Getting Some Green to Sprout a Median on Larchmont Boulevard
If stars align, checks clear and bureaucracy is kind between now and April, city landscapers will crack asphalt and plant 28 jacaranda trees down the middle of Larchmont Boulevard. You probably don’t care, don’t drive on this street and maybe don’t even like jacarandas. But in my neighborhood this is a big event.
It would mean the Larchmont Median Project sped from conception to reality in three short years, the turn of a page in the life of most public projects. How did this happen? How did this little neighborhood improvement fantasy survive the bureaucratic obstacle course of City Hall? The short answer is perseverance and timing. Our project is one of dozens of grass-roots efforts--some completed, some just beginning--to spruce up the city by planting more trees along streets.
Larchmont Boulevard runs from 3rd Street north to Melrose Avenue about a mile west of Western Avenue. If you’re eating at one of its sidewalk cafes and glance up to the hills, the Hollywood sign is a straight shot to the north. The two-block shopping district bustles at lunchtime, especially with industry types from Paramount Studios. But Larchmont is also a homey Main Street with banks, a hardware store and bookshop for the larger neighborhood it inhabits, Windsor Square.
A longtime activist in that neighborhood, Linda McKnight, had been saying for years, “Why doesn’t the city install a median on Larchmont south of the business district?” In 1999, Doug Meyer and his wife, Marka, bought and renovated a Moroccan-style bungalow along the stretch McKnight had in mind. Meyer, an associate partner with Altoon & Porter Architects, envisioned the same thing and started sketching plans before he even moved in. At a meeting of the Windsor Square Assn. one night, he asked why there wasn’t a median already. People responded, “You have to talk to Linda McKnight.”
Together, they pushed this project, and good instincts provided wind at their backs. That Meyer is an architect who knew to sketch his idea first helped unify the neighborhood. That McKnight is well-known and well-liked helped attract people to endless meetings. That both sat on the government-savvy (and flush) board of the Windsor Square Assn. helped immeasurably. My involvement began seven months ago when I volunteered to help raise $45,000 in private money, which is one of the last pieces still falling into place.
“Usually, when a community comes to us, they don’t know what they want,” said Gil Flores, a veteran landscape architect for the city’s Bureau of Street Services. “Doug, with his expertise, roughed out some designs, so we had the guidelines. This was a slam dunk.”
It may have seemed that way to him, but not to those of us who worked on the project. We’dread news stories about public money for parks, but no one was aware that medians and street trees were sprouting all over L.A., from Crenshaw Boulevard to Sherman Way in the San Fernando Valley.
Jacarandas now shade Wilshire Boulevard near the Veterans Administration Hospital in Westwood; acacias line Century Boulevard near the airport. The state just gave the Sherman Oaks Homeowners’ Assn. $50,000 to plant trees along Ventura Boulevard. The Fashion District and Chinatown are about to get new street trees and is Sunland Boulevard in Sun Valley. West Hollywood’s Santa Monica Boulevard face-lift included the planting of hundreds of Chinese elms.
Flores’ office in the Bureau of Street Services is working on 24 projects now with $18 million from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. His staff is overwhelmed. The mayor’s office has $42 million to spend over four years through its Targeted Neighborhood Initiative program.
The reason for this sudden greening of Los Angeles is the availability of funds. When city planting was put on hold during the drought 10 years ago, money was budgeted elsewhere. A recession followed, and little was done until the late ‘90s.
You can now get public grants for anywhere from $500 to $1 million for street trees, landscaping, murals, street furniture and other beautification ideas. Grant givers range from the MTA to the city’s Operation Clean Sweep.
Susan Yackley, a deputy to the late City Council President John Ferraro, said Angelenos are using the money to give neighborhoods the quick, inexpensive face-lift that street trees provide. “A lot of neighborhoods started finding out they could get a little bit of money, and it always seemed like their choice was to add more trees,” said Yackley, who nurtured the Larchmont project for two years.
McKnight and Meyer got their joint inspiration for a landscaped median because the drought killed many of the ficuses that lined the two residential blocks of Larchmont Boulevard between South 1st and 3rd streets. The streetscape had gaping holes, many lawns were brown, and the street looked sun-baked and tired. A median would also slow traffic along what had become a straightaway into the village. The street’s center traffic lane has been empty since the trolley tracks were paved over about 50 years ago.
Meyer felt a median would visually connect Larchmont to the leafier neighborhood of Windsor Square.
“I knew from my own experience as an architect that we would need a visual to communicate what we were trying to do,” said Meyer, who also helped pioneer the revitalization of the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. His sketches inspired the Windsor Square Assn. to back the median, which was pivotal. Another neighbor, Damon Hein, created computer-generated before and after images that ran on the front page of the area’s monthly newspaper, the Larchmont Chronicle. Those pictures helped cement support from neighbors along the two blocks of Larchmont Boulevard. Almost 75% signed petitions for the median, despite the dogged opposition of a small minority. They argued that the median would limit residents’ access to the opposite side of the street.
“The professional-looking visuals that brought this thing to life gave it life,” said Jane Usher, president of the Windsor Square Assn. “People didn’t have to rely so much on their imagination.”
When Meyer took his sketches to the city Department of Transportation the reaction was less enthusiastic. They liked the project. But, because their work is funded through grants, engineers couldn’t even investigate the project’s feasibility without money up front. Discouraged, Meyer went to the Windsor Square board.
Because Meyer had done a lot of the work already, the city lowered its fee for an engineering study from $16,000 to $14,000. The board advanced the money, with the understanding it would be returned to the treasury by private fund-raising.
The vote was unanimous, and the board set up a nonprofit escrow account for donations through the California Community Foundation.
Meanwhile, Meyer and McKnight continued going to meeting after meeting with Yackley and various professionals at City Hall. They met Flores, the landscape architect, just after he gained the authority to not only design and build projects, but write grant proposals. Yackley suggested they apply together for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority grant.
Its two-year funding cycle was, luckily, just beginning. If there are no surprises, the median will cost between $246,000 and $268,000. That covers curbing, landscaping, irrigation, trees, soil and a stone monument that lists donor names. It’s a tiny sum compared to most public street projects. Every other program on Flores’ docket is on a major thoroughfare and got powerful backing from city councilmen and/or businesses. Some were million-dollar projects. At the time Yackley and Flores applied for the Larchmont grant, there was no supporting business district (and still isn’t), and Ferraro, our district representative, couldn’t lobby for it because he was terminally ill. Still, the neighborhood’s financial commitment and Yackley and Flores’ blessings weighed in the project’s favor. The MTA granted the project $199,000 in July but required the neighborhood to raise $69,000 privately. If the project costs less than $268,000, the Windsor Square Assn. uses the difference for repairs and maintenance. When I volunteered to raise private money, we had $25,000 in the escrow account--raised through direct-mail--and still owed the Windsor Square board $14,000 for the initial drawings. Later, the board forgave the loan by donating three trees in Ferraro’s name.
I formed a fund-raising committee of 15 neighbors and started talking up the median as much as possible. We created many levels of donations and promised recognition on a plaque to anyone who gave us $100 or more. Those who donated $5,000 would have trees named for them and those who donated $1,000 would get cobblestones engraved with their names.
Right away, the local garden club and historical society each bought trees, which made us giddy. Meyer’s daughter, Ingrid, is a graphic designer who created a lovely letterhead for us pro bono. We sent personal fund-raising letters to friends whom we felt would want to donate; we also applied for grants from private foundations with mixed results.
Slowly, the money trickled in. A friend wrote me a check for $900 on the street one day and I tried to act nonchalant, but was secretly in awe. A sister and brother pledged $5,000 in the name of their grandmother, who had lived on Larchmont for 40 years; they wanted the tree in front of her house named for her. Mayor Jim Hahn, as city attorney, donated $7,500 from a fund that collects restitution for environmental crimes and pays them back to the damaged community. A nearby housing complex had paid that amount in fines over an oil spill from a garage.
We’re waiting with fingers crossed for the last few pledged donations. We hope the timeline for the MTA grant can be moved from 2004-05 to the current fiscal year. Meanwhile, the city has written the project into its construction schedule for next spring. Flores’ gorgeous landscaping plans are rolled up and waiting.
We’ve received 175 donations since December, most of them $100 checks from neighbors. That so many friends and neighbors sat down and wrote checks for the median, too, makes me feel connected to them, rooted in this city on a deep level.
We had no television ads, no banners, no celebrity spokespeople, no gala events; we couldn’t afford it. Instead, very quietly, this community of a few thousand people in a big city quietly joined together to plant trees.
