Letters From Here

Here at Chez Jay in Santa Monica, where big-name Hollywood wined and dined, it might as well be 1966. But change is coming to this tiny dive bar with the king-size reputation.

Just steps from Chez Jay’s back door and that bar porthole, the city of Santa Monica is building a multi-acre park with picnic tables, hills, playgrounds and two steel observation decks with views of the ocean and the pier. Nearby, more than 300 condos and rental apartments and shops are rising at the $350-million Village at Santa Monica. In 2015, the Expo Line light rail will roll into town.

City officials envision a family-friendly, alfresco eatery to go with the new development.

Chez Jay’s owners hope their 53-year-old landmark restaurant will fill the bill. They are pondering a $1.5-million makeover to create an outdoor patio where visitors could order burgers, fries and ice cream cones (but no alcohol) at a walk-up window. The outmoded 150-square-foot kitchen would become a private dining room. A modernand much bigger kitchen would be built closer to the park. They plan to submit a proposal to the city.

Downtown Los Angeles has changed dramatically in the past dozen years from being known as a high-rise office park ringed by poverty to an actual neighborhood where thousands live and more come to play.

Back when I lived in Los Angeles, I would often take guests visiting from out of town on private sightseeing tours around the city. Inevitably, during the downtown portion of the tour, they would marvel at the postapocalyptic emptiness of the streets and sidewalks. How, they would ask, could the urban core of one of the world’s biggest and most culturally significant cities be so utterly devoid of energy, of street life, of any life?

This question is at the heart of Walkable City, a new book by Jeff Speck, a city planner. Speck operates as something of an itinerant pathologist, traveling around the country helping cities fix their most intractable health problems: out-of-control congestion, unsafe streets and sidewalks, the vexing puzzles of parking policy.

Keep reading here.

Los Angeles resident Alissa Walker makes her living writing about urban planning and architecture.

She gave up her car six years ago and she walks, bikes, and uses public transit. And she’s not alone: a national study used by city planners estimates that 17% of all trips in Los Angeles County are made on foot. In fact, Los Angeles ranks just behind Portland, Oregon in walkability according to Walkscore.

Great piece about Crenshaw (in L.A.) by Christopher Hawthorne

I’ve spent plenty of time on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, in the more glamorous precincts of central Los Angeles, but during a decade’s worth of visits with my wife to both sides of the “hill” — as those mountains, and the perceived cultural divide they represent, are affectionately known — I’ve come to an interesting conclusion: I tend to prefer the Valley. Sure, it’s got strip malls and strip clubs in equal abundance, and it lacks the chic cachet that so many people associate with Los Angeles. But that lack of hipness is exactly its charm.