[M II A II R II K]

Atlantic on the move


May 13, 2012

By Christopher Hawthorne

Read More: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...8106.htmlstory

The 5600 block of Atlantic Avenue doesn't look like much at first glance, especially if you're zipping through at 45 mph. A dry cleaner, a pupuseria, a T-shirt shop and a medical marijuana dispensary line the low-rise street in the North Village Annex section of Long Beach. About a third of the storefronts are vacant. But if you climb out of the car, you'll notice that this classic commercial strip — convenient for drivers, charmless and alienating for everybody else — is in the midst of a remarkable evolution.

- The changes along Atlantic are emblematic of the way urban planners, architects, shopkeepers and neighborhood activists are remaking the boulevards of Southern California, reversing decades of neglect. The boulevard, in fact, is where the Los Angeles of the immediate future is taking shape. No longer a mere corridor to move cars, it is where L.A. is trying on a fully post-suburban identity for the first time, building denser residential neighborhoods and adding new amenities for cyclists and pedestrians. In the process, the city is beginning to shed its reputation as a place where the automobile is king — or at least where its reign goes unchallenged. Cities across the U.S. followed L.A.'s car-crazy lead in the postwar era. This time around we might provide a more enlightened example: how to retrofit a massive region for a future that is less auto-centric.

- Smaller-scale and bottom-up initiatives — pedestrian plazas, food trucks, guerrilla gardening on long-forsaken medians — are also bringing new urban energy to dozens of major streets. That transformation is the focus of a series of stories that begins with this look at Atlantic, which carves a long, gently meandering path along the eastern outskirts of Los Angeles, from Alhambra south all the way to Long Beach. "Boulevard," which comes to us from the French, shares its roots with the word "bulwark," a barricade or protective wall. In Los Angeles the boulevards have had the opposite effect, not dividing the city but stitching it together, providing a loose super-grid for the vast region. The boulevard is the only part of the built environment in Southern California that operates simultaneously at local and regional scale. It defines the neighborhood block even as it gives sprawl a spine.

- The sheer scale of L.A.'s major boulevards makes improvements along their length piecemeal and hard-won. Atlantic is 25 miles long, roughly twice the length of Manhattan. And even as more Southern Californians embrace walking and bicycling, they are finding that cities have allowed streets and especially sidewalks to crumble in recent decades. Not just in L.A. but across the U.S. we've neglected the simple act of walking for so long that we now face a patently absurd task: redesigning our streets, often at significant cost, just to make it possible for citizens to put one foot in front of the other without feeling unwelcome, unsafe or a bit eccentric. Along Atlantic, officially a boulevard along its northern stretches and an avenue further south, the dominant architecture reflects a region still in thrall to automobiles and petroleum. Its most recognizable landmarks — Dale's Donuts in Compton, for example, whose doughnut-shaped rooftop sign is nearly twice as tall as the building itself -- are designed to be glimpsed through a windshield.

- New construction on Atlantic is much more likely to be built right along the boulevard than behind a massive parking lot, as existing buildings tend to be. The Kipp Raices Academy, a 2-year-old charter school in East Los Angeles painted in various shades of green and gray, comes right out to the sidewalk. So does a Vons supermarket in downtown Long Beach recently remodeled by KKE Architects. So, with decidedly uneven architectural results, does the massive new Atlantic Times Square development in Monterey Park, which combines ground-floor shops and restaurants with 210 condos on its upper floors. It attempts to bring together the street-front energy of nearby Valley Boulevard in Alhambra, with its noodle shops and cacophony of signs in Chinese, and the upscale residential amenities and flashy lighting of Rick Caruso's Americana at Brand complex in Glendale. It is not a happy marriage.

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