Pasadena

Talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, actress Portia de Rossi, have bought a 13-acre estate in Montecito that had been listed at $26.5 million. The purchase price has not yet appeared in the public record. The restored Tuscan-style villa and gardens had undergone years and millions of dollars in reconstruction work under the care of an earlier owner, designer John Saladino. The two-story villa was built in the late 1920s from locally quarried stone. The property, entered through wrought-iron gates, has a quarter-mile-long driveway that winds through olive and eucalyptus trees.

Pasadena officials are negotiating a proposal to convert the city's long-vacant former YWCA building into a 150-room boutique hotel, the city announced last week. Completed in 1921 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the three-story building near Pasadena City Hall was designed by Julia Morgan, believed to be the country's first independently practicing female architect. Morgan also designed Hearst Castle and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner building. The city invoked eminent domain to acquire the former YWCA from a Hong Kong investor for $8.3 million in April 2012 after it stood vacant at Marengo Avenue and Holly Street for 14 years.

Mark and Cindy Evans make the rounds of Southern California flea markets early, before most shoppers have gotten out of bed. Their favorite stops: The Groves Antique Market Held the first Sunday of the month from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Irvine Valley College, 5500 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. Admission and parking are free. Dogs allowed. (949) 786-5277. Pasadena City College Flea Market Also held on the first Sunday of every month, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Due to a scheduling change, the market happens to be open this Sunday.

"Bloom," a compact show of eight recent painted sculptures by Christopher Miles, takes its name seriously. The flowering at hand is excitement over the extreme, hybrid nature of contemporary experience. These artistic mutts celebrate incongruity, heterogeneity and multiplicity -- even if irradiated with a certain creepiness, which certainly feels right for our time. The works are on view in the rear project-room at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in a show organized by artist Constance Mallinson.

Retail giant Macy's Inc. said it would close a store on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena as part of plans to shut down six "underperforming" stores nationwide. The closings will make way for the retailer to open nine new locations, including a Bloomingdale's department store at the Glendale Galleria mall this fall. Another Macy's in Pasadena on Lake Avenue will remain open. The 158,000-square-foot store being closed in Pasadena is at the Paseo Colorado shopping mall. It is slated to be shut in early spring.

Most of us consume milk. We put it on cereal and add it to coffee. We give it to our children by the glassful to build up their bones. Women are encouraged to drink it throughout adulthood to maintain those bones. We select this milk from an ever-expanding range. Milk comes in whole, reduced-fat, low-fat and no-fat versions. We have organic milk and milk labeled as coming from farms that do not use hormones. But to Northern Californian dairy farmer Ron Garthwaite, these milks aren't milk at all.

By the time Jim Haddad inherited his family's Pasadena property in the mid-1980s, the garden was in a state of neglect. His parents had stopped maintenance on the nearly 2-acre Japanese-style garden a decade earlier, when Caltrans acquired about a third of an acre by eminent domain for extension of the 710 Freeway. Plants had died. The pond had gone dry. Garden ornaments had been sold or stolen. The teahouse, overgrown with moss and weeds, had burned to the ground. PHOTOS: Historic Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden revived in Pasadena "Every real estate agent around wanted to sell off the lot in parts.

Julia Child, who would have turned 100 this year, found her life's calling only by leaving her hometown of Pasadena for China and France. Had the pioneering celebrity chef stayed in her "parochial" Pasadena, she once confided to a biographer, she might have "become an alcoholic. " Today, she would have been able to graduate from Le Cordon Bleu, the American version, without going all the way to Paris - or even leaving her hometown. In recent years, the famed culinary school has colonized more than 100,000 square feet near downtown Pasadena.

Huntington Memorial Hospital, 100 Congress St., Pasadena, has opened a pediatric urgent care clinic next to its emergency department. The clinic is open every night from 6:30 to 11:30 p.m. to provide care to children who need emergency attention. The cost is $50 per visit for a brief evaluation.

The father of Kendrec McDade , an unarmed teen robbery suspect who was shot and killed last year by Pasadena police, has filed a claim alleging he was roughed up by officers during a recent search of his home. Pasadena Police Lt. Tracey Ibarra said the department has launched an internal affairs investigation into the claim filed on behalf of Kenneth McDade by his attorney, Caree Harper, on April 30. McDade, who is seeking $10,000 in compensation, contends the incident was in retaliation for a federal civil-rights lawsuit he filed over the death of his 19-year-old son, who was shot and killed by police officers responding to a robbery call.

If Los Angeles can have a book festival -- the just-concluded Los Angeles Times Festival of Books -- and even the suburb of nearby Duarte (pop. 21,000) can have one, why not Pasadena? Pasadena is famous for the Rose Parade, Caltech and Jackie Robinson, among other things, but the city of 137,000 also has its own proud literary tradition, as the writer Larry Wilson recently reminded us. “From James M. Cain's 'Mildred Pierce' to Raymond Chandler's 'The High Window,' from John Ball's Virgil Tibbs mysteries including 'In the Heat of the Night' to Meggs Brown's macabre murder mystery 'Saturday Games,'… plenty of novels and short stories have been set in Pasadena,”  Wilson wrote recently in the Pasadena Star News.

The sounds of a live band playing and scuffling dance shoes used to flood the corner of Green Street and De Lacey Avenue in Old Town Pasadena where the Twin Palms restaurant drew a crowd every weekend. The restaurant, which has stood vacant and silent for the last four years, is reopening this summer under the same name, with a new owner. The original location, opened in the mid '90s by the late chef Michael Roberts with an investment from actor Kevin Costner, quickly became a Pasadena nightlife institution with performances by live bands.

The preservation group Pasadena Heritage takes a turn toward the Modern when it hosts a May 19 tour of six homes built after 1940. Stops will include homes by Lloyd Wright, Harold Zook, Ted Tyler and Lawrence Test, plus two houses by the iconic Midcentury firm Buff & Hensman: the 1954 Norton House and the 1983 Hamlin House. Patty Judy, the Pasadena Heritage education director who organized the lineup, said the last two stops serve as chronological bookends for Buff & Hensman's work and were the suggestion of Ted Smith, the architect who carries on the practice.

Police are beefing up security at Pasadena High School on Thursday and Friday in response to an anonymous note threatening violence on the campus, school and public safety officials said. The note did not specify who might commit violence and the writer appeared to be reporting the threat as secondhand information - “someone saying, 'I heard this,'” Pasadena Unified spokesman Adam Wolfson told the Pasadena Sun . A prerecorded telephone and email message went out to parents Wednesday night informing them about "an anonymous note" and a "threat of violence.

Veteran Southland roots rocker Dave Alvin, sonic experimentalists String Theory and Grammy-winning Latin rock group Quetzal top the bill for Saturday's free all-day South Pasadena Eclectic Music Festival and Art Walk . Alvin -- a member of the Blasters, X, the Knitters and an acclaimed solo singer-songwriter-guitarist -- will headline the Carnegie Stage at the South Pasadena Public Library, which also will host jazz pianist John Proulx, the...

Worldly synth-pop act Tanlines, atmospheric electro-pop act Yacht and politically minded dance artist Robert DeLong are among the artists slated to headline June's free Make Music Pasadena . The all-day event, set for June 1, will feature more than 150 concerts spanning indie rock, Latin music, folk and jazz, and will continue to announce participating artists in the coming weeks.  Among the more than 30 confirmed acts revealed thus far are...

Saturday in the park with Bernadette (Peters, that is) will highlight the summer season at the Los Angeles County Arboretum announced by the Pasadena Pops and its new principal conductor, Michael Feinstein. Peters, whose many starring turns on Broadway include the original production of Stephen Sondheim's “Sunday in the Park With George” in 1984, will be the headliner on June 29, with Larry Blank conducting. PHOTOS: Hollywood stars on stage Feinstein will conduct three of the five shows in the series, leading a “Michael Feinstein's Songbook” program (June 1)