Cities Look to the Streets to Improve Their Images
Adding landscaped medians on Wilshire and Ventura boulevards would have seemed like lunacy to city engineers just a few years ago. Replacing traffic lanes with angle parking in Arcadia and San Gabriel might have triggered honks of protests. Spending big bucks throughout Southern California for fancy crosswalks, pedestrian lighting and neighborhood gateways could have seemed strange choices.
After all, isn’t this the region where car is king? Where no obstacle shall hinder the monarch’s speed?
Times are changing. Even if the auto rules Southern California, many neighborhoods are planning to rebel a tad, or at least offer succor to two-legged challengers.
The evidence, planners say, is the unprecedented amount of so-called streetscape projects under construction or being designed throughout Los Angeles County and its neighbors. Millions of federal and local tax dollars, along with private funds, are being invested in new--and radically different--sidewalks, street lamps, plantings and parking arrangements.
The new streetscapes are supposed to encourage pedestrian life and foster neighborhood identities amid Southern California’s repetitive and sometimes-ugly sprawl. Another goal is to help aging retail streets compete against private malls and walkabouts like Old Pasadena, Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade and CityWalk at Universal City.
“What’s happening is that a lot of shopping areas want to capture the pedestrian qualities that have been proven elsewhere,” said Con Howe, planning director for the city of Los Angeles.
Reba Wright-Quastler, California chapter president of the American Planning Assn., thinks the movement is a rebellion against uniformity and chain stores. “If we all have the same stores, maybe the streets can be different,” said Wright-Quastler, planning director in Poway in San Diego County. “The most successful cities are the ones that have recognizable neighborhoods.”
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Some cities question whether the beautification work is merely cosmetic, too superficial to counter economic and social trends favoring auto-dominated suburbs. Others debate details such as sidewalk widths and whether trees will block shop signs. The answers, in brick and California fan palms, will be increasingly visible over the next year or so.
For example, a March 30 celebration is scheduled for completion of Arcadia’s $8-million overhaul of Huntington Drive and 1st Avenue, with antique-style street lamps and stone planters. Construction is scheduled to begin by summer on Wilshire Boulevard’s $6-million face-lift between Hoover Street and Wilton Place, including landscaped islands and 38-foot-high Art Deco pillars announcing the Wilshire Center area in neon. The Los Angeles City Council later this year will start reviewing designs for 17 miles of Ventura Boulevard, down to a jungle motif of tipu trees, monkey silhouettes on street lamps and a giraffe statue on sidewalks in Tarzana, where “Tarzan” author Edgar Rice Burroughs lived.
Planning has begun for new streetscapes in Westwood Village, on Santa Monica’s Main Street and near the revived Angels Flight in Downtown Los Angeles. Mayor Richard Riordan’s Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative is sprucing up portions of eight bus route boulevards, from Leimert Park to Sun Valley to Boyle Heights. West Hollywood is about to extend its much-praised pedestrian lighting--blue poles with globes that illuminate the sidewalk--along westerly Santa Monica Boulevard. Proposed designs for six other pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods make up the “Living in Los Angeles” exhibit opening this week at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park.
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Such work and many others are a big change from the redevelopment that demolished neighborhoods a generation ago. Federal and state funding now encourage less disruptive efforts like streetscape improvements, particularly linked to mass transit. The trend is strengthened by the rise of business improvement districts, in which local property owners and merchants tax themselves.
“These are definitely more doable than giant redevelopment or renewal projects and the price tags are more digestible,” said Santa Monica-based architect John Kaliski. “They are more immediate and visible than others and that makes them more popular with politicians and citizens.” He recently worked on plans for nine blocks of Santa Monica’s Main Street, which include four gateway arches over the roadway and the addition of medians.
“I think people really recognize now that there is a connection between the psychic health of a place and its physical condition,” he added.
The competition to draw Californians out of their homes and cars is made tougher by the Internet and cable television, according to architect Douglas Suisman. “We are seeing the end of mandatory urbanism. Now we have optional urbanism. So the public needs to have a reason to choose this public urban experience over another,” he said. His firm, Public Works Design, is redesigning Hill Street around Angels Flight and is consulting on Riordan’s project.
Skeptics, however, complain that new trees and bus benches are not enough to turn a street around. They point to the eye-catching overhaul two years ago of Hollywood Boulevard; it won good reviews for dramatic new palm trees and theatrical lighting, but could not overcome the area’s many other problems. In fact, a few new boulevard benches were pulled out after merchants protested that the seats attracted troublemakers.
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Streetscape boosters insist current designs will be bolstered by economic development, advertising, maintenance, policing and anti-vandalism programs. They stress that even Old Pasadena and the Third Street Promenade struggled for years before learning those lessons and, then, winning new movie theaters and better security.
“The trees are nothing but a catalyst, not an end to itself,” Gary Russell, project manager of the Wilshire Center streetscape improvements, said as he pointed to newly planted date palms and camphor trees on the boulevard. “It’s a beginning to give people hope. If you don’t see things are happening, people will walk away.”
That part of Wilshire was battered by office vacancies and disruptive subway construction. Icons of past elegance, all now empty, line the street: Bullocks Wilshire, I. Magnin, the Ambassador Hotel, the Sheraton Townhouse. Renewal hopes are pinned on this summer’s opening of three Red Line subway stations in the neighborhood. “This place called Wilshire Center lost its identity,” Russell added. “We will use the streetscape to start creating that again.”
There are doubters. “A tree is a tree. It’s better than no tree at all. They could pave the street in gold. I don’t care what they do,” shrugged Robert Rozdial, owner of Alexander’s Shoe Store on Wilshire Boulevard. He, too, gestured toward new palms outside the shop door: “If the economy around here stays so bad, it doesn’t matter what they put in.”
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Just three years ago, the city of Los Angeles wanted to widen the Wilshire roadway by reducing sidewalks. City engineers not only abandoned the idea but finally agreed to allow construction of medians, which improve the pedestrian flavor but can obstruct motorists’ views. Medians proposed for Santa Monica’s Main Street provoked similar controversy.
“I think the engineers are looking at those requests with more of an open eye,” said James Okazaki, a Los Angeles transportation department official. “In the old days the department was used to saying no, no, no.”
Likewise, angle parking was installed in San Gabriel’s mission district two years ago despite some grumbling about traffic flow. In Arcadia, 1st Avenue merchants report new diagonal parking and stop signs boost sales by slowing cars and drawing attention to shops.
“It totally changed the energy on the street. It created a lot more activity,” said Margaret Pappas, owner of the Back on the Rack boutique. While a muddy construction site remains outside her door, she hopes the new pastel sidewalks and 1920s-style street lamps will encourage area landlords to fix up facades and attract tenants to vacant stores.
The Arcadia project has suffered political squabbles, labor strikes and lawsuits between the city and a former contractor. Costs rose sharply to $8 million, about half of which was needed for storm drains and other non-streetscape items.
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The price intensified criticism about the plan’s premise, said opponent Robert Harbicht, a former Arcadia city councilman who is running again for the office. Contending that the area will never compete well against shopping malls, he suggests the city encourage more non-retail business, like insurance and escrow firms, to move in. Those offices don’t need fancy amenities for sidewalk strolling.
The Arcadia work mainly uses local redevelopment funds, plus gas and water tax money. In many other cases, federal transportation programs are involved, notably the unfortunately named Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA). The theory is that passengers will want a pleasant environment when they get off the train or bus.
“It shows how a huge federal initiative trickles down, how much funding can change patterns,” architect Suisman said.
Self-financing by business districts in Wilshire Center, Westwood, Santa Monica and the Ventura Boulevard corridor will help pay for improvements and maintenance. For example, fees along Main Street may average from $200 to $1,000 a year, said restaurateur David Teck, chairman of the local assessment board there. “In the long run it’s going to be a new and groovy Main Street,” said the owner of the World Cafe, “but somebody’s got to pay for it.”
