New Cotton West Medical Office Building Planned to Pair Up With Cotton South Medical, Built in 1983

Pasadena’s Department of Planning and Community Development will brief the City’s Design Commission Tuesday on a proposal to build a new four-story, approximately 60,000 square foot medical office building and a four-story above-ground parking structure at 50 Alessandro Place. 

The new project is now referred to as the Cotton West Medical Office Building, and is to be located to the west of the adjacent Cotton Medical Center office buildings known as 50 Alessandro Place (Cotton South) and 50 Bellefontaine (Cotton North). It will also include the construction of a parking structure over the existing underground parking structure on Alessandro Place.

The project site consists of a single T-shaped two-acre lot currently developed with the four-story Cotton South medical office building, constructed in 1983, at the northeast corner, which will be retained and unaltered, according to the plan. The site also includes a landscaped open space west of the existing building and surface and subterranean parking at the northwest and southern portions of the site. 

A tree inventory identifies five non-protected trees on the site, all of which will be removed following tree-removal procedures. Surrounding properties include additional medical office buildings between two and four stories in height to the north and east, as well as a two-story multi-family residential building immediately adjacent to the east, one- to two-story commercial, office and industrial buildings along Fair Oaks Avenue to the east; and multi-family residential buildings between two and four stories in height to the west and south. 

Nearby, some of the properties designated as historic resources include the Markham Place Historic District to the northwest, roughly bounded by S. St. John Ave., Bellefontaine Street, S. Orange Grove Blvd. and W. California Blvd.; the Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden at 270 Arlington Drive to the southwest, and the Glenarm Power Plant at 72 E. Glenarm Street to the 

southeast. 

The Bellefontaine Nursery at 836 N. Fair Oaks Ave. is identified in the City’s Ethnic History Research Project as being associated with Pasadena’s Japanese-American heritage. The site is within the PD-5 (Alessandro Place/Fair Oaks Planned Development) 

Zoning District along with two other properties immediately to the north. 

The new Cotton West medical office building will be built on the southerly leg of the T-shaped site, set back 75 feet from Hurlbut Street. Setbacks between five feet and 11 feet are proposed from the east and west side property lines. The building will be set back 125 feet from Alessandro Place to allow for creation of a vehicular drop-off zone and entry court to the existing and proposed buildings. 

The new parking structure will be placed at the northwest corner of the site, set back five feet from Alessandro Place, with 10-foot setbacks from the west and south property lines. The south façade of the parking structure will engage the westerly portion of the new medical office building’s north façade. 

As to design, the proposed medical office building is generally contemporary in style, with a flat roof, cubic massing, a randomized grid pattern of fiber-reinforced cladding panels and thin brick overlaid onto ribbon windows with angled sill panels, and expressed vertical circulation. 

The plans show the parking structure will be rendered with exposed horizontal floor plates with vertical circulation towers at the corners.

The property developer said the project was originally pursued in 2017 as a two-building development of 110,000 square feet that required street vacation to accommodate a shared underground parking structure. The approach was eventually abandoned due to land ownership issues and the challenges associated with the parking solution. 

With the initial feedback from the city, the development revisited the planning and design explorations last year by testing the site for its ability to accommodate a 60,000 square foot development. 

The project is currently in the Preliminary Consultation phase of the City’s approval process.