American Pie 2 | 1253 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena — Where the Summer Job Was

Vicky and Jessica spend the summer of American Pie 2 working a till in a vintage clothing shop, and the shop was a real one: Aardvark's, on the 1200 block of East Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. Racks packed shoulder to shoulder, denim by the yard, the particular smell of forty-year-old wool in a room with the door propped open.

The trade at that address has turned over since 2001, as retail on a boulevard always does. What has not changed is the block — flat-fronted mid-century storefronts, deep awnings, parking meters, the kind of street that gets used for filming precisely because it is unremarkable and therefore convincing.

Colorado Boulevard is not unremarkable one day a year. This is the Rose Parade route. Every January the crowd stacks up on these sidewalks four deep and the same storefronts appear behind the floats on television in a hundred countries. For the other three hundred and sixty-four days it is a working commercial street where a film crew can park two trucks and nobody makes a fuss.

Stand on the south sidewalk facing the shopfronts and you have the camera's position. The scene needed a place where a nineteen-year-old could plausibly be bored for eight hours in August, and Pasadena supplied it without dressing a thing. That is the quieter craft in this film — most of the locations are simply somebody's ordinary Tuesday.