Colorado Boulevard's 150th Year Is Reshaping Both Halves of the Street at Once
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Stand at Colorado Boulevard and Fair Oaks Avenue and you're standing where Pasadena started. In 1876, a merchant named L.D. Hollingsworth opened a general store and post office on that exact corner, a plank building surrounded by orange groves. This year marks 150 years since that beginning, and the city has been marking it quietly: a June exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of History, a mayoral cake-cutting, a nod to the fact that Route 66 also turns 100 in 2026 and ran straight through this same stretch of pavement.
You would think a street celebrating a milestone birthday might slow down and let people admire it. Colorado Boulevard is doing the opposite. A wave of new restaurants and retail has landed on the boulevard this year, and it isn't clustering where you'd expect. It's splitting almost evenly between the preserved, postcard-ready blocks of Old Pasadena and the stretch further east that Pasadena's own preservation experts say the city might still lose.
Pasadena Heritage's executive director, Dr. Bridget Lawlor, has a framework for thinking about Colorado Boulevard that's more useful than any walking map. She describes it as two different streets. West of Lake Avenue, through Old Pasadena and the Civic Center, the boulevard is a preservation success story: brick commercial blocks, theaters, banks and government buildings that survived the twentieth century largely intact. East of Lake, the street tells a rougher story, shaped by the automobile era and Route 66, where motor courts, service stations and neon signs once lined the pavement and where, according to Lawlor, the historic record has never gotten the same recognition or protection.
Lawlor points to Old Pasadena's "continued vitality" as one of the city's clearest preservation wins. But that same framing implies the east side should be languishing by comparison. It isn't. This year, both halves are absorbing new investment, and the details of who's opening where complicate the simple version of the story.
The clearest sign that Old Pasadena's west-side blocks are still commercially hot arrived in late May, when CJ Olive Young opened its first U.S. brick-and-mortar store at 58 W. Colorado Boulevard, tucked between an Apple Store and a Crate & Barrel. Olive Young dominates the beauty retail market in South Korea with roughly 1,380 stores, and it picked Pasadena over every other American city for its debut. The 8,647-square-foot flagship arrives as Korean beauty imports to the U.S. surged 54 percent in 2024, reaching $1.7 billion, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission, and California alone accounts for 40 percent of the company's American online sales. CEO Gaeun Kwon called the location "a forward base to showcase a wide range of Korean brands to the global market."
A few doors down at 38 W. Colorado, Love Baked Wings moved into the former home of Jake's Burger, a longtime neighborhood name, serving baked rather than fried wings with house-made sauces. Between a global beauty retailer picking Pasadena as its American launchpad and a local burger institution's old address getting a new tenant, the west side of the boulevard is behaving exactly the way you'd expect a protected historic district to behave: steady, in demand, worth a premium address.
Here's where the story gets more interesting. Head east past Lake Avenue and you'll find just as much fresh construction dust. Lunasia Dim Sum House closed its longtime spot and reopened as Lunasia Signature at 865 E. Colorado Boulevard, a larger space with a stage for live entertainment alongside the classic soup dumplings and steamed BBQ pork bao. Further east at 2391 E. Colorado, Ginjo Ramen opened with slow-simmered pork bone broth and a kombu-based vegetarian option. The same eastward pull shows up one street over, too. Bob's Furniture opened on East Foothill Boulevard at the start of the year, and Boot Barn has since joined that same corridor at 3353 E. Foothill.
None of this reads like a street in decline. If anything, the businesses moving into the stretch Pasadena Heritage flags as vulnerable are betting bigger, not smaller, than the ones opening in the protected core. Lunasia didn't downsize into its new location. It expanded.
There's a small physical reminder of just how contested this eastern stretch has been. Outside a McDonald's near Holliston Avenue sits a three-and-a-half-foot concrete marker most drivers mistake for a gravestone. It's the Bancroft Marker, a road-numbering relic from the early 1900s, more than two decades older than the Route 66 designation that came later. It was shifted 25 feet in 1994 to make room for the McDonald's driveway, and it's the last of three such markers that once stood in Pasadena. It made the National Register in 1996 under the category "Early Automobile-Related Properties in Pasadena." It's a single stone standing for an entire architectural era that mostly didn't survive, on the very street where new restaurants keep opening anyway.
If you want to see both versions of Colorado Boulevard for yourself, the next two weeks are a good window. A few things worth putting on the calendar:
The 150th anniversary exhibition, "Where History Meets the Road: Celebrating Route 66 & Colorado Boulevard," remains on view at the Pasadena Museum of History through the summer, tracing what curators call the boulevard's role as both a transportation corridor and a cultural symbol. Every era Pasadena passed through, the railroad resort years, the streetcar suburb, the automobile city, today's walkable corridor, happened on this same mile-long stretch of road.
The easy version of this story would be that Old Pasadena is winning and the east side is fading, or the reverse, that new money is finally discovering the "authentic" east end while the west side coasts on its landmark status. Neither holds up against what actually opened this year. A Colorado Boulevard newspaper roundup of 2026 openings counted momentum on both ends of the street simultaneously, from East Foothill retail to Old Pasadena dining. The boulevard's two halves aren't in competition with each other this year. They're both busy at the same time, for different reasons, which is a stranger and more interesting fact than either half winning outright.
That's worth knowing if you've lived here a while and assumed you already understood which parts of the boulevard were thriving and which were holding on. The 150-year-old street just proved that assumption wrong in both directions at once.
If you're curious what a street like this does to property values on the blocks around it, or you just want to talk through what's changing in your corner of Pasadena, Art Del Rey Realty has been watching this city's neighborhoods for decades. Let's Connect.
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