Victorian and 1920s storefronts surround Fair Oaks Avenue and Colorado Boulevard. Castle Green, a few blocks away, has played more parts on screen than any other building in the district.
What Old Pasadena looks like
Old Pasadena is the city's original downtown. It runs about twenty blocks of Victorian and 1920s commercial buildings around and , the intersection that marks Pasadena's postal zero point. A merchant named Hollingsworth opened a general store there in 1876 that doubled as the town's post office, and the street became Pasadena's main commercial strip.
By the late 1960s most businesses had moved elsewhere, and the city's 1971 plan called for tearing the district down instead. A preservation group called Pasadena Heritage fought that plan. The district reached the National Register in 1983, with more than ninety percent of its buildings counted as historic. The renovation that followed stripped later paint and signage back to the 1925 to 1940 look the city wanted.
itself was widened from 72 to 100 feet in 1929 and 1930. Property owners cut back their own building fronts to make room, and many Victorian facades came down for Art Deco or Spanish Colonial Revival ones. The street carried U.S. Highway 66 until 1940 and was still called Colorado Street until 1958. Three of its crossings use the same pedestrian scramble system as Tokyo and the Las Vegas Strip. They are at De Lacey, Fair Oaks and Raymond Avenues.
is a shopping courtyard built around seventeen of the district's historic buildings. It keeps its own address on , one of several service alleys behind the main street. and sit a few blocks from it, and each has spent decades on screen under other names. , off Union Street, has its own film history too.
Films shot in Old Pasadena
has played more roles on screen than any other building in Old Pasadena. It sits on the corner of Raymond and Green.
Bugsy, 1991
's exterior played the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Bugsy, the 1991 film about Bugsy Siegel. The interior of that same scene was actually filmed somewhere else, the Park Plaza Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
The Sting, 1973
's interior played a New York casino in The Sting. A decade later the same rooms became the Austrian hotel where Steve Martin's character honeymoons in The Man With Two Brains.
The Last Samurai, 2003
Tom Cruise meets a group of Japanese businessmen in 's Moorish Room in The Last Samurai. In Babylon, Brad Pitt's character has a drink with Li Jun Li's Lady Fay Wong in the same building, a scene the production set explicitly in Old Pasadena.
What Old Pasadena can double for
Old Pasadena can stand in for Havana in Bugsy, a New York casino in The Sting, an Austrian hotel in The Man With Two Brains and Seville in Knight and Day.
.jpg)
