People St

For decades Hollywood has exported Southern California car culture images around the world. That's changing now. Made-in-L.A. commercials, films, and videos now increasingly feature bike lanes, inverted-U bike racks, and, yes, even People St polka-dotted pedestrian plazas. From NPR via Streetfilms' Clarence Eckerson, have fun watching Yo La Tengo's 'Friday I'm In Love' video - showing L.A.'s premiere pedestrian plaza - the Sunset Triangle Park Plaza. Tomorrow we return to serious news.

Downtown L.A.'s "Broadway Dress Rehearsal" project entered a new phase last month. SBLA readers will recall that the Broadway project was a relatively quick and low-cost creation of bulb-outs designed to calm traffic. The project removed space from cars, giving it to people dining and traveling on foot on one of L.A.'s highest pedestrian-volume streets. Broadway's Dress Rehearsal opened August 2014 and every day plenty of people use it, especially the tables and chairs there. Last fall, the city Transportation Department (LADOT) published a study showing baseline conditions on Broadway; this fall LADOT will be following up with comparison data on what has changed.

"Don't tell anybody I'm using these," Councilmember Herb Wesson said of the blue art scissors he wielded as the moment came to cut the ribbon on Leimert Park Village's People St Plaza project this past Saturday.

A couple weeks ago, I reported that the great new bike corral on Main Street at 5th was the first in downtown Los Angeles. Commenter Steven White correctly pointed out that there are indeed two other on-street bike corrals in the Downtown Arts District. So although it is the first in the historic core, the Main Street corral wasn't the first downtown L.A. bike corral, nor was that my first or or likely to my last error to appear in writing.

It is noon on a Monday.

What was once an empty alley near the busy intersection of Magnolia and Lankershim Boulevards in the heart of the North Hollywood Arts District is now a public plaza with tables, chairs, green polka dots on the pavement, and sun shade.

In July 2014, according to coverage at LAist and CBS, a drunk man made off with his friend's car and, after clipping a couple of parked cars, smashed into a parklet. That parklet is located in front of Downtown Los Angeles' L.A. Cafe, on Spring Street between 6th Street and 7th Street. Sadly, since the collision, the parklet has been closed.

Los Angeles is reclaiming some car space to allocate it to walking and hanging out. Work is underway on three new plazas, located in Pacoima, North Hollywood, and South Los Angeles' Leimert Park.

Yesterday, the Los Angeles City Transportation Department (LADOT) released a new report entitled Broadway Dress Rehearsal: Pre-Installation Existing Conditions Report 2014 [PDF]. The handsome 82-page report is full of facts, figures and graphs all detailing the "safety, public life, and economic" conditions on Broadway from 2nd Street to 11th Street in downtown Los Angeles. This stretch of street is where the Broadway Dress Rehearsal project was recently completed. The streetscape project removed a traffic lane to make space for plazas which feature outdoor seating and planters.