The city has always laid at my feet. I was merely days old when my mom was rolled out of the hospital and both my mom and dad brought me home and laid me on their bed at our condo in Monterey Hills, a neighborhood atop a tall hill just South-East of South Pasadena. Though the lower portions of the Monterey Hills area is a bit slummy, like most of Los Angeles, the hill was a conglomeration of what makes LA so neat; a mix of city and nature as Debbs State Park resides there.
When we left the condo on the hill and moved into the Oleander house in the summer of 1992, I found that this dichotomy of city and nature was prevalent here too. The house, on a tall hill, surrounded by acres of open land, hillside, orange trees, eucalyptus and crab-grass, it also sits in Los Angeles city limits. And, much to my surprise, my bedroom window faces South, and I can directly see the old condo in Monterey Hills where I started my life.
I was bicycling today through my neighborhood--for the first time since I was a young teenager. As I'm crossing the York Blvd bridge into South Pasadena, I can look down and see the Arroyo I love so much; I can smell the hey from the little horse stable and I see a horse's muzzle sticking out of his stall. I feel so lucky to live in this crux of natural California; dry riverbed, fragrant arid land and city all meet up here at this crossroads.
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South Pasadena is an interesting town. It has one foot rooted in the heydays of the 50s, as the corner of Fair Oaks and Mission silently attests, and the city has an eye to the future.
A city that functions independently with its own mayor and city council, its own school district and downtown, it is a throwback to the idea that Los Angeles is a conglomeration of varied and unique cities--both micro-metropoli and smalltown USA mainstays.
For a fairly wealthy town with longstanding high property value, and conservative political and business nature, South Pasadena's landmark Rialto has long been home to avant-garde celebrations of the unusual, iconic, and liberally bohemian midnight showing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."
But contradictions make things more interesting.
South Pasadena is apparently big enough--in its 3.4 square mile radius to sustain two different pizza parlors, only two blocks apart--pizza parlors run by the same family in competition with each other.
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Thursday, May 28, 2009
This is what I love about South Pasadena--a block of city, the closest thing the city has to a town square, is being overrun by the smells of barbecuing meat and roasting corn while people talk to one another in a friendly fashion. The quiet city transforms into a bustling hub of activity on Thursday evenings for the weekly Farmer's Market.
There is nothing unique about this S. Pas Farmer's Market--except that I just ran into Frank Fairfield- a bluegrass player I saw this last Sunday, not here, but all the way in Santa Monica at McCabe's Guitar Shop. Even stranger than him being at a S. Pas Farmer's Market is the fact that I saw this same, esoteric player hustling his banjo, his mandolin and his guitar in Old Town this Monday evening.
To summate--he's been in the Pasadena area twice in the last week even though I didn't even know he existed before Sunday afternoon. I know what you're thinking--maybe he lives in Pasadena. But alas, he does not, as I talked to him and found that he lives on Cahuenga North of Hollywood.
Yesterday marked the debut of this week's Pasadena Weekly, which bore my name on the cover as my story was the feature of the week. Below the picture of the cute dog pictured in its kennel is my name--Carolyn Neuhausen. Meanwhile, by the time I usually go to Kaldi's the newsstand is usually empty--but not today--today there is still a fresh stack of PWs around--as today they hit the street. My name is literally haunting Pasadena as I type this and my name stares back at me on a paper at my very own local coffeehouse.
An interesting confluence of events--and it all happened in South Pasadena.
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