The opportunity to plan and design more than 50 acres of inner-city urban development in any city is significant, but in Pasadena, California, it is a possible inflection point in the city’s history, an opportunity to redress past mistakes, and to set the stage for future generations to benefit from perceptive and forward-thinking planning.
In early 2024, Pasadena selected Perkins Eastman to develop a new master plan to transform the city’s historic downtown. The intent? Decoupling the stub end of the State Route 710 freeway from regional circulation and reconnecting this strip to the local street grid by adding new bikeways, greenways, paseos, and urban gardens to repair the city’s divided urban fabric, and to set the stage for a new era of development. This project represented a rare chance to reflect on the past, heal, and define a balanced path forward.
Similar past efforts with other communities informed Perkins Eastman’s approach to the Pasadena plan. In these planning endeavors, more can be gained than just filling in a gap; if thinking is broadened and difficult questions are posed from the outset, the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. Fortified with this expertise, Perkins Eastman set out to listen, learn, and guide.
Redlining and U.S. freeways
What began during the 1930s with the redlining of neighborhoods in the United States—activity that created historical and current patterns of racial and ethnic segregation in our cities—was followed by a second blow, the construction of freeways, which started in the 1950s and further divided many neighborhoods. Once maps were rolled out to identify routes for both Interstate 210 and SR 710 in Pasadena, the communities that had previously been redlined fared the worst, adding to a legacy of environmental and social inequality. Compounding this wrong, the January 2025 Eaton Fire, which had a devastating and disproportionate impact on nearby Altadena’s Black residents, heightened the need to heal and reconnect communities.
In its heyday, from the late 19th century through the 1920s, downtown Pasadena was a thriving mercantile and urban neighborhood. By the 1960s, however, plans for the 210 Foothill and SR 710 Long Beach freeways were introduced to connect Pasadena to major highways. These efforts led to the removal of developable land from the tax rolls and loss of affordable housing for minorities, the elderly, and low-income families, further contributing to the area’s decline.
In the 1970s and 1980s, an awakened respect for the city’s architectural treasures led to the renovation of historic homes and buildings throughout Pasadena. Nowhere was the makeover more apparent than in Old Pasadena, where the city’s business district first began. Revitalization of this area occurred throughout the 1980s and culminated at the end of 1992 with the completion of the One Colorado historic block. Transformed into a dining, shopping, and entertainment district, Old Pasadena is now a major attraction in southern California. Yet the scar of the SR 710 remains.
Today, with the relinquishment of the SR 710 Stub—as locals call the end of SR 710 where the road drops into a ditch more than two-and-a-half times longer than the Empire State Building is tall, and 30 feet deep—a new opportunity exists to redress the historical impacts of freeway development.
Legacy projects
Pasadena is not alone. Nationwide, plans are in place to reshape communities affected by the misguided planning of the last century. This effort stems, in large part, from the law established in 2021 under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This legislation was the basis for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, which provided an annual average of $50 million for planning grants and $150 million for construction grants from FY22 through FY26. Although the current federal administration defunded future programs of this sort, the funding for projects already in development endures. With the Pasadena plan, we hope to set an example that will rekindle such investment.
The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco sped the final removal of the elevated Embarcadero Freeway once a $69.5 million budget for freeway reconstruction changed the debate in favor of a boulevard with a final cost of less than $50 million. In the 1990s, Perkins Eastman and the Downtown Long Beach, California community tore down the tail end of the SR 710, as well as on- and off-ramps, and we repurposed highways as boulevards to create a revitalized waterfront district called Rainbow Harbor at Queensway Bay, now an iconic landmark in the city.
Seattle is in the process of rebuilding its central waterfront—an $806 million multiyear investment. With the Alaskan Way Viaduct removal complete, the city is constructing a park promenade along the water, building a new surface street along Alaskan Way, and improving east-west connections between downtown and Elliott Bay. Each of these efforts reconnects communities to their unique urban waterfronts and heals the wounds inflicted by a legacy of blind devotion to the automobile.
Tacoma, Washington, is about to undertake an effort to identify improvements necessary for people of all ages and abilities to travel safely across the I-5 Freeway. These efforts will increase safety, enhance mobility options, and strengthen community connections in historically disadvantaged communities affected by the freeway construction.
The opportunity
Despite Pasadena’s not being a waterfront locale, it can take advantage of many strategies and lessons learned from these examples, and others, of reconnecting communities and reimagining the future. Pasadena has a downtown cleaved apart by a ditch 30 feet-deep (9 m), 494 feet wide (150 m), and almost 4,000 feet (1,220 m) long.
Of the plans’ many benefits, the SR 710 Stub presents the opportunity to terminate the freeway and create a more well-behaved pattern and scale of ways to restitch the urban fabric. Prioritizing the pedestrian experience in lieu of the automobile provides one example. By re-establishing a network of greenways, bikeways, paseos, and walkways, as well as repurposing former elevated freeway ramps, the plan fuses together the public realm, reconnects severed neighborhoods, and creates new opportunities for many special places to emerge.
Inheriting the excavated ditch presents an opportunity to mitigate development costs of future subterranean parking, take advantage of the opportunity to “build down,” by creating a terraced urban fabric, or both. Adding water to the ditch to create a unique urban lakefront environment that anchors the public realm also merits exploration.
Building advocacy
From the beginning of the Reconnecting Pasadena master plan project, advocacy and understanding of the opportunity were established through seven primary lenses that inform the final work product and outcomes. Each lens has a key planning/design lead and stakeholder or agency group that can bring expertise to the subject and make decisions in a focused and timely manner to advance the work.
- Community engagement strategy—A broad net is cast to gather input from planning experts, elected officials, the development community, neighborhood organizations, and youth groups. This engagement helps propel these individuals to become advocates for this major initiative that will make payouts well into the future.
- Restorative justice framework/policy—Listening to life stories/oral histories, reviewing literature, and taking property and historic real estate inventories has been essential in creating a full picture of what has preceded Perkins Eastman’s work. These activities provide a framework for future healing in the community.
- Data collection, existing physical conditions, 3-D–modeling survey—Gaining a full understanding of the physical attributes of a site and surroundings lets the team shape a plan to seamlessly knit the urban fabric together again.
- Economic study/market demand analysis/development and income opportunities—Understanding the current market and exploring possible future trends helps the city prioritize needs and explore implementation options.
- Mobility and circulation analysis—Foundational to this project is the remediation of harm done to the local community by freeway infrastructure. It also offers an opportunity to improve traffic circulation in the region and explore new mobility options.
- Land-use options and placemaking—A key element of the exploration and future success of the downtown will be to identify and encourage the right mix of uses to enable a prosperous revitalization. This outcome means establishing new neighborhoods and many special places for locals to create new memories.
- Climate-resilient infrastructure development and services plan—As the future of Pasadena is boldly redefined, the architects and urban planners can explore opportunities on a broad scale that would otherwise not be possible at a site or building scale.
Imagining the future
Our work to date has revealed a community that—although shaped by urban wildfires, historic blight, freeway construction, and redlining, is now eager to heal, build generational wealth, and create a neighborhood—reflects its members’ identities and aspirations. Pasadena can be the region’s most equitable and resilient city and can define a path forward for other cities in the area.
Key to scaling the emerging plan so it can offer value to other communities will be maintaining a focus on establishing authenticity for the new neighborhoods; being attentive to the public realm; and creating streets and squares that have human scale, and that prioritize walking and biking over cars. Streets that have been overdesigned and are today inhospitable extensions of the freeway system can become local neighborhood addresses and be redesigned as “complete streets.”
Reintroducing a gracious and continuous canopy of trees can reverse the heat island of asphalt and concrete that has dominated the area for the past 50 years and chart a new course for sustainability. Introducing new parks and greenways can provide equitable access to open space for future residents. A new transit hub can reduce car trips in the region and mitigate the impact of traffic on local streets during game days at the nearby Rose Bowl stadium. Establishing a new town square on Colorado Boulevard, an address shared by all the neighborhood districts, will allow the community to honor the past and collaborate for a shared future.
Radical change is necessary for Pasadena to boldly chart its path toward physical and social reconnection. With bold thinking, the city is poised to set a precedent for other similarly affected communities and improve the urban fabric of cities throughout the country.
