadena and Colorado Boulevard

Old Pasadena’s brick-paved blocks, once a fading commercial district slated for demolition in the 1970s, have since become one of the liveliest stretches in the city — restored 1920s facades now housing restaurants, bookstores, and bars that spill onto the sidewalk in the evening. We walked Colorado Boulevard past the very grandstands set up each New Year’s Day for the Rose Parade, trying to picture eighty-plus flower-covered floats rolling past, then ducked into a used bookstore that smelled reassuringly of old paper and stayed far longer than planned.

The Huntington and the Arroyo

A short drive south, the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens sprawls across 120 acres of rose gardens, a full-scale Japanese garden, and a desert garden thick with towering cacti, alongside a library holding a Gutenberg Bible and an original Chaucer manuscript. Lia and I spent an entire afternoon lost in the Chinese garden’s lakeside pavilions before wandering back toward the Arroyo Seco, the seasonal streambed that cuts through the city and gives Pasadena’s famous Colorado Street Bridge its dramatic 150-foot drop. Built in 1913 and nicknamed “Suicide Bridge” for a grim chapter in its history, the bridge’s graceful concrete arches are now better known as a filming location and a genuinely stunning sunset spot.

Craftsman houses and Caltech

Pasadena holds one of the country’s finest collections of American Craftsman architecture, and we spent a morning walking past the Gamble House, a 1908 masterpiece of exposed joinery and teak woodwork built for the Procter & Gamble family, considered the movement’s defining building. Afterward we wandered onto the Caltech campus nearby, its Spanish-tiled courtyards quiet with the particular hush of a serious research university, a world away from the parade floats and rose gardens just a few miles east.

Getting There

Pasadena sits about twenty minutes northeast of downtown Los Angeles via the 110 Freeway, itself a historic route, being the first freeway built in the western United States. Bob Hope Airport in nearby Burbank is the closest airport, about fifteen minutes away, while LAX is a forty-five-minute to hour-long drive depending on traffic. The city is also reachable by LA Metro’s L Line, making a car optional for those staying centrally.