New Pasadena Jail and Police Building Rises Above Critics

Every Monday morning for the last six months, Pasadena police Lt. Chris Hagerty has tromped up 153 steps to the top of City Hall’s towering dome and loaded a roll of film into a Super-8 movie camera aimed at the ground below.

The camera, mounted in a waterproof box, automatically snaps a frame every 1 1/2 minutes of the construction site at the southwest corner of Walnut Street and Garfield Avenue.

By March, when the new Pasadena Police Building and Jail is expected to be completed there, Hagerty will have a time-lapse film chronicling virtually every step in the making of the much-heralded facility.

“The building is really starting to take shape now,” said Hagerty, who plans to use the film as part of a cable TV documentary. “When it’s finished, I don’t think there’s going to be anything like it around.”

In the three years since Pasadena voters approved a $17-million bond issue to help fund the project, officials have hailed its Spanish flavor and humanistic design as avant-garde departures from the bunker-like structures that have come to typify most police stations.

Members of the city’s Design Review and Cultural Heritage commissions have praised the historical sensitivity of the building. Its beige stucco walls, arched windows and terra cotta tile roof echo the 1920s-era themes of nearby City Hall.

Police are excited about the community-oriented philosophy of the structure, manifested in such features as open access to restrooms, no iron bars, an airy chandelier-adorned lobby and a 70-bed jail that will be the first in the state to arrange cells into easily supervised pods.

And members of the Pasadena Arts Commission, which Thursday endorsed a $360,000 environmental design contract that features a giant sycamore tree and assorted drought-resistant plants, said the plan will convert the grounds into a shady garden with the feel of the nearby Arroyo Seco.

In fact, there is so much enthusiasm about the building’s ambience, it almost seems as though officials are expecting people just to drop in for coffee and chat about the weather.

“The whole idea is to be warm and open and friendly,” said Hagerty, the Police Department’s facilities planning manager. “Instead of looming over people . . . we want to say: ‘Hey, folks, this is your building. How can we help you?’ ”

To be sure, the project has not been a universal hit. There have been concerns recently about the rising cost of the structure, which now has a price tag of $23.5 million--about 38% more money than the bond measure raised.

Although Pasadena officials say a good chunk of that additional money will buy things such as computers and office equipment that the bonds couldn’t legally fund, some members of the city’s Endowment Advisory Commission have complained that the extra costs were not spelled out in the beginning.

“The voters believed that they were getting a building for $17 million that they’re paying $23 million for now,” said Leigh Rosenberg, chairman of the commission. “I think we may have let them down.”

Not all have been enamored, either, of the building’s historical reference points. Some local architects, for instance, have criticized its arched 50-foot-high tower as an obvious imitation that detracts from the Italian Renaissance dome capping City Hall.

“I believe the building’s a bit overdone . . . and makes too much of a replica-type visual statement,” said Armando Gonzalez, an architect and former member of the city’s Community Development Commission. “It seems to only relate to the past and not enough to the fact that we’re going into the year 2000.”

But to others, such as Donna Mathewson, a member of the Cultural Heritage Commission and executive director of the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the building looks to the future as well.

“It’s going to be a lasting building,” she said. “Being in the civic center, it has to have a certain kind of ambience, feel and look. And I think it has it. Fifty years from now, it will still be handsome.”

When the building’s architect, Robert A. M. Stern, was invited by the AIA chapter to present a slide show of his work last month at Caltech, he was greeted by a crowd of about 200 mostly appreciative colleagues.

Stern, the head of a New York firm that does about $200 million in business a year, has an impressive list of projects to his credit, including an annex to the U.S. Embassy in Hungary, the main personnel center at Disney World in Florida, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., and a master plan for the Fine Arts Village at UC Irvine.

His work is typified by clean, elegant lines that are more reminiscent of classical structures than the steel-and-mirrored-glass monoliths that tower over most American downtowns.

During his 90-minute talk on Nov. 15, Stern sniped at much modern architecture, which he considers superficial, overly ornamental and completely out of touch with its context.

The new police building, he said, complements the historical feel of downtown Pasadena, as well as fulfilling the people-oriented philosophy that the Police Department seeks to promote.

“We wanted to make a building that was at once an expression of the formidable quality of law, but that also invites people in,” said Stern. “I think we’ve achieved that. . . . It’s a civic building to be proud of.”