By Joseph Hanania
Ms. Sackariason’s piece on the survey of the Promenade was quite interesting, (SMDP, Dec. 9, page 1). Especially interesting was the idea of converting the alleys on either side of the Promenade to areas which could be decorated with murals and used by cafes now being forced out of the Promenade by escalating rents.
In her classic book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Jane Jacobs made several points which went contrary to then popular belief. One of those points was that a street’s attractiveness to the public had less to do with fancy decor and more with the mixture of activities taking place on that street. The more active a street — or public square — is, the more attractive it is to the general population.
Extrapolating from her book to Los Angeles, Rodeo Drive may be the single most glamorous street in the Southland — but it is also one of the most boring, especially at night. Jacobs also pointed out, narrower streets — or alleys — by their concentration can be more lively than wider boulevards.
Walk around some of the narrower streets of Old Town Pasadena, and this is self-evident. Glamour is not the same as liveliness. And it is that sense of liveliness stemming from a mixture of populations, old and young, ethnic and not, rich and poor, which we need to cultivate, once more, in Santa Monica.
One of the reasons I moved to Santa Monica many years ago was the lunch counter at J.J. Newberry’s, at the corner of Third and Arizona. Glamorous, it wasn’t. Real and with an interesting mix of people, it very much was.
I also loved Woolworth’s and the International Food Court, the latter near Broadway, for precisely these reasons. Do we really have to give away our city’s cultural, ethnic, and economically diverse richness in the name of “progress?”
A very small piece of the puzzle might be a dropping of the puritanical ban on bicycles on the Promenade. Why do we only allow the police to use bicycles on the Promenade? Don’t bicycles used by the rest of us also have hand brakes? Are the cops really so much safer for pedestrians than are other bicyclists? And wouldn’t adding bicyclists to the mix of populations help enliven the Promenade?
For those of us who don’t remember what the Promenade used to look like, a trip to nearby Westwood Village, with its mixture of individually owned stores, restaurants, and the like could help give us more of a vision of what we want here.
Otherwise, we’ll turn into another Rodeo Drive. And, I suspect, even the denizens of that famous street tend to find it — dare we say it? — boring.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 11, 2003. Read the original PDF.