Reconstructing history

When it opens in December, Pasadena’s newest architectural attraction will also be one of its most familiar — the Raymond Theatre, only now reborn as a mix of homes, offices and retail space where people once watched vaudeville acts, movies, plays and rock concerts.

Nearly four years of construction and historic restoration work by owners Gene and Marilyn Buchanan have firmly closed the book on its life as an entertainment venue, but not without restoring some of the original architectural grandeur which had been lost since the Raymond opened in the spring of 1921.

Over the years, the work of architect Cyril Bennett — who, after finishing the Raymond, joined the firm of Bergstrom, Bennett and Haskell to create the venerable Pasadena Civic Auditorium — took something of a beating as the building went through various changes in use and ownership.

Decorative elements throughout the structure were in need of repair or replacement, and hundreds of holes drilled into its façade to hold up a false terra cotta surface had to be filled by hand after the panel was removed. Original beige brickwork had been crudely covered in red paint, and the structure’s front windows had been smashed out and sealed up with black stucco.

But perhaps the greatest damage was done in the theater’s entranceway, where unique decorative flourishes were smashed during installation of marquees, and original smooth Italian marble panels lay shattered behind a drab stone cover.

“The public never saw many true historical parts of the building because they were covered up. The façade will be gorgeous when it’s revealed, and it will be the first time most people will have seen it [in its original form]. What they’ll be seeing is real, from 1921, not garbage put up in the meantime,” said Marilyn Buchanan of the couple’s $1.25 million restoration effort.

The theater began as the Jensen-Raymond Theatre, operated by German immigrant brick-makers-turned-builders Henry C. Jensen & Sons, who also built a long-defunct movie palace in Glendale, Jensen’s Melrose Theatre near LA City College (now a Ukrainian cultural center) and Jensen’s Recreation Center on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. The movie and live-act venue was sold in 1948 and became the Crown Theatre movie palace, then was sold again in the 1960s to an owner who brought stage performances back, and by 1979 had morphed into a popular rock concert venue called Perkins Palace.

The Buchanans bought the Raymond, as it finally came to be known, in 1985. When Perkins Palace shuttered in the late 1980s, they briefly leased the theater to an underfunded entrepreneur who couldn’t keep the building up to code before they settled on plans to redevelop it.

And so a 20-year soap opera was born when enterprising Perkins Palace events manager Gina Zamparelli and her preservation group, Friends of the Raymond Theatre, launched a massive public and courtroom campaign opposing the conversion — a battle which raged until the Buchanans cleared all legal hurdles in 2005 and received building permits from the city in 2006.

For thousands who knew and loved it as an arts and entertainment venue, the new Raymond — dubbed The Raymond Renaissance — will be a strange sight indeed. A guided tour of the building for this newspaper two weeks ago revealed nine office/condos being built on and above the space which once was the theater balcony and 10 luxury residential units occupying the fly-tower space above the stage. The theater’s main space will become a large, ground-floor retail unit — maybe a fine restaurant, Gene Buchanan envisions. 

A second building going up next door, where the Raymond’s parking lot sat at the corner of Holly Street and Raymond Avenue, will contain 6,200 square feet of ground-floor retail (a designer furniture store has already signed a lease) and 28 residential units of various sizes.

“There is a need to change as [a city] grows and modernizes,” said Marilyn Buchanan, who in 2005 had opened the building to the Pasadena Weekly for an exclusive tour while workmen were reinforcing its crumbling façade and walls. “When you have something old, you can’t just let it fall down because it has no viable use. So when you readapt its use you keep as much as you can so people can appreciate the beauty of it, and you make it viable. No one can enjoy something you can’t use and is falling down.”

As has been the case all along, Zamparelli disagrees completely.

“When I look at the entire effort, knowing it could have been saved, to see it in this state now — sometimes it might be better to demolish a building than to see it so horribly amputated. This is one of the worst decisions Pasadena has ever made. I don’t see the value in what’s happened to this remarkable one-of-a-kind landmark. What a tragic loss,” she said.

Zamparelli — who keeps a collection of historic ticket stubs, marquee letters and other paraphernalia that she recovered from trash bins during the conversion of the theater and hopes to eventually donate to a museum — recalls that numerous developers had attempted to purchase and restore the Raymond as a theater but were unreasonably refused by the Buchanans.

The Buchanans say they had met with serious buyers, but none felt they would be able to make the aging 1,500-seat venue economically viable again; the one person they had leased it to as an entertainment venue did significant damage to some historic elements of the theater, they add.

Pasadena Heritage, a preservation group which held a 1984 easement that could have blocked subdivision of the Raymond, takes a milder, more optimistic position on the conversion than Zamparelli and her Friends of the Raymond.

“We love this building and fought for it for 20 years, so if there was anything we could have done to save it we would have done it,” said Pasadena Heritage Preservation Director Christine Lazzaretto. “But if everyone’s telling you it’s not viable, then you’d be left with a white elephant — this sad empty building. In general, sometimes you need to think of a new use for a building in order to make it viable. Sometimes in order to save a building it needs to have a new life.”

Lazzaretto rose to her position only two years ago, when the fight over the Raymond had all but ended. She did explain, however, that the easement wasn’t necessarily the slam dunk the Friends of the Raymond thought it was — that under some legal readings it may have only determined whether the Buchanans could rent apartments or sell condo units.

But, “Restoring the façade has been a really important preservation issue for us, and we are really happy [the Buchanans, who hired historic architect Peyton Hall, who helped restore Greene & Greene’s Gamble House, to supervise much of the process] were willing to spend the money to do it right,” she said.

Although the winding ramp that once led up to the balcony is gone and the balcony itself is being redesigned as office space, a surprising number of familiar sights remain inside.

The sloping floor that held ground seating has been made level, but most of the familiar decorations and paint gracing the walls and the ceiling are (or will be) restored for what will be an 11,000 square-foot retail space. The recesses flanking the stage that once held organ pipes remain, now concealing an elevator shaft and a staircase.

Even the original painted stage curtain — a unique work of art depicting a Model A Hudson touring Yosemite National Park, produced for the Raymond’s opening day by the Hull Motor Co. — has been preserved, though it was rolled up during the paper’s visit. The Buchanans (who had professionals clean decades of dirt and cigarette smoke stains from it before sealing its woven asbestos fibers with a clear coating) have installed motorized pulleys so it can decorate the back wall for their future retail tenant..

Other historic elements may not be remembered as such, however.

The aluminum doors familiar to Perkins Palace concertgoers were not original, so they are being replaced by glass-paned wood French doors like those originally installed by Bennett. Like so many wall and ceiling flourishes hidden or destroyed by various changes over the years, these new “old” doors were recreated from 1921 newspaper clippings by Hall, who also used photos to recreate the long-gone exterior windows.

When work is completed, interior colors will take on a slightly different appearance as well: Dark blue paint will be replaced by a stonier, greener color that reflects the original shade, said Marilyn Buchanan.

Although she says her sadness keeps her from even looking at the building today, Zamparelli says her love for the Raymond and that of others has not gone away.

So, it may be years before The Raymond Renaissance project can be fully understood in terms of what Pasadena has lost or gained.

This place is not, and likely never again could be, the Raymond Theatre. The question now is whether painstaking preservation of historic details — many familiar to this generation and others long forgotten — has saved enough of its character to help people understand what it once was and why it was such a civic treasure.