Goodbye to a skyscraper. And to an era.
First Pasadena State Bank, the only skyscraper in Pasadena, is scheduled to implode at 7 a.m. on Sunday, July 21. That breaks my heart.
In 1963, the year it was built, a bank could be the heart of a town, something to be proud of. First Pasadena State Bank was definitely that kind of icon.
Lyndon Baines Johnson campaigned on the bank’s lawn the day before the 1964 presidential election. The building’s picture appeared on schoolkids’ report cards. In spring, the Strawberry Festival Parade marched past it. At Christmas, Santa ho-ho-hoed in the lobby. Deals were sealed with handshakes, and the bank’s president, Buddy Jones, waved hello to his customers.
A striking skyscraper in the Frank Lloyd Wright style, it was modern without being glass-box dull. At 12 stories, it towered 10 above everything else in town and marked 1001 Southmore Ave. as the peppy new pulse of Pasadena.
But it wasn’t just the town that was proud of its bank. In those days, a bank could be proud of its town, too.
Pasadena liked to bill itself as “equidistant from downtown Houston and NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Center” — which is to say, poised between two different, limitless futures. When planning the building, bank chairman James Donovan said he wanted a building that signaled the former Strawberry Capital of the World’s transition to the era of manned spaceflight.
The bank hired architecture firm MacKie and Kamrath, devotees of Frank Lloyd Wright, to design what a bank brochure later called “a fitting symbol of Space Age industry and finance.” With its cantilevered overhangs and art-glass trim, the building ran counter to the glassy orthodoxy of the day: It was thoroughly modern without being generic.
The bank’s lobby had curving glass walls and Danish modern furniture. An indoor fountain burbled.
“Your spirit soared when you walked in,” David Pomeroy once told me. Pomeroy, a lawyer, used to go there on business almost every day. He didn’t have an office in the building’s upper floors, but it seemed that every other professional in town did.
The bank’s board of directors was filled with Pasadena’s elite: doctors and lawyers, insurance agents, an optometrist, a dentist, the owner of an office-supply store, the manager of the Pasadena Sears. In the elevators, Pomeroy might run into real-estate men. In the bank lobby, he’d see members of the school board.
The aesthetic was Mad Men. But the culture was Mayberry.
Banking, sadly, has long since changed beyond recognition. Priorities reach far beyond financing the real economy and lending to real people. First Pasadena State was bought out, then sold again and again to larger bank agglomerations that had nothing, really, to do with Pasadena. The building that was once the center of a town’s universe, run by the town’s people, was reduced to a mere branch location.
In the ’80s, one owner went down during the savings-and-loans scandals. For a while, it seemed that Pasadena’s main bank had a new name every six months. Pomeroy kept the different checkbooks that each new owner issued him: a grim collection.
In 1990, the building ended up in foreclosure. Eventually, banks abandoned it altogether. The grand lobby closed, and the upstairs office tenants drifted away. In 2005, the city issued a demolition permit for the empty building. KT Realty Group bought it, and there was talk of spiffing it up, maybe in conjunction with city of Pasadena efforts to revitalize the area.
But the economy tanked, and those plans went nowhere. Hurricane Ike walloped the building, peeling away brick and breaking the roof ’s art-glass trim. Boards covered broken windows. Taggers roamed it at night, spray painting it at will. Houston Mod, a nonprofit that promotes modern architecture, declared the structure endangered.
That was when I met the building: In 2009, when it was clearly on the skids but people still hoped it might be saved. I hoped it might be saved.
To state the obvious: That didn’t happen. These days, Pasadena’s Economic Development Corporation owns the bedraggled skyscraper.
There aren’t yet plans for the land. It’ll sit empty.
On a web page about the implosion, the economic development corporation says that contractors will recycle beams and such. Other bricks will be sold in the Pasadena Heritage Park & Museum’s gift shop. And some of the bricks will be repurposed as “an outdoor display” at one of Pasadena’s city hall campuses.
Yes, that’s “city hall campuses,” plural. These days, Pasadena doesn’t really have a center. The closest thing is probably Fairmont Parkway, in the new-ish strip malls full of chain stores whose top management don’t have a stake in Pasadena.
Stores have gone global — just like the banks.
A multinational’s C-suite executives answer to stockholders on other continents and live and die by quarterly performance reports. The president of an national or international bank can’t be expected to wave hello to Pasadena customers. The board of directors doesn’t include local optometrists or Sears managers. One can’t imagine the chairman of a global investment fund bragging about creating a “fitting symbol” for Pasadena.
It’s hard not to wonder what would have happened if that ambitious realty company had been able to borrow money to revamp the old Pasadena State Bank building and save a little of the city’s history.
We’ll never know. Weather permitting, early Sunday morning there’ll be a series of sirens on Southmore. In the eerie silence that follows, the demolition crews will set off their charges. When the dust settles, there’ll be a pile of rubble where a city’s heart used to be.