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.

Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza plans massive expansion

A promotional display has popped up in the middle of the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza mall. On it are pretty renderings that depict what one developer hopes the downtrodden mall can transform into. The revitalization project, which is still in early planning stages, hopes to add 2.5m sf of retail, residential, office, and hotel to the existing 1m sf mall. The new mall would resemble more of an "urban village" with pedestrian pathways and access to the planned Crenshaw corridor lightrail.

In the CEQA "Notice of Preparation" document compiled by the CRA, the plan calls for 1.8m sf of retail/entertainment, 150k sf office, a 400 room hotel and about 1000 dwelling units. The majority of the newly constructed buildings would be built on what are now surface parking lots, and all parking would be concentrated in two large structures at the southwest corner of the site. From the looks of the proposed site plan, the developer is aiming for an LA Live South, complete with "public plazas," restaurants, and an "entertainment district." This will be an ambitious, even dubious, feat. Rios Clementi Hale Studios prepared the initial architectural designs. The developer is Capri Capital Partners of Chicago, who has owned the property since 2006.

The LA Sentinel reports that support for the mall addition is strong in the local area, likely because it will add investment and jobs to a part of the city that has long lacked both. But projects of this magnitude rarely get off the ground in the current economic climate, and unfortunately this project's location poses a huge hurdle to its financial feasibility. LA Live barely scraped through on its final phases, and that was with lots of public money and a pre-recession groundbreaking. The Grand Avenue project, one of the largest and most exclusive mixed-use proposals out there, is on the back burner and running out of steam. But perhaps Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza can take advantage of its under-market status. When Macy's moved out of the historic Broadway department store building in the late 1990s, Wal-Mart was quick to fill the void, and remain's the only Wal-Mart in Los Angeles and the only 3-story Wal-Mart. Developers must be careful to improve the center in a lucrative and prestigious way, while preserving the African-American identity and pride of place the mall has come to embrace.

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.