The Best of Both Worlds : Housing: Ornate landmark hotel in Pasadena is a rare example of low-income residents living in the same building with affluent condo owners.

Pasadena’s landmark Hotel Green, with its spectacular towers, turrets and grand staircases, has become that rarest of places--a dwelling where the poor live with the affluent in the midst of a vibrant, fashionable neighborhood.

In one wing of the former hotel, located in trendy Old Pasadena, 140 mostly elderly, low-income tenants live in federally subsidized apartments that are plain but well-maintained and modern.

In an ornate and elegant adjoining wing, 70 residents--many of them affluent--live in condominiums, some with fireplaces, high ceilings and old-fashioned bathrooms.

“I think it’s probably the only one of its kind you’ll ever see,” said Pat Davis, manager of the low-income apartments. “Subsidized housing is usually in low-income areas. It would be like bringing Compton and Beverly Hills together in one block.”

Having low-income senior citizens living in a prosperous, bustling center of town is a dramatic and welcome departure from the common practice in America of isolating the poor and the elderly, said Phoebe Liebig, gerontologist with the National Resource Center on Housing and Longterm Care at USC.

“I think it’s something that more cities should consider doing,” she said. “It’s very desirable and other people should come and have a look at it.”

The low-income units--called Green Hotel Apartments--and the condominiums--known as Castle Green--are separated by a sealed fire door, but the lives of some of the residents are nevertheless sometimes entwined.

Both establishments use their ballrooms for weddings and on occasion residents mingle at one another’s parties. And at least one love affair has breached the fire door between the wings.

Neighbors on both wings frequently help one another with shopping and errands, or look in on those who need assistance.

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Andrew Kaminski, 75, who operated the Castle Green elevator with its old iron accordion gate for 16 years, is looked after occasionally by the people he used to ferry up and down the six floors. Now stooped and having difficulty walking, he lives in a low-income apartment.

“He’s like family,” said Mary Truscott, 77, who has lived in one of the condos for 20 years. “I helped him one time to pull that little grocery cart because he could hardly walk.”

Virginia Morrison, who lives in a condo lushly furnished with stuffed chairs and Oriental rugs, also does errands for Kaminski and other low-income neighbors.

But it is not a one-way street. Many of the condominium dwellers are also elderly and sometimes need the assistance of their low-income neighbors.

Sterling McIlhany, 65, who lives in a low-income apartment, remembers the day he found a distraught and bewildered elderly condominium resident standing in front of the building.

“She had that hollow-eyed look,” recalled McIlhany, who said the 80-year-old woman was near hysteria because an expected check had not arrived.

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McIlhany, a writer and former design teacher, took his neighbor to a phone and helped track down the check. “There are times,” said the short, trim man with a neat white beard, “when it is a great pleasure to serve people.”

Like other low-income residents, McIlhany cannot often afford the trendy boutiques, restaurants and bars on the adjacent streets.

The tenants usually cook their own meals after shopping for food at supermarkets at the edge of Old Pasadena. Apartment manager Davis is kept busy returning shopping carts to stores after her tenants use them to haul groceries home.

Still, some frequent the nearby no-frills Old Town Cafe with its low-priced lunches. McIlhany sometimes indulges himself with a lunch in a popular Italian restaurant on busy Colorado Boulevard, where he can watch the throngs of visitors to Old Pasadena. “Every day,” he said, “would be impossible.”

McIlhany found out about the Green Hotel Apartments during a bus ride in Pasadena two years ago.

He was living in Hollywood in a run-down building with no hot water or heat.

A 12-year-old sold drugs in the lobby, thugs attacked McIlhany in the hallway and a tenant regularly tried to burn down the building.

McIlhany overheard a bus passenger complain that all the good things in Pasadena were changing and that even the Hotel Green was being used for low-income housing. He remembered the grand old building from his youth.

“I couldn’t wait to get to a telephone,” said McIlhany, who has been a tenant ever since.

Another tenant learned about the apartments when she met a couple in Mexico who owned a Castle Green condominium.

Louise Sturges, the 86-year-old third wife of legendary film director Preston Sturges, once lived in the Hollywood Hills attended by four full-time servants.

When the marriage ended, the money ran out and Sturges found herself stranded in Guadalajara, caring for the children of fellow Americans in order to earn money to come home.

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Living on a federal pension for the elderly poor, Sturges was faced four years ago with a drastic rent increase where she was living. Friends at Castle Green told her of the low-income units next door.

She lives surrounded by a wide range of books, paintings and a few fine old pieces of furniture in a clean and sunny corner apartment on the fifth floor looking out on Old Pasadena. She occasionally explores the adjacent streets with the help of a walker.

“I think I’m fabulously lucky,” she said.

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Castle Green and the Green Hotel Apartments share a common and complicated history. They are all that is left of the elegant turn-of-the-century Hotel Green. The facility opened on the east side of Raymond Avenue, where a five-story hotel was completed in 1893.

Five years later, a sensational six-story Moorish-Mediterranean annex with great turrets and towers was built on the west side of the street. The annex, which is now the Castle Green condominiums, was equally impressive inside.

“Hand-wrought woodwork, high coffered ceilings, onyx wainscoting and wrought iron decorate all the spacious public rooms,” a historical document says.

The annex was connected to the original hotel by an elaborate covered bridge across Raymond Avenue, a remnant of which still stands. Five years after the first annex was built, the wing that now houses the Green Hotel Apartments was built.

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By 1924, the original west annex, with all its towers, turrets and arches, had been sold to its occupants. Christened Castle Green, it was one of California’s first condominiums.

Ten years later, the original hotel across the street was razed.

The wing adjacent to Castle Green continued to operate as a hotel, but by the early 1970s it had deteriorated badly.

It was purchased by developers who converted it into the low-income Green Hotel Apartments. Much of the ground floor, which included a grand ballroom and a large, pillared lobby, was left in the turn-of-the-century design. But the five upper floors were gutted and turned into modern apartments, with low acoustical ceilings, electric kitchenettes and aluminum frame windows.

The surrounding area was then just another decaying area. But that changed with the birth of Old Pasadena.

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Nick Williamson, 32, who helps manage Castle Green, bought a condo in 1989 after he “happened to pass by the building and fell in love with it.”

He was soon working with co-manager Steven Harris to restore the building and the two now share a corner condo with an almost 180-degree view from a tower balcony. The slow, painstaking restoration of the lobby, parlors and ballroom are financed from fees for wedding receptions and other functions and from money paid by filmmakers who frequently use the premises.

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Scenes for the “The Sting,” “Sneakers,” “The Grifters,” “The Little Rascals,” “Wild at Heart” and other movies were shot there. So were episodes of “Murder She Wrote,” “Sisters” and other television shows.

Nearly $700,000 in federal funds to work on the facades of deteriorating towers was obtained after Castle Green and the Green Hotel Apartments were listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Condo residents are pushing for the Pasadena Cultural Heritage Commission to designate the structure a city treasure so that property taxes from the building can be used for its rehabilitation.

“People here have the desire to share the building and talk about it,” Williamson said. “You don’t get the average condo people here. They don’t care here about great plumbing. They live with the quirks.”

Still, all the public attention, the weddings and the big film productions can take some getting used to.

“We deal with it,” said Ellen Godkin, 30, a free-lance writer who has rented a condo for two years. “When you first move in, it’s a little intimidating.”

As for the building itself, said Godkin, “the Castle is a special place. It’s kind of an adventure living here.”

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Her high-ceilinged studio apartment is decorated in turn-of-the-century style, complete with a small oval bathtub surrounded by marble. But some of Godkin’s purist neighbors would surely be chafed by the hardwood that has been laid over the concrete floor in the living room.

Take Jim Marrin for example. No hardwood floors for him. The 54-year-old graphic designer has completely restored his condominium with its living room of curved walls located in a corner tower. Pastel throw rugs lie on bare stained concrete floors, the way they were at the turn of the century. Original Stickley Arts and Crafts furniture graces the spacious apartment.

“I love living here,” Marrin said. “I like it, but it’s frustrating. There are some people here that don’t get it.”

Some of his neighbors, Marrin says, are destroying an invaluable architectural treasure by modernizing their condos. He is especially upset with the gutting and modernization of the Hotel Green Apartments. Marrin does not object to living next door to low-income units, but he maintains that the developers should have preserved the original architecture.

“I think it’s a tragedy,” he said.

But Davis, the manager of the low-income apartments, smiles at the criticism.

“When you get to be 85, you’ve lived in old apartments,” she said of her tenants. “You bwant something more modern.”

Tenant Gertrude Shirk, who happens to be 85, agrees.

“Everything is lovely over there,” she said of the condos. “But I like it here as it is.”