Immortalized in song by Jan and Dean's little old lady, Pasadena commands world attention for two hours in the beginning of every new year, when the extravagant floats and high-stepping bands turn right off Orange Grove and down Colorado Boulevard in the annual Rose Parade. In spite of its unique place in popular culture, Pasadena more significantly exemplifies the real structure of greater Los Angeles, a 14-million person horizontal metropolis, sprawled over hundreds of square miles just this side of the Pacific Ocean and knit together by concrete arteries that thrum day and night with traffic, the lifeblood and bane of L.A. life. Perched at the edge of the continent, Los Angeles is not really a "city," (as any Angeleno will tell you) it is dozens of them. And it is as much a state of mind as a place, especially since Gertrude Stein's famous crack about Oakland ("There is no there there.") fits Los Angeles just as well, if a bit differently.

Pasadena will remind you of nothing so much as a prosperous, leafy Midwestern town, with its neat grid of streets, tidy zones of commerce and entertainment, low-rise profile, green spaces, museums and cultural venues, and dozens of distinctive neighborhoods. Incorporated in 1874 as the "Indiana Colony," Pasadena's mild climate and handsome prospect quickly seduced prosperous families from the Midwest , especially in the dead of their winters, when Pasadena is still warm during the day and cool and bracing at night. Families with still-familiar names - Wrigley, Busch, Gamble, Huntington - moved entire households to Pasadena - even whole neighborhoods replete with the necessary artisans, laborers, servants and help of all kinds to sustain their way of life. Surrounded by citrus groves that stretched to the horizons and sheltered from the east by the rugged escarpment of the San Gabriels, Pasadena prospered. Famous architects found patrons and commissions here (Wright, Greene & Greene, Myron Hunt); famous scientists founded a school here (Caltech - more Nobel laureates per capita than any institution in the world); famous artists and craftspeople found space and solace along the Arroyo Seco. Those few turn-of-the-century families who conceived of that New Year's Day parade could never have imagined how successful they would be in promoting Pasadena's benign winter climate to their friends and families "back East."

Where Los Angeles sprawls, Pasadena is comprehensible and compact. Unlike most cities in greater Los Angeles, people actually walk in Pasadena. With a population around 200,000 (including neighboring Altadena and San Marino) there are enough people to feel like a city but not so many as to feel like an unmanageable metropolis. "Old Pasadena" is so Pasadena: a mixed-use retail/restaurant/condo-living district recently named "Best Downtown in California." Just 20 years ago this now-thriving city center was a dingy, dispiriting collection of abandoned buildings, broken windows and sketchy denizens. Pasadena's intrepid preservationists insisted that the old buildings be saved and faced down developer after developer, bent on bulldozing and demolition, until one finally agreed. The renaissance was underway and, today, planners and architects come from all over the world to admire and emulate (as does half the population of the east San Gabriel Valley on any given Saturday night.)

The name for this small gem of a city - "Pasadena" - came from a Chippewa word that means something like, "of the Valley," and so the city has been known variously as the Crown of the Valley, the Crown City, the Queen of the Valley, and so forth. Where once it marked the far-eastern boundary of greater Los Angeles, it now sits smack in the middle of the ever-growing sprawl that is contemporary Los Angeles, and provides a perfect starting point for sampling seashore and mountains, tropical greenery and desert, suburban domesticity and urban bustle. And if you time your journey to avoid rush hours, nothing is more than about a freeway hour away, confirming the time-tested observation that Los Angeles is not so much a city of monuments as a city of mobility. The great social theorist Reyner Banham called Los Angeles "the city of the future, and it always will be." Pasadena, on the other hand, feels very much like the idealized city of the past, come to rest gently in the present as the very model of a thriving modern community.