Guest Opinion | Julianna Delgado: The Times They Are – And Will Always Be – A-Changin’

In late 2021, towards the end of another strange pandemic-caused year, the Design Commission approved the Final Design Review for a development project that would convert the Laemmle Theatre’s Playhouse 7 building into a multi-tenant commercial complex without the multiplex movie theater. I, like my Commission colleagues, voted in favor. The decision met with consternation from the public and I have since been bombarded with emotion-filled messages to which I am compelled here to respond. How could ‘the City’ let this happen? Why didn’t ‘the City’ take responsibility and halt the change? How could I as a Commissioner for ‘the City’ have condoned the project and lost the movie theater?

As a professional planner and professor who has taught urban planning for decades, my first reaction was to respond soberly and technically. ‘The City’ was not responsible for the change. There was no need to review or approve a permitted use to which the new owner was already duly entitled. Hence, no conditional use permit was warranted nor Planning Commission review at a public hearing. My vote on the Design Commission rested on compliance with adopted regulations, based on the will of the people, to which I have been sworn to uphold. First and foremost, the property is privately held. ‘The City’ does not own the land nor is it in the business of development. Equally, ‘the City’ is not empowered constitutionally to deny due process, meaning to deny an owner of a property the same rights afforded to all similarly situated ones. If the zoning at the Laemmle site allows for multiple commercial uses, then so be it, regardless of owner or current use. ‘The City’ cannot arbitrarily assign the enjoyment of permitted land uses adopted via our General Plan (the blueprint for growth and development required for all cities and counties in California adopted through a process of public participation.) At the Laemmle site, the underlying zoning does not mandate that it be used exclusively for a theater. Since the new owner was entitled to develop the property in accordance with our General Plan and the Zoning Code that implements it, the Design Commission had no power or jurisdiction to require the owners to continue a use that may no longer have seemed financially viable or for any other reason. ‘The City’s’ role fundamentally is to ensure a level playing field, that all owners are treated fairly and equally, and play by the rules the people have adopted.

On further reflection, thankfully our form of government allows for freedom of choice within the parameters of our adopted zoning and then to use our property as best we see fit without government intervention. Additionally, despite the best laid community-supported municipal plans, ‘the City’ cannot control the location and timing of development – where and when it will occur. That decision rests, again, with property owners exerting their free will. This sacred right to own and use property—to develop it or not–sets our nation apart from places where that right has been curtailed (think of a system based on inheritance that favored Old England’s landed gentry) or where it is non-existent (think modern-day China). If we don’t like our freedom of choice and to own property, then we will need to change our form of government.

The Design Commission’s power is thus limited to assess whether the physical characteristics of the building for the allowed, proposed use on a specific property fits its context in a way that makes sense architecturally and maintains or improves our experience of Pasadena. Contrarily, those who mourn and are angered by the loss of the Laemmle theater are not powerless. Make the property owner a handsome offer, buy the land, build a new theater, and organize your neighbors to pitch in. Collectively agree to stop your streaming services, your forays into YouTube, your virtual concerts, and attend regularly in person—on each and every Saturday night religiously like folks did in the pre-computer era–and buy plenty of popcorn to keep the movie theater going.

Most members of the community know all this, a wise neighbor pointed out. She reminded me they didn’t write to hear an officious argument. In times of trouble they look to their leaders. They wrote to vent their frustration, their sense of helplessness, of hopelessness that no one in power was listening or truly cared. They worry about an uncertain future, the stuff of which we planners must contend daily, and the discomfort that comes at first blush when blindsided by change. To them I owe a different kind of answer. I understand your concerns and anxiety. I, too, have mourned loss and change that comes over time with a growing community.

That sense of loss and the nostalgia for the past seems to be a perpetual part of urban living.

I once read a piece about a group of residents furious with a newfangled style of architecture that was destroying all they loved about Pasadena. They were writing at the beginning of the 20th Century to complain about the scores of Craftsman-style bungalows that were gobbling up the fields at the edges of the city. I wonder, too, how the early settlers felt losing Williams Hall, the first town hall, general store, and theater on the corner of Colorado Street and Fair Oaks, the building where they voted to become a city, or their grand Raymond Hotel, the two places they treasured most both lost by fire. I wonder how the residents of the stately Victorian homes that grew up around All Saint’s steeple felt as their neighborhood was razed to make way for a looming civic development, our City Hall, now a source of community pride. How did the community members opposing development feel about the spatial and social fallout from the Bennett Plan, a mighty vision for the city as “The Athens of the West” approved by popular election in 1923? With its massive implementation project, homes were lost in the Central District, residents displaced, businesses upset and failed as civic buildings rose up and Colorado Boulevard and Lake Avenue were modernized, widened to accommodate the increasing use of the automobile. The last of the homes on South Lake were soon torn down, replaced with what decades later would be labeled the City’s ‘premier shopping district,’ the area abutting Shoppers Lane that some residents now cry out to preserve in the face of the growing need to return the area to more housing and greater density.

The formation of my own neighborhood, Bungalow Heaven, once the bane of the Victorians who abhorred both the architectural style of its modest homes and their farmland-gobbling construction, was born from protest to hold back the tides of change. The moment came with the Cultural Heritage (now Historic Preservation) Commission’s nod in the mid-80s to demolish a house on the corner of Wilson Avenue and Washington Street and replace it with an ugly, modern multi-tenant apartment building. The event mobilized a contingency of angry residents to petition a zone change to halt further demolitions. The unprecedented result would be the City’s first historic preservation overlay district, the model for twenty-plus local landmark districts to follow. But that didn’t stop change entirely. I often wonder if my earlier neighbors in their new bungalows mourned the loss of their beloved drugstore and ice cream parlor, the local hang out on the northeast corner of Lake and Washington. Housed in a structure that mirrored the Innabi building that remains across the street, the two formed a lively community center adjacent to a thriving movie theater with housing units above (incidentally, one of the first mixed-use developments in LA County). The place is now gone, the corner drugstore replaced with a gas station that is still there. The theater building, despite multiple attempts of late to revive the use, is still sitting empty. How did later neighbors feel about further changes mid-Century, when the row of single-story shops on the west side of Lake Avenue was demolished to make way for the shopping center and its massive parking lot where Food 4 Less is now the major tenant? And what about the scores of lovely, little bungalows who managed to hold on, whose sites were eventually converted into Lake’s row of auto-oriented fast-food joints?

Who then is responsible for the City’s change that has culminated in today’s loss of the Laemmle? Who exactly is ‘the City’ that has allowed it? If by city we mean our local government – its elected officials, commissioners, and staff—then at its very core ‘the City’ in our democracy is none other than ‘We the People.’ People have the power to vote and support legislation or empower representatives to make decisions on our behalf as long as we come to some sort of consensus in public on the rules beforehand. Community members have the power to make changes in Pasadena, to say how it grows and develops over the coming years. That power, however, rests on our willingness to be engaged. There is ample opportunity for action. Pasadena updated its General Plan in 2015. Only a fraction of us were willing to participate, to roll up our sleeves, take the time and make the commitment to provide input. Likewise, Pasadena is in the process of updating eight specific plans, mini-General Plans that set neighborhood-specific design and land use goals that are coming up before its commissions to vet at public hearings. Now is the time for ‘We the People’ to speak up about the overhauls but relatively few of us are even paying attention. In the 1970s, City elders approved bulldozing over sixty acres west of Old Pasadena, an action intended to increase free-flowing mobility via the SR 710 by completing the freeway grid. It destroyed a thriving neighborhood and caused painful displacement and an irreconcilable city divide. Soon we may have the unprecedented opportunity to make amends, to envision what sensitive redevelopment could mean as the unfinished roadway is relinquished to Pasadena and that barren land rises out of the ashes to right wrongs and reconnect us. If it does not do that, then we will only have ourselves to blame.

To quote a Nobel laureate, the times they are a-changin’, and they always do. Change is always difficult and complex: a possible boon for those who exert their right, and yet an almost visceral consequence for others until the shock of the new settles in and is replaced by something that will inevitably become the comforting status quo. The rise of on-line shopping and entertainment, the ability to meet and work via Zoom has not just allowed us to thrive during these dangerous times but has upset retail and office uses, precipitated the demise of restaurants, galleries, and movie theaters, yet has freed up land for housing and reduced vehicle miles traveled and its climate-changing air pollution.

To all those concerned folks who confronted me about the Laemmle decision and mourn the theater’s passing, I thank you, too, for paying attention and reminding me of what I miss as well. Surely, I will miss going there like I do the old Bullock’s Tea Room, Smith & Hawken, and Arnold’s. But I won’t miss it nearly as much as I do Flo Stevens, Bob Kneisel, Bob Winter, and my mom. In this New Year, may we find joy in letting go of our romantic visions of the City’s past and fear of its unknowable future, be grateful for all that we have in front of us today, and find the courage to come together and change what we can.

Julianna Delgado is the president of the Southern California Planning Congress, a city planning commissioner, a design commissioner and a member of the mayor’s housing task force