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# Letter: Santa Monica Place and the Promenade's decline
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/121404-story-20041214-5/
- Published: 2004-12-14T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T05:48:16.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Promenade, #archive-import, Homeless

*By Ken C. Arnold Santa Monica* where most of the time.

Santa Monica Place’s only function now is to serve as a clean place to go to the restroom, since the city can’t afford public-airport-style restrooms on the Promenade. Yet, perhaps the city should not put in restrooms since they would soon be taken over by organized groups of professional panhandlers who reside as thick as fruit flies on rotting fruit in all the city’s once-beautiful parks. One thing can be said about tired old Santa Monica is that it’s sure beginning to show its age. The Friday night excitement has disappeared as the money-to-burn crowd has gone on to find more interesting places to stroll, shop and be seen. Santa Monica’s own big spenders seem to like shopping outside of Santa Monica. Why try to run a gauntlet of screaming, raging drunken public welfare-fed psychopaths to get to the baby store? It’s a lot easier to drive over to Culver City and do your everyday shopping there. Perhaps the oppositional groups would like to see Santa Monica Place turned into a homeless museum or extra-large rent-controlled group home for drug abusers and drunks. Think about it. How fitting. And no one is going to fly to Santa Monica from Shanghai or Tokyo to go to the Gap. They need more than that. That’s the reason the Chinese tourists don’t even stop in Los Angeles anymore, they fly straight to Las Vegas and never set foot in California. The message gets around fast when your town has nothing to offer its guests anymore. I feel that the residents of Santa Monica need to work and develop Santa Monica Place.

And I dare any of the oppositional group members to stand back and take a real good look at those two parking garages and still claim that they are not the ugliest thing they ever saw in any city in any state in any country.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 14, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/121404.pdf?ref=smdp.com)