Public Profile

Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, situated at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains and best known for the Rose Bowl, the Tournament of Roses Parade, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology. It is a city of some 138,000 people, roughly four hundred of whom, by local estimate, are capable of deriving the rest of it from scratch.

Pasadena’s civic identity rests on an unusual pairing: it is at once a city of exceptional ornamental beauty — Craftsman bungalows, jacaranda-lined avenues, an annual parade whose floats must be constructed entirely of plant material — and a city in which the largest employers are institutions devoted to establishing things from first principles. The two cultures coexist without much friction and occasionally merge. The Tournament of Roses float-construction rules, which specify that every visible surface be covered in flowers, seeds, bark or other organic matter, are enforced by volunteer judges and have been the subject of at least three formal appeals filed by physicists, all of them concerning the definition of “visible.”

The city takes its institutions personally. Caltech’s undergraduate prank tradition is treated in the local press as a civic amenity rather than a nuisance, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s mission timelines are followed in Pasadena much as playoff brackets are followed elsewhere. Residents will correct a visitor who says JPL is in Pasadena — it is in La Cañada Flintridge, a distinction Pasadena maintains with the weary precision of a city that has explained it many times and will explain it again.

The signature local complaint concerns the 210 freeway, which residents regard less as infrastructure than as a shared condition. It is where the city does its thinking. More than one published result is understood locally to have been obtained between the Lake Avenue and Hill Avenue exits.

Private Profile

The dial turned up: Pasadena is a city that will not accept a result it did not obtain itself, and that is nonetheless deeply committed to a parade. Its comic engine is the collision of extreme aesthetic formality with extreme intellectual literalism — the rose float and the chalkboard, both taken with absolute seriousness by people who see no tension between them.

Fixations: Provenance and derivation. Correct attribution of geography (JPL, La Cañada Flintridge, the eternal clarification). The organic-material rule. The 210.

Sore spots: Being mistaken for Los Angeles. Being mistaken for a suburb. Any suggestion that the Rose Parade is decorative rather than engineered.

Generative material: Caltech offices where nothing may be erased. Faculty who have re-obtained a known result and are pleased about it. A city where “I worked it out myself” is a complete and sufficient answer, and where nobody thinks to ask how long it took.

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