No Cracks, Please, This Is Serious Business

Wearing sensible shoes and carrying cameras, clipboards, maps and tape measures, volunteers fanned out across Hollywood on Saturday, gathering data on the state of the famous town’s sidewalks.

Were they wide enough? In good repair? Inviting -- or at least safe -- enough to encourage pedestrians?

“The Great Hollywood Walkabout,” as organizers with Los Angeles City Councilman Eric Garcetti’s office dubbed it, aimed to find out.

“Today, we’re going to make sure we understand this city, from the ground up,” Garcetti told an enthusiastic bunch of more than 100 volunteers, who turned up for marching orders at his Hollywood field office in the morning.

Then they got to work, dividing into groups of no more than five or six.

Each group was assigned one of 41 areas of commercial streets to scour, taking photos and entering detailed notes onto five-page survey sheets.

With several redevelopment projects in the works and a revision of the community plan underway, organizers think the time has come to see what can be done to make Hollywood’s streets more pedestrian friendly.

“With all that’s going on now, we have an opportunity to look at the whole area and to reevaluate what we’re doing,” said Deborah Murphy, an urban planner and chairwoman of the city’s Pedestrian Advisory Committee.

If what one band of volunteers found is typical, there’s a long road ahead.

Heading south from Hollywood Boulevard along Western Avenue, volunteers Mott Smith, David Caley and Steven Winningham quickly found a number of problems.

Lights illuminated the street but not the sidewalks; trash lined the gutter; news racks and bus-stop signs narrowed the walkable part of the pavement, which looked in need of a thorough scrubbing.

The three volunteers watched as a man riding a motorized scooter tried to navigate a stretch of sidewalk that sloped to the right. To keep his balance, he was forced to lean left.

An abandoned mini-mart with a crumbling, fenced-off parking lot sat along one side of Western, just down from a post office with a rusting chain-link fence. Along some stretches, trees offered shade -- but their roots had buckled the sidewalk.

“That’s lovely, isn’t it?” quipped Winningham as the trio came upon a patch of sidewalk so badly deteriorated that tall weeds had pushed up through the cracks and formed a perfect trap for assorted trash.

“This is Hollywood’s crack problem, right here,” joked Smith, a developer who lives in Mount Washington and has worked on projects in several communities, including Hollywood, Silver Lake and Pasadena.

For Saturday’s walkabout, Garcetti’s office drew volunteers from several of Hollywood’s advisory neighborhood councils, business groups, urban planners and environmentalists.

Many volunteers came from other parts of Los Angeles, or even other cities, because they supported the walkabout’s goal of making things better for pedestrians.

Some just wanted to cheer on Hollywood as it undertakes a long-hoped-for comeback.

Caley, a Los Angeles County Department of Health Services liaison to community groups, said he volunteered because making streets more walkable would encourage people to exercise.

“I see this as a way of combating the problems of obesity,” he said.

Kathleen Guthrie, who brought along her yellow Labrador mix, Beau, said she lives in South Pasadena but “wanted to do my part.”

Guthrie’s friend Anne Etue said she works in Hollywood and has watched it go through a lot of changes -- from glamorous movie capital to “when it went through a seedy time” -- and now is happy to see its revitalization.

“What’s happening is amazing,” said Etue, “and I want to be a part of it.”