On a Thursday morning in Pasadena in mid-May, about 200 city residents turned out for a groundbreaking ceremony that was hardly routine.

They came to witness the fall of the city’s controversial Plaza Pasadena mall and to celebrate its replacement, Paseo Colorado. In a scene that was almost surreal, city organizers of the event released white doves and played triumphant symphonic music as an excavator’s claw shattered the glass fa & #231;ade of the building.

Pasadenans cheered.

It was an important moment for the city and for the direction of retail in the L.A. area.

Gone was the traditional mall. It was to be replaced by an urban-village concept calling for not only retail but housing, offices and entertainment. A town within a town.

The enthusiasm and all the hoopla in Pasadena may have had more to do with Plaza Pasadena’s demolition than it did with the new development plan. Just about every Pasadenan will tell you they hated the mall the day it opened its doors in 1980.

Plaza Pasadena was at the time a model mall, and it even received architectural and design awards. It was designed by eminent retail architects Jon Jerde and Ron Altoon and developed by H-CHH Associates, a partnership between Ernest W. Hahn Inc. and Carter Hawley Hale Stores.

Plaza Pasadena was derived from a concept that was prevalent at the time: a box-shaped, two-story, enclosed building with a few large retailers serving as anchors. The anchors of Plaza Pasadena were The Broadway, May Co. and J.C. Penney.

“For the first several years, it was successful and turned a good profit for the owners,” said Richard Froese, vice president of development for TrizecHahn Development Corp., the developer and owner of Paseo Colorado.

Problems arise

Its success was short-lived.

The mall was not large enough to have an impact as a regional mall and it lacked strong, fashion-oriented department stores, according to Howard Wong, vice president of retail at Jones Lang & LaSalle.

Adding to Plaza Pasadena’s misery, two nearby super-regional malls in Glendale and in Arcadia were luring shoppers with more upscale and diverse retail offerings.

Meanwhile, Old Pasadena was undergoing a renaissance and eventually attracted an array of national retailer such as The Gap and Banana Republic.

Shoppers all but gave up on Plaza Pasadena, Wong said.

There was also a gradual change in shopper expectations, according to Froese.

“The trend, especially in Southern California, has been towards open-air, place-oriented environments for shoppers,” he said.

But the main problem was that many Pasadenans viewed Plaza Pasadena as a blight on their city.

“Plaza Pasadena was born in controversy,” Mayor Bill Bogaard said.

The mall had been part of a citywide effort to rejuvenate an ailing downtown Pasadena in the late 1970s, but to some civic leaders the box-like building did just the opposite.

The Plaza Pasadena project involved demolishing four historic buildings and using the city’s eminent domain power, which some Pasadena residents resisted as a violation of property rights. There was also a public subsidy of $57 million needed to launch the project. While it absorbed public funds, Plaza Pasadena also was widely viewed as an affront to the character of Pasadena’s downtown.

Blocking the view

According to Bogaard, what really disturbed Pasadena residents was that Plaza Pasadena blocked the view of the city’s Italian Renaissance-style civic auditorium from the historic central library.

“The people of Pasadena always resented the intrusion of that building,” he said.

Redevelopment of the ailing mall was inhibited by several factors, such as the owner’s inability to find a creative plan that would be profitable within the confines of the mall property, Froese said.

“It was very difficult to get all of the department stores in sync with the developer on development plans.” Froese said.

Also, Pasadena has a reputation of having a bureaucratic and time-consuming project approval process.

But the mall remained enticing as a redevelopment opportunity because of its location on Colorado Boulevard, a surrounding community with great spending power, a preexisting entitlement for a 600,000-square-foot shopping center and adequate parking.

“The success of Old Pasadena, while it influenced the decline of the property, also gave us a reason to redevelop it,” Froese said. “It told us that a correctly conceived project could be successful.”

In 1997, TrizecHahn, led by an effort by then-Mayor Chris Holden, began collaborating with a citizens’ advisory group to revitalize the downtown area.

Change in ownership

TrizecHahn became the mall’s new owner after a series of buyouts. Trizec Corp., then a Calgary-based real estate holding company, acquired Ernest W. Hahn Inc. in 1980. Horsham Corp., a gold mining and oil refining company, acquired Trizec Corp. in 1991 and formed TrizecHahn Corp. TrizecHahn Development Corp., the division specializing in entertainment and retail properties, became the sole owner of Plaza Pasadena in 1998.

A citizens’ advisory group concluded that Plaza Pasadena’s redevelopment should be open-air, have retail shops front onto public streets and re-establish the view that had been lost because of the mall building.

“The process took the ideas of the community and blended them with the actualities of the marketplace,” Froese said.

Well, sort of. Froese said TrizecHahn almost shelved the redevelopment plan because the community’s objectives were proving too costly.

“We were thinking in a narrow box,” he said. “We couldn’t expand beyond the street. Then we realized we could go up (vertically) and include retail space.”

In late 1998, TrizecHahn proposed Paseo Colorado, part of a new breed of shopping centers.

Each one of the city of Pasadena’s approving bodies supported the proposal unanimously, a first for any project in the city.

When the 560,000-square-foot Paseo Colorado opens in the fall of 2001, it will be an interconnected network of retail, office, entertainment and housing components.

“It sets a high standard of urban design by offering mixed use,” Bogaard said. “It re-establishes the view corridor and promises to promote pedestrian traffic in the civic center.”

The $200 million development is being supported by $26 million from the city of Pasadena.

“It was handled differently from most other projects that preceded it because TrizecHahn accepted the preference of Pasadena,” Bogaard said. “As a result, Paseo Colorado will bring Pasadenans back to the heart of their historic civic center.”

Development is taking place on a three-block area of the civic center, located along Colorado Boulevard between Marengo and Los Robles avenues.

Importantly, the project’s main pedestrian artery, Garfield Promenade, will restore the historic view corridor between the civic auditorium and the central library.

The street-front retail will include an upgraded Macy’s, a 14-screen cinema with stadium seating, a health club and spa, restaurants and a Gelson’s supermarket.

Atop Paseo Colorado’s two-level retail marketplace will be 400 residential units developed by Post Properties Inc.