Parklets on Colorado Boulevard during PARK(ing) Day 2014 (Photo – Jonathan Edewards).
At the 2017 Pasadena Playhouse District Association (PDA) annual meeting, Board Chair Brian Alan Baker announced the news of the Playhouse’s Parklets project being placed on hold.
By Wafic Khalil
The announcement came during a speech delivered by PDA’s Board Chair at the Annual Meeting* that took place at Pasadena’s Boston Court‘s intimate 99 seat theater.
Mr. Baker highlighted many of PDA’s accomplishments this year and touched on the Playhouse Parklets Pilot project and the lack of a park in the district:
I’m not sure [Parklets] is gonna happen, not sure that’s gonna happen. We struggle with a park. Our district does not have a park…This has been very controversial, and we will never reach a consensus on this, but the question becomes this, does that mean we kill the project?…
MMP Festival
After discussing the struggle with the homeless problem around the district and recognizing it as a problem that’s shared with the City and the need to find a responsible solution, Mr. Baker touched on this year’s demise of the Make Music Pasadena festival:
It’s a program we historically partnered with Old Pasadena [District] and temporarily -I hope- has been suspended but soaring costs and some other logistics have made it just not competitive…
Bicycles and Cycle Track
On the subject of Bicycles and Cycle Track, he said:
…Bicycles are coming in…the bikes themselves will be here in couple of weeks…In a couple of years, I believe, is when we start seeing the Bike Track itself come down Union [St] bisecting this district. The idea is this, we’re going to be seeing more bicycles…and we’re going to start serving people who move around the city on bicycles, and we need to start thinking about that.
(L-R) PDA Executive Director Brian Wallace, Keynote Speaker Vaughan Davies, and PDA Board Chair Brian Alan Baker at the 2017 Annual Meeting on June 28, 2017 (Photo – Mike Pasistoran).
Mr. Baker concluded by saying:
…We have a lot of community interest, it’s not going to be a consensus…the Parklets program, and the Park program, are just the perfect examples of that, and the question we wanna happen to ask ourselves sometime: is controversy in and of itself willing to be the reason not to move forward?…We got a lot of projects out there, good ideas, but we sometimes seem to not move forward…
…I urge all stakeholders to get involved…It seems, given the diversity of opinions we have in this district, we can use them all in a way to figure out, and navigate, some of the controversies we’ve encountered…
Mr. Baker assured ColoradoBoulevard.net that the Playhouse Parklets Pilot program is not totally dead. When asked if there’s a chance it will be revived, he replied, “I hope it will be!”
*The PDA’s 2017 Annual Meeting event was emceed by Jessica Kubzansky, Co-Artistic Director of the The Theatre @ Boston Court, with keynote address delivered by Vaughan Davies. In addition to members of PDA’s Board of Directors, the event was attended by Mayor of Pasadena Terry Tornek, Councilmember Andy Wilson, City Manager Steven Mermell, Boston Court’s newly named Executive Director Kyle Clausen, PMCA’s newly named Executive Director Susana Smith Bautista along with PMCA’s founders Robert and Arlene Oltman, Pasadena Playhouse’s Producing Artistic Director Danny Feldman along with Director of Development Annette Ricchiazzi, plus a group of business owners, property owners, developers, and residents of the district. The event was organized by PDA’s staff spearheaded by PDA’s Executive Director Brian Wallace.
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