South Pasadena Faces Blustery Times in Dealing With Change

South Pasadena has Boy Scouts and Little League and enough red, white and blue on national holidays to paint an aircraft carrier. It has kids with collies, a sleepy, plain-looking downtown and an unceremonious mayor who invites his constituents to City Hall for tete-a-tetes and coffee.

This, some residents proclaim, is Small Town, U.S.A. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting, a Mickey Rooney movie, a gauzy vision of a fading way of life--just 10 minutes from downtown Los Angeles.

“There are a lot of things here that, maybe, dreams are made of,” said Les Balk, proprietor of Balk’s Hardware on Mission Avenue for 53 years and patriarch of the city’s small-is-beautiful faction.

Old-fashioned City

But the old-fashioned city of 24,000 residents, whose shade trees and slanted roofs have attracted movie makers looking for settings for Midwestern towns or New England villages, faces some especially blustery times ahead, civic leaders say.

Freeway builders want to plow an eight-lane corridor down Meridian Avenue, developers drool over the city’s central location and, like small cities all over California, South Pasadena’s budget is getting harder and harder to balance.

Despite a series of knock-down-drag-out political fights in recent years on issues as diverse as the height of new buildings and the location of City Hall, most South Pasadena residents agree on one thing: they want the city to stay the way it is.

“It’s a kind of crown jewel of a little city,” said Mayor James Woollacott, who presides over a folksy, often contentious open-door kaffeeklatsch at City Hall every Thursday morning.

The big question, many say, is how long the city, wedged uneasily between Los Angeles and Pasadena (the largest city in the San Gabriel Valley) and poised uncertainly between the past and the future, can stay that way.

The latest threat is one that has been around, in one form or another, since the 1950s: state efforts to complete the Long Beach Freeway.

Last month, after 13 years of study and revisions, Caltrans presented federal and state agencies with its final environmental impact statement on the proposed freeway extension. The 6.2-mile link will, if it is built, slice through El Sereno and downtown South Pasadena, connecting the Long Beach Freeway with the Foothill and Pasadena freeways.

For 25 years, South Pasadena and Caltrans have been engaging in a kind of hand-to-hand combat over the freeway link.

City leaders contend that the freeway would, in effect, split South Pasadena and displace the equivalent of 12% of the city’s population.

“It’ll take the guts right out of the city,” Woollacott said.

So far, South Pasadena and its allies have held off the state agency, winning an injunction in U.S. District Court and forcing numerous route shifts.

But Caltrans persists. And the state agency, under pressure from neighboring cities whose streets are flooded with traffic because of the uncompleted freeway, evidently smells victory. If approval from the Federal Highway Administration and the California Transportation Commission comes quickly, demolition of about 1,400 homes and 24 businesses in the freeway link’s path could begin as soon as 1990, Caltrans officials said.

“We hope to have the whole (environmental review) process wrapped up by sometime in February,” said Jeff Bingham, Caltrans environmental branch chief for Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

For South Pasadena residents, many of whom support an alternate route along the city’s border with Los Angeles, the fight has become deeply personal. What happens if Caltrans builds the freeway?

“The city would probably end up dying a natural death,” said Councilman James Hodge.

South Pasadena was founded 100 years ago on 3 1/2 square miles of vineyards and orchards. According to Jane Apostol, South Pasadena’s official historian, the city’s 500 charter residents were conservative people with strong temperance sentiments, adopting as their guiding principle: “A church or school on every hill, but no saloon in the valley.”

The city, predominantly white, but with a burgeoning Asian population these days, has been conservative and “family oriented” ever since, determined to keep its “small town-ness,” as one former councilman put it.

It has also been scrupulously independent, maintaining its own Police and Fire departments and supporting a small but effective school district. The city’s five schools usually score near the top of the county in California Assessment Program tests.

A community of placid neighborhoods, with often eye-catching old homes, the city is beginning to show signs of age and dilapidation here and there. A few mainstays of the downtown area, like Gus’s Bar-B-Q and Weaver’s Fix-It Shop, have succumbed to earthquake damage. City leaders often point to the corner of Huntington Drive and Fremont Avenue when they talk about commercial “underachievers.” At the intersection is a vacant lot; two others hold boarded-up buildings.

“That’s prime commercial real estate and it’s not producing anything,” Woollacott said.

World Is Encroaching

Everybody lauds South Pasadena’s old-fashioned life style, but realists say that the rest of the world is encroaching.

Fremont and Fair Oaks avenues are major north-south rush-hour thoroughfares for cars disgorging onto the city streets from the truncated Long Beach Freeway and the Pasadena Freeway. Bristol Farms, a food specialty store on Fair Oaks, attracts motorists too.

“It created traffic problems, but, hey, that’s success,” former Mayor Ted Shaw said.

Crime is an increasing problem in the city. There were three bank robberies last month.

But city leaders say South Pasadena and its old-fashioned way of life are protected by a community-nurtured resistance to change. South Pasadena was one of the first cities in the region to adopt a slow-growth policy. In 1986, faced with a proliferation of condominium complexes and apartment buildings in the southern part of the city, as well as a voters’ revolt, the City Council imposed a 60-unit annual limit on new multifamily developments.

“We’ve protected ourselves pretty well,” Woollacott said.

Static Population

The city’s reluctance to build is reflected in population statistics. The population in neighboring cities has ballooned, mostly with new arrivals from Asia, but South Pasadena’s has increased by an average of only 84 people a year since 1970.

While the city was keeping a lid on new apartment buildings, slow-growth activists turned down a string of proposed commercial developments, using intense political pressure or the initiative process. For example, in 1983, when a local merchant proposed to erect two multistory office buildings, angry residents petitioned for a ballot measure limiting the height of new construction. The measure won, and the so-called “twin towers” died a sudden and unlamented death.

In recent months, two major projects have also succumbed to slow-growth sentiment. First, developer Thomas Stagen withdrew a plan for a 150-suite hotel on Fair Oaks Avenue, citing the community’s “virulent opposition” to the project. Then, the City Council, acting as the Community Redevelopment Agency, scuttled a move to declare 74 acres of prime commercial area in the city a redevelopment area, after rebellious local merchants displayed signs portraying the council as a big octopus, seeking to control the city.

Forget the big projects, South Pasadena residents seem to say. Let’s go back to single-family neighborhoods.

Tranquil Neighborhood

Take the Leman-Milan Neighbors, a community association which was formed to fight development in its neighborhood. Milan Avenue and Leman Street, which intersect south of Huntington Drive, anchor tranquil single-family residential blocks. This is kid territory. A posse of preteens on bicycles generally patrols the sidewalks and streets in front of bulky frame houses with broad expanses of lawn.

Last summer, a developer bought a house on the block where Robert Sherinian, a leader of the association, lives. The developer, relying on a zoning anomaly that permitted more concentrated development, proposed to tear down the house to build four smaller houses.

Council Persuaded

Neighbors quickly organized, petitioning the owner to desist and directing emotional appeals to the City Council. Last month, a crowd of Milan-Leman residents jammed into the City Council chamber. The council voted to down-zone the two blocks so that the zoning would conform to the character of the neighborhood.

City officials cite the association’s appeal for down-zoning as part of a headstrong resistance to development. In a heated real estate market, most residents conceded, they were probably sacrificing property values to save their community.

Sympathetic city officials worry, however, that South Pasadena is not keeping pace with the rest of the world.

“What we have is a town of the ‘30s and ‘40s,” said City Councilwoman Evelyn Fierro. “We have to recognize that we’re almost into the 21st Century. We have to deal with the world outside our boundaries.”

Nonsense, said Balk, the feisty hardware store owner, a slight man with electric blue eyes, who admits to being in his 70s.

Change of Atmosphere

“There have been a good many developers who have tried to tell us we should make better use of our land,” he said, standing in his cluttered store, where tools, appliances and gadgets appear to have been shoehorned onto every inch of shelf space. “But all they’re going to do is change the attitude and atmosphere of the place.”

Balk, himself a former councilman, uses his own business as an illustration of modest and manageable business practices.

“If I was just there to make so many dollars, I could have built up the business and sold it,” he said. “I would have been gone, whistling ‘Dixie.’ But in America, you can buy your property, build your business and do what you want to do, even if you’re not making tons of money.”

True enough, council members conceded. But the city still has to pay its bills. Because of a shrinking tax base, it’s barely doing that now.

“They say business is OK,” Councilwoman Fierro said, “but ‘OK’ isn’t helping the city.”