Office tower, apartment complex being built near Pasadena Playhouse

Two major developments with 1920s appearances an office tower and a luxury apartment complex are under construction in the once-sleepy neighborhood around the venerable Pasadena Playhouse theater.

With a combined value of $125 million, the projects are pillars of a city plan to give an increasingly lively part of Pasadena a more dense and urban feeling. The new projects are intended to bring still more people to an area of town that has seen a burst of new housing and dining options in recent years.

Developers will add more restaurants, shops and landscaped walkways to the 32-block Pasadena Playhouse District with Playhouse Plaza tower and Union Village apartments.

"This increases the livability of our district and makes it extremely walkable," said Elizabeth Doren, who is executive director of the theater and serves on the board of directors of the Pasadena Playhouse District Assn.

Both projects feature architectural styles of the 1920s, the decade when the Pasadena Playhouse was erected. But whereas Union Village apartments will be in the Spanish Revival fashion of the playhouse, the office tower will have more in common with an Art Deco masterpiece in Los Angeles.

"It has overtones of Bullocks Wilshire," developer David Saeta said, "and seems to be something that feels really at home in Pasadena."

Bullocks Wilshire was a luxury department store built in 1929 at 3050 Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles. Pasadena also got an elegant Bullocks outpost on Lake Street in 1947.

Now housing Southwestern Law School, the landmark L.A. building is clad in terra cotta and tarnished green copper. Playhouse Plaza tower will have a similar exterior made of reinforced concrete panels accented with green panels made of fiber-reinforced plastic.

Coming up with an appropriate appearance for Playhouse Plaza was difficult, he said, because the office building at the southeast corner of Colorado Boulevard and El Molino Avenue will stand directly across El Molino from the theater.

"Getting a design that was complementary but didn't mimic the playhouse was the big challenge," Saeta said. Some opponents of the development objected to an earlier, more modern design.

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Office tower, apartment complex being built near Pasadena Playhouse