The Grove, still our city center

In an eye-catching display combining social media, outdoor advertising, and pedestrian involvement, the Canada Tourism Bureau has set up shop in vacant storefronts in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, to show a new generation of prospective American travellers all the wonders of our northern neighbor, via live Twitter and Facebook updates from actual visitors. The choice of our three largest cities is quite obvious, but their locations therein less so. They would have to choose locations that not only feature the most pedestrian traffic, but the ones that are most high-profile, in order to garner wider attention, like from the media. So Times Square for obvious reasons in New York, and Chicago's Michigan Ave is that city's main ritzy shopping thoroughfare.

And for LA? None other than the Grove - that much-debated yet much-loved outdoor mall cum public place that is still a huge metric of our urban identity, eight years after its completion. The Canadian bureau's decisioin to invest there poses a great reminder that the Grove is the sort of place we Angelenos like to spend our time and our money, especially given the recent high-profile openings of pseudo-urban mega-places like LA Live and the Hollywood W hotel TOD. The Grove is a civic space as much as it is a shopping mall - we go there to people-watch, to walk our dogs, to work on our laptops, and to grab a bite to eat. But it is a privately built and privately maintained civic space - devoid of the riff-raff we might find at actual public places, and unfortunately devoid of much of the character as well.

When Caruso Affiliated proposed the project early last decade, there were many questions - what would happen to the farmer's market? (it is flourishing), do people actually want to live above shopping centers? (largely no), and what's next? Well, to date the Grove has easily been Caruso's greatest success, with the Americana of Glendale a fairly big disappointment. And the formerly drab Santa Monica Place will reopen this Summer to resemble more closely its crowded but breezy neighbor, the 3rd St. Promenade, another popular urban space in the hands of national chain stores. So if it takes profit-minded developers to build our city's places, and if we are content paying for these places ourselves, through spending rather than taxes, then I see no problem with our urban spaces looking or feeling different from the more traditional ones in older cities. So it goes - what's good enough for Canada is good enough for us.

Santa Monica plans second freeway cap park

Santa Monica City Council approved a proposal to cap an additional portion of the 10 freeway on Tuesday. This second cap park would be over the freeway slot between Ocean Ave and 4th St. The decision comes just months after another park was approved over the Santa Monica Freeway between 14th and 17th Sts. But that project is still in early feasibility stages. This latest development brings the number of LA area freeway cap parks under consideration to 4 - the others over the 101 in Hollywood and Downtown.

City leaders hope a park bridge over this section of the freeway would help create a stronger pedestrian connection between the Third Street shopping area, the pier, and the newly revitalizing civic center. The freeway segment is already conveniently "cut" about 20 ft below ground, but is still exposed to the open air. At Ocean Ave, the freeway briefly tunnels below Ocean Park and the entrance to the pier, before emerging again as the Pacific Coast Highway along the beach. By extending the tunneled portion of the freeway, both parks might also benefit from larger green spaces and greater pedestrian access. The park would also be convenient to the Expo light rail station planned for Colorado Ave and 4th St.

The approval allows spending of ~$300,000 for a feasibility study and ~$3m for initial engineering. Local planning and engineering firm AECOM is charged with conducting the preliminary study and will present its findings to the council within 3 months. The park has been a pipe dream of the city's since at least 1999.

The added land, which is in the super-prime center of Santa Monica, would be more valuable than the cost of capping the freeway. Besides the obvious mitigation of the visual and aural impacts of the freeway, and the shifting of transportation priority from freeways to public transit, projects like this are significant case studies in the frontier of "land creation." As suburban sprawl has lost its appeal in the aftermath of recent economic and environmental events, developers are looking to disprove the old adage 'you can't build more land.' Freeways occupy huge expanses of our built environment, often in inefficient ways. Where freeways have been dug below ground, or where they pass through expensive land, there can be innumerable benefits from capping or reclaiming that ugly and wasteful infrastructure. Santa Monica's experiments should be watched closely by civic leaders and developers everywhere.

Source: Santa Monica Daily Press

Santa Monica Demos Parking in Favor of Greener Alternative

Parking structures at 1200 4th St. and 1400 2nd St. will be demolished in accordance with a $1 million spending package approved by Santa Monica's City Council Tuesday night. As part of a contract with construction firm Morley Builders, two larger, "greener" structures will take their place. The new structures will incorporate solar power, ground floor retail, bike parking, and public restrooms. They will also increase capacity by 250 cars each.

The two structures, which are the smallest of the area's six city-owned structures, were built as part of the city's plan to attract downtown retailers by eliminating parking requirements. The arrangement has been extremely successful, especially at Third Street Promenade, where high-end retailers clamor to lease the pricey spots. It has also led to a dense, walkable downtown that isn't plagued by unsightly ground parking like so many other Southern California shopping districts. Long a practitioner of so-called smart parking, Santa Monica is also home to a new parking structure at its civic center, so innovative and handsome it has been featured in a spread of Architectural Record.

Also on the voting sheet Tuesday night was an option to increase the city's bandwidth to bolster WiFi hot spot coverage. With its small area and fat pockets, Santa Monica may well be the first Southern California municipality to offer citywide wireless coverage, so far a distinction claimed only by Google's Bay Area hometown of Mountain View.

Santa Monica Place Reopening Further Delayed

Santa Monica Place, the unfortunate early-Gehry-designed covered shopping mall that anchors the southern end of the Third Street Promenade, has delayed its reopening even further into 2010. The Macerich Company is the developer on the remodel, and announced this week an "official" opening date of August 6, 2010 - significantly later than the earlier planned Spring 2010 and 2009 before that.

The company, which purchased the property in 1999, originally planned to raze the existing mall and replace it with a multi-use complex of condos, offices, and retail. This 2004 plan was met with strong opposition from locals however, who felt the megalomaniacal development would be out of scale with the surrounding neighborhood and worsen already bad beach and promenade traffic. In 2007, they modified the proposal to a simple reconfiguration of the existing mall, which was ardently supported by the community.

While construction on the site looks horrendous, the project really is just a glamorized remodel. The interior walkways have been gutted and will be replaced by open-air walkways. Also new will be an indoor/outdoor rooftop dining terrace a la Westfield Century City but more upscale. Locals and visitors will be happy to see what was once a depressing, placeless mall turned into a welcoming promenade-like shopping center more in tune with Santa Monica weather and culture. And through adaptive reuse to boot. Expect to pay for it though - anchor tenants Macy's and Robinson's May have been replaced with Bloomingdale's and Nordstrom.