Pasadena's Paseo Colorado mall gets a new name, restaurants, and H&M

The new owners of Pasadena's outdoor Paseo Colorado mall will rebrand it simply as The Paseo and will open two trendy chain restaurants this year, part of a plan to revitalize the 16-year-old center.

The new restaurants—branches of Great Maple and Dos Coyotes Border Cafe—join a new H&M store, scheduled to open before the holidays, and a 186-room Hyatt Place hotel now under construction on the site of the mall's former Macy's department store at Los Robles Avenue and Green Street.

Great Maple is slated to open in the summer; the hotel is expected to open in October of next year.

Right now, The Paseo features offices, specialty retail stores, an ArcLight Cinema, an Equinox Health and Fitness and 391 loft condos called The Terraces, the Pasadena Star-News reported.

The mall dominates three blocks of Colorado Boulevard between Marengo and Los Robles avenues, with City Hall to the north and the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and Convention Center to the south.

The 13-acre mall has undergone many changes since it replaced the old Plaza Pasadena, an enclosed brick-clad mall that went up in 1980 and was virtually demolished in 1998 to make way for the new center.

Architecturally, the open-air Paseo was an improvement over the old mall, mainly because it restored the sight line along Garfield Avenue between the Civic Auditorium and the Pasadena Public Library that was part of city planner Edward Bennett's original layout of the City Hall plaza.

Paseo Colorado has changed hands since its opening: Developers Diversified Realty Corp. bought it in 2003, then sold it to Dallas-based Cypress Equities last year.

The mall has also seen major tenants come and go. Original anchor tenant Macy's closed in 2013 and was torn down to make way for the new hotel. Anchor tenant Gelson's also shut down in 2013 and was replaced with The Rose, a concert and dinner venue.