An Incomplete + Personal History of Old Town Pasadena • 2015
As part of the Women's Center for Creative Work's Parlor at the Armory: The World That Begins Where Our Skin Ends, I spent one-week in residence producing a critical neighborhood walk exploring Old Town area of Pasadena following a trail of leads and conversations along the lines of you know someone who knows someone one. I wanted to ask people what could be learned from Old Town, a place so ubiquitous to me as someone who grew up in the area.
Old Town, by the mid-1990s deeply into its second wave of gentrification, was a formative location for my earliest ideas around history and place. It was also a nationally-awarded planning project that became a model for how other cities, nationally and locally from Downtown LA to Santa Monica, enacted gentrification through historic preservation. What exactly was being preserved? What is missing from its historicized commerce-oriented narratives? What sanitized racial and ethnic histories, migration stories, creativity, and movement have been buried (many, literally beneath the 710/210 freeway)? What are its stories preceding its early 1980s gentrification and the later hyper-gentrification of the mid-1990s, and what remnants of all these eras are still visible in its current physical landscape?
During the week, I also created a resource binder of regional news articles relating to the neighborhood's redevelopment to see the story step by step as it evolved through media coverage. I also received copies of Follies, a 1970s arts and culture newspaper published in Pasadena by Terry Cannon, for an internal perspective on the neighborhood.
Speakers on the walk included Nicholas Hummingbird and Tim Martinez of the Arroyo Seco Foundation, Sophia Rivera, Terry Cannon, and Kevin Cloud Brechner, plus numerous guests who spontaneously shared their own memories and experiences. In the course of planning, I also connected with the following people: Richard Amromin, Dalia Petring Burden, Friendship Baptist Church, Nawili Grey, Ayo Henderson, Sandra Hill, Ikuko Miyashita, Jun Ohnuki, Nora Oppenheimer, Roscoe Lee Owens, Margaret Schemerhorn, Paul Tzanetopoulos, Bert Voorhees, and Faith Wilding.
This project was produced in 2015 via the Women's Center for Creative Work as a part of the NEA Our Town Project "My Pasadena," a City of Pasadena public art project with Side Street Projects as a partner.