City of the roses:
Bookstores, great bargains, true love and almost any other damn thing you can think of
By Leon Bing 08/01/2010
Pasadena is a city of firsts. If you’re flying in and heading for a landing at LAX, the first stretch of green you’ll see rising up through the cloud cover is Pasadena: an urban forest of parks and tree-shrouded streets. L.A.’s first freeway was the 110; it’s easy to imagine the model T’s and Packards of the early 20th century toiling along the serpentine curves that lead drivers from downtown Los Angeles (usually pronounced with a hard “g” back in the day) to Pasadena.
Some of the city’s first Victorian and American Gothic houses, as well as a church, are still standing. One can catch a glimpse of them behind the shrubbery that borders the freeway; they are uninhabited but not derelict. The cupolas, jigsaw fretwork and fish-scale sidings provide a glimpse of early signs of the community here.
The first New Year’s Day college football game took place in Pasadena in 1902 (the University of Michigan flattened Stanford, 49-0). The first wirephoto transmission of a football game came out of Pasadena in 1925. In 1948, the first L.A. telecast of a college football game took place at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl.
The Rose Bowl is still the Big Kahuna of football championship games, but a couple of footnotes have been added to its legend — the flea market is one of them. Looking for a 19th-century Chase brass lamp with colored-glass insets? A bottle of Mitsouko perfume (probably empty, but with a lingering ghost of fragrance) nestled in its original parchment and tobacco-brown box? A jade mouse? The odds are pretty good you’ll find at least two of those items at the Rose Bowl’s second-Sunday-of-every-month flea market. And if you strike out, there’s always the smaller deal held the first Sunday of the month at Pasadena City College.
I found a handcrafted kid-size chair there for a small bathroom that was long on charm but tiresomely short on shelf space. Twelve bucks and I had a place for cologne, lotions, my hairbrush and one or two books. (I like to read when I bathe.)
How about books? There are nearly as many bookstores in Pasadena as there are roses. Vroman’s is a knockout: two stories of books in a space that takes up most of a block on Colorado Boulevard, and the staff is great — you’re welcome to browse as long as you like. You’ll find every new book you’ve read about in the Times (both L.A. and N.Y.) and some that went unreviewed, as well as beautifully bound copies of the classics and other older, more obscure works in both hardcover and paperback.
The newspaper stand out front can provide you with whatever you’re looking for, and the magazine section on the first floor has everything from the French, German and Italian issues of Vogue (plus the current U.S. issue, of course) and The New Yorker, through avant-garde cinema magazines, to the latest Scientific American. Vroman’s not only provides a world-class collection of reading matter, it takes a wonderfully proprietary pride in its Pasadena authors; I’ve had signings for every one of my books there, with most satisfying results.
Now, if you’re looking for one of those long-out-of-print books you loaned to some loser and never saw again, the odds are very good you’ll find it in any one of the bevy of secondhand book stores that pocket both sides of Colorado Boulevard. These smaller places are virtual troves of literary treasure.
As for me, I love this city for a number of reasons: I received my college-prep education as a boarding student at Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy in the foothills above Pasadena, and I give full credit for my career as a writer to the Dominican sisters who pounded grammar and sentence structure into my head with the zeal of Amish farmers raising a barn. I wrote my first book here, in one of this city’s wonderful old apartments with a wood-burning fireplace, high, beamed ceilings and original tilework still maintained in its original pristine condition, facing a charm-drenched courtyard complete with a working fountain surrounded by flowers.
I wrote my second book there, as well — an account of a triple homicide committed by teenagers from South Pas. My second dog, a shaggy little blond puppy I named Diz, found me there when he wandered into the courtyard just as I was walking out the door with my first bum, Woofie, a scruffy terrier mix. Both those wonderful little dogs are gone now — their ashes, as well as those of two beloved cats, moved with us to a larger place — but we have Bobbie, another shaggy blond whose union rules seem to demand that he get his way 100 percent of the time. Finding Diz and, later, Bobbie are two of the best reasons I can think of to love Pasadena. That, and the way Pasadena dog owners (although it’s clearly us smitten humans who are on the leash) interact with each other. We’re a friendly bunch, always ready to take time out from a long walk for a chat about our little (or gigantic) guys. One doesn’t see much of that in Beverly Hills.
A confession: I hate to shop — really hate that whole time-consuming process. But Pasadena has a couple of the best resale stores I’ve ever ducked into. Clothes Heaven is one of them. Past that door you can find Donna Karan Black Label
(I got a raw silk three-piece evening ensemble in taupe that’s impossibly beautiful), Armani, Chanel and Ralph Lauren outfits for way less than the wholesale price; there’s the occasional Hermès or Celine bag, and a few years back, I found a pair of black alligator Chanel pumps that fit perfectly, never worn, the soles still slick. I paid $150 for them and although I’ve worn them often (the last time in a photo shoot at the Gamble house here in Pasadena to go with a column I wrote for an upcoming issue of Vogue), they remain in near-mint condition. I also found, in a basket of jewelry the owner keeps on the counter, a beautiful antique dragon pin paved with marcasite for less than $100. These kinds of bargains are worth schlepping out for, with the added bonus of no worries about a kamikaze spray attack of some gag-reflex-inducing cologne that sticks to your skin like a case of hives as you walk through some Big Mall cosmetic department.
It’s almost too easy to rhapsodize about the wealth of great architecture in Pasadena — the majestic old Queen Anne houses, the sprawling Monterey-style haciendas roofed in the original, hand-cast terracotta tiles and the carefully restored Craftsman houses lined up behind manicured lawns in the district known as Bungalow Heaven. Pasadena could well be nicknamed Landmark Heaven. There’s the Tournament of Roses house, a Beaux Arts gem on Orange Grove Boulevard, originally built for the Wrigley family; and the Gamble and Blacker estates, both designed (including all wood and stone interiors), by the brothers Greene. There’s a Frank Lloyd Wright (his first textile block residence) — La Miniatura, tucked behind a wall of dense foliage on one of Pasadena’s gently curving streets.
If you peek through the greenery, you can spot a lily pond and a guest house that is, in fact, a soaring little studio that resembles the main house. I tried to rent that guest house when I came back to this city in the early ’90s, but it was undergoing some kind of restructuring work that seemed to go on endlessly, with blue plastic sheeting on the roof and other signs of non-habitability. So
I stayed on in the charming courtyard and was rewarded with Diz.
Oh, and one more thing: I met the man of my life — it’s his photo essay you see in this issue — while I was out on a walk with Diz and Bobbie seven years ago. That’s Pasadena for you: wonderful, life-altering surprises when — and where — you least expect them.
Léon Bing is the author, most recently, of Swans and Pistols: Modeling, Motherhood and Making it in the Me Generation.
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