Walk through The Paseo on a Tuesday afternoon this September and you will find a line at a boba counter, a family checking in for an escape room booking, and a browser paging through used paperbacks two doors down from where a fountain used to draw crowds after work. None of that was true eighteen months ago. For most of the 2020s, the open-air mall at 300 E. Colorado Blvd was the kind of place Downtown Pasadena residents mentioned only to explain why they were walking somewhere else instead.
The mall isn't getting rescued by a marquee tenant. It's getting rebuilt by the kind of businesses that couldn't have afforded a lease there five years ago, and that detail says more about what's actually changing downtown than any renovation photo does.
The mall that emptied out first
The Paseo opened as an upscale redo of the old Pasadena Mall, built around a promenade, a fountain, a concert venue, a movie theater, a gym, and residential lofts stacked above the storefronts. People actually live there, in the Paseo Terrace units above the retail floor, which means the vacancy problem wasn't an abstract downtown statistic to them. It was their own front stoop.
The tenant roster that filled the space in its first decade leaned toward brands like West Elm and Equinox, retailers built for shoppers with disposable income for home furnishings and boutique fitness memberships. What the mix never quite solved for was daily, practical foot traffic, a grocery anchor, a hardware run, the kind of errand that pulls someone back three times a week instead of three times a year. Public reviews from the past year describe empty storefronts and a property that had become, in the words of more than one visitor, a shell of what it used to be. Anchor stores closed. Only the Yard House kept a steady crowd. A Regal multiplex sat upstairs as one of the last reliable reasons to park in the garage at all.
The businesses that could afford to try
The turnaround didn't start with a big signing. It started with a bookstore.
The Open Book opened its Pasadena branch inside The Paseo on October 1, 2025, tucked into the mall's quieter stretch and sitting directly across the street from Vroman's, the city's long-established bookseller. According to Local News Pasadena, the store's ability to land there at all came down to rent. The financially struggling center had space available at a price an independent bookstore could actually carry, the kind of rent that wouldn't have penciled out next to tenants like West Elm and Equinox. Branch manager Serena, who has watched the foot traffic ebb and flow since opening day, told the outlet, "I just remember everyone used to come here after school."
That's the mechanism worth sitting with. The vacancy that looked like failure from the outside was, for a certain kind of tenant, an opening.
Then came the boba line and the escape rooms
Once one lower-rent, high-loyalty business proved it could hold on, more followed. Wushiland Boba opened a location inside the mall at 300 E. Colorado Blvd, Suite 124, serving the Taiwanese chain's milk teas and its red bean and taro standbys to a steady stream of regulars who treat it as a quick stop rather than a destination purchase. Monarca Collective moved into curated retail space nearby, part of what ColoradoBoulevard.net described as a broader wave of openings reshaping the district.
The biggest signal came on April 1, 2026, when Escapology held its grand opening inside the mall at 300 E. Colorado Blvd, Suite 153. The escape room chain built its Pasadena location around officially licensed game rooms, including a Scooby-Doo mystery set inside a spooky castle and a Batman: The Dark Knight Challenge, alongside original rooms like Mulberry Manor, a horror investigation set inside a fictitious haunted estate. It's a deliberate bet on families and repeat weekend visitors rather than the lunch-hour office crowd the mall used to court, and it sits walkable from both the Memorial Park and Del Mar Metro Gold Line stations, roughly eight to ten minutes on foot from either stop.
Upstairs, the Regal Cinemas location finished a renovation the mall's own site now promotes as a fresh look with the same iconic experience, giving the property's oldest anchor tenant a reason to feel new again. Paris Baguette was reported in spring 2026 as expected to join the lineup by summer, part of the same reinvestment push.
Here's what that lineup looks like as of this writing, block by block:
| Business | What it is | Opened |
|---|---|---|
| The Open Book | Independent new and vintage bookstore | October 2025 |
| Escapology | Licensed and original escape room venue | April 2026 |
| Wushiland Boba | Taiwanese bubble tea counter | 2026 |
| Monarca Collective | Curated retail | 2026 |
| Regal Cinemas | Renovated multiplex | Reopened 2026 |
| Paris Baguette | Bakery cafe | Expected by summer 2026 |
Sacramento came to look, too
The turnaround got enough attention that state lawmakers scheduled a visit. In December 2025, Assemblymember Matt Haney, who chairs the State Legislature's Downtown Recovery Committee, walked The Paseo alongside Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo and Assemblymember John Harabedian as part of a tour that had by then covered fifteen city centers across California, according to Pasadena Now. Anna Grazioli of the Onni Group, which owns The Paseo, guided the group through a plaza that had recently gotten a full repaint, new green walls, overhead string lights, and stadium seating.
Haney's read on the broader lesson was blunt. "We can't just keep on doing the same thing we've been doing," he said, standing in the same plaza where the mall's old anchor strategy had run its course. The tour's takeaway wasn't a single fix. It was that small, steady changes, a bookstore here, a boba counter there, a repainted wall, add up to something a downtown can actually feel.
What this looks like on an ordinary Saturday
If you already live in the lofts above The Paseo, or a few blocks over in the Civic Center district, the practical version of this story is simpler than the policy version. It means an errand run that used to require driving somewhere else can now happen on foot: a book picked up at The Open Book, a boba order at Wushiland while you wait for a table, an escape room booked for a birthday instead of a drive out to a different city. It means the Regal upstairs is worth checking again. It means the plaza that used to feel like a pass-through now has string lights on at dusk.
None of this makes The Paseo the mall it was in its first decade. It makes it something more useful to the people who are actually there on a Tuesday, which, for a downtown that spent a few years feeling hollowed out, is its own kind of comeback.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home search or a sale in Downtown Pasadena, or you just want a local read on how a neighborhood's daily rhythm affects its market, Kawika Hiroshige is a phone call or a quick form away. Get your free home valuation and get a straight answer from someone who actually walks these blocks.
