Signs of the times in Pasadena: For lease

The central business district of wealthy Pasadena, which the late Johnny Carson teased for years on the Tonight Show was ‘God’s waiting room,’ is decorated with for-lease signs. If you believe in retribution, the biggest signs hang on the high-rises on North Lake Avenue above Colorado Boulevard, near the Gold Line light-rail station that housed the corporate headquarters of the disgraced IndyMac Federal Bank and regional headquarters of Countrywide Financial Corp. and Wachovia Corp., which have been swallowed, along with billions of bad home loans, into larger institutions. If you are fearful about how bad things will get, the business district along South Lake below Colorado offers a clue. A few doors from the recently renovated and reopened Macy’s, a homeless man slept in a vacant storefront about noontime on a Saturday, his snoring drawing shoppers’ attention. It’s not that this upscale part of Los Angeles County -- Pasadena, Altadena, San Marino, Arcadia -- doesn’t know poverty. Each Thanksgiving Day, hundreds of volunteers gather in Pasadena’s Union Park to provide turkey dinners for the area’s needy. It’s simply that the poor and the wealthy rarely meet on such upscale ground. For so many years, Los Angeles’ chief topic of conversation was real estate, and one place where deals were always being made, either in person or by cell, was The Nosh on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It still serves the best bagels outside of Brooklyn, but the real estate talk, even on a lazy, dismal Saturday morning, wasn’t evident. ‘What happened to all the people who did their real estate deals here?’ a customer asked the cashier. ‘They can only afford Dunkin’ Donuts these days,’ he replied, not smiling.