Wingsch Real Estate Investments   

Pasadena in California

Monday, 11 April 2016 - 11:00 am (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination: North America / Nordamerika
Category/Kategorie: General, Greater Los Angeles Area Reading Time:  7 minutes

🔊 Listen to this Post Pasadena was incorporated on June 19, 1886, becoming only the second city to be incorporated in what is now Los Angeles County, after Los Angeles (April 4, 1850). It is one of the primary cultural centers of the San Gabriel Valley. Pasadena is a part of the original Mexican land grant named Rancho del Rincon de San Pascual, so named because it was deeded on Easter Sunday to Eulalia Perez de Guillén Mariné of Mission San Gabriel Arcángel. The Rancho comprised the lands of today’s communities of Pasadena, Altadena and South Pasadena. The city is known for hosting the annual Rose Bowl Game and Tournament of Roses Parade. In addition, Pasadena is also home to many scientific and cultural institutions, including the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena City College, Fuller Theological Seminary, Art Center College of Design, the Pasadena Playhouse, the Norton Simon Museum of Art and the Pacific Asia Museum. The television series The Big Bang Theory plays in Pasadena. February 25 – on this day in 2016, the 200th episode of the television series aired – was officially declared the The Big Bang Theory Day.

Downtown Pasadena is the central business district. It is centered on Fair Oaks Avenue and Colorado Boulevard and is divided into three distinct neighborhoods: Old Pasadena, the Civic Center, and Monk Hill. Old Pasadena is the historic core of Downtown, and has a multitude of fine shops and restaurants (Italian and Japanese restaurants are especially numerous here), two parks, the historic Del Mar Station and Castle Green, and the headquarters of Parsons. The Civic Center lies to the east of Old Pasadena and was built in the 1920s. It is home to Pasadena’s City Hall, Paseo Colorado, the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. It also houses several municipal government offices, though notably not the Department of Public Works, which is in Banbury Oaks. Monk Hill is the westernmost part of Downtown and is home to the Norton Simon Museum and Ambassador Auditorium.

Among the historical estates are:

• The maker of Wrigley’s chewing gum, William Wrigley Jr.’s, substantial home was offered to the city of Pasadena after Mrs. Wrigley’s death in 1958, under the condition that their home would be the Rose Parade’s permanent headquarters. The stately Tournament House stands today, and serves as the headquarters for the Tournament of Roses Parade. Adolphus Busch, co-founder of Anheuser-Busch, brewer of Budweiser beer, established the first of a series of Busch Gardens in Pasadena. When Busch died at his Pasadena estate, his wife generously offered the property to the City of Pasadena, an offer the city inexplicably refused. Henry Markham, who lived adjacent to Busch, was the 18th Governor of the state of California (1891–1895) and wrote Pasadena: Its Early Years. The home of David Gamble, son of consumer product maker James Gamble of Procter & Gamble, is located on the north end of Orange Grove Boulevard.
• The Gamble House, an American Craftsman masterpiece, was built in 1908, by architects Charles and Henry Greene, as an exemplification of their ultimate bungalow. It is open to the public as both an architectural conservancy and museum. The Gamble House is a California Historical Landmark and a National Historic Landmark on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1966, it was deeded to the city of Pasadena in a mutual agreement with the University of Southern California School of Architecture. Every year, two fifth-year USC architecture students live in the house full-time. The students change yearly.
• The home of Anna Bissell McCay, daughter of carpet sweeper magnate Melville Bissell, is a four-story Victorian home, on the border of South Pasadena. Today the Bissell House is a bed and breakfast. Thaddeus S. C. Lowe‘s home of 24,000 square feet (2,200 m2) was on South Orange Grove. The house included a sixth story solarium which he converted into an observatory. Lowe was also a generous patron of the astronomical sciences. He started a water-gas company, founded the Citizens Bank of Los Angeles, built numerous ice plants, and purchased a Pasadena opera house. He also established the Mount Lowe Railway in the mountains above Pasadena and eventually lost his fortune. The brilliant, but troubled, rocket scientist John Whiteside Parsons sometimes shared his residence with other noteworthy people, including L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Parsons died in an explosion while testing a new rocket fuel in his Pasadena home laboratory, in 1952.

Old Town Pasadena spans 21 blocks downtown. It boasts upscale retail shops and a wide variety of restaurants, nightclubs, outdoor cafés, pubs, and comedy clubs. “One Colorado” features renovated historic architecture that attracted the new retail stores and restaurants. This development filled vacant buildings and was the impetus of the revitalization of Old Town on Colorado Boulevard. Paseo Colorado is an upscale shopping mall designed to be a modern urban village. An open-air mall that covers three city blocks, Paseo Colorado is anchored on the west end by upscale grocery store Gelson’s (recently closed), on the east end by Macy’s (also closed) and Arclight Cinemas centers the middle portion of the mall. Another shopping district is located in the South Lake Avenue neighborhood. On Lake Avenue, an old Macy’S department store and furniture gallery is in a registered California historical landmark. The building was originally designed and built as the fourth Bullock’s department store in the mid-1950s (the last freestanding store they constructed). The Rose Bowl Flea Market is a large swap meet that involves thousands of dealers and tens of thousands of visitors in and around the grounds of the Rose Bowl. The merchandise on display ranges from old world antiques to California pottery to vintage clothing. The flea market has been held every second Sunday of the month, rain or shine, since 1967.

Read more on Pasadena, Pasadena Tourism, Rose Parade, California Institute of Technology, Castle Green, Jurassic Quest, The Langham Huntington, Wikivoyage Pasadena and Wikipedia Pasadena (Smart Traveler App by U.S. Department of State - Weather report by weather.com - Global Passport Power Rank - Travel Risk Map - Democracy Index - GDP according to IMF, UN, and World Bank - Global Competitiveness Report - Corruption Perceptions Index - Press Freedom Index - World Justice Project - Rule of Law Index - UN Human Development Index - Global Peace Index - Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index). Photos by Wikimedia Commons. If you have a suggestion, critique, review or comment to this blog entry, we are looking forward to receive your e-mail at comment@wingsch.net. Please name the headline of the blog post to which your e-mail refers to in the subject line.

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