Plan Does Good Job of Portraying the Many Faces of Sunset Strip
A vision of Sunset Strip: Billboards rise up out of arcades; solid stone storefronts convey a 1920s Main Street atmosphere; towers create gateways to the Hollywood Hills while opening up at their base to allow peeks into the valley below.
That is the vision the city of West Hollywood has just presented in its draft of the Sunset Specific Plan, a planning document that is meant to guide the future development of the 1 1/2-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard between the Marlboro Man and the Beverly Hills line.
Those two geographic coordinates also represent the extremes the plan tries to reconcile. Areas such as Sunset Plaza give you the sense of a genteel enclave where you can sip cappuccino in front of Main Street-style shop fronts. Yet just a few doors down, nightclubs present their dark facades, covered with graffiti, advertisements and announcements for the latest hard rock band to a crowd that doesn’t seem to have the patience for genteel architecture. Theirs is an architecture of anonymity, of signs, and of rough edges, and it is just as much a part of what makes the Sunset Strip into such an exciting place.
The split is not just between Hollywood to the east and Beverly Hills to the west. It is also between the office buildings and apartment buildings on the Strip and the houses behind them. This part of Sunset Boulevard is both a destination for workers, dancers, and shoppers from all over Los Angeles, and the neighborhood Main Street for the small town of West Hollywood. Developers want to build larger buildings there, while local inhabitants enjoy the looseness of their environment.
The Plan does a good job in trying to give all of these users a piece of the street. It breaks the area down into separate districts and proposes that each use, whether it is shopping or partying, be encouraged. It then tries to strengthen the overall character of the place by proposing that certain sites, such as the top of La Cienega Boulevard or the place where Holloway meets Sunset, can be used for relatively tall buildings. They will be vertical exclamation points that define, anchor and enliven the horizontal experience of driving or walking down the Strip.
*
The Plan ties the ephemeral experience of the Strip, with its billboards and sign-like buildings such as the Mondrian or Ben Frank’s, back to the solid geography of the hillside site by proposing that developers be allowed to create terraced buildings moving up and down the slope, while allowing glimpses of the surroundings through view corridors, portals and courtyards. The rules will force developers to make decent buildings, even if their design is not spectacular and they are much larger than what you will now find on the street.
Only occasionally does the Plan slip into cliches about what we are these days told our cities should look like. The idea of arcades and solid facades on a street that has always been about movement, change and a mixture of glitz and tackiness seems particularly misguided, though one can understand the city’s concern about finding more space above the sidewalks on the narrow, northern lots of the strip while avoiding tacky storefronts.
I am not sure we need the median strips it proposes; this boulevard should be crowded, cramped and confusing on a Saturday night. This is not San Vicente or Wilshire Boulevard, after all, but the former outlaw territory at the edges of civilization, now reborn as the place where we test the solid fabric of morality as well as that of building. It should look like and work like what it is.
*
The Sunset Specific Plan is a serious attempt to understand and strengthen the particular qualities that make it so much fun and sometimes so frustrating to move through Los Angeles. If only part of the Plan is carried out, at least we will have a stronger and more exciting corridor of sublimated sin hugging the edges of our city.
