LOS ANGELES | METRO Project Rundown 2.0 (non-downtown)

[LosAngelesBeauty]

edluva just has a love hate relationship with LA like how so many of us do. He obviously loves it and is just OCD about it and wants LA to be like the way other walking cities across the world are including New York, Tokyo, etc.

I feel that way too and many times as I know LA must have the transit in place before density can really be embraced and then the walking lifestyle becomes mainstay in West Central LA. All that is coming, though, fortunately, with the Purple Line extension, Downtown Connector, Expo Line to Santa Monica, Crenshaw Line up to Weho connecting LAX, Green Line to South Bay, Gold Line to Monclair and Whittier, and streetcars, dedicated bus lanes, etc. etc.

NIMBYs have prevented LA from densifying as they file lawsuits every chance they get to stop or scale back projects (as seen in Hollywood, West Hollywood, Westwood, Santa Monica, etc.).

If there is any blame here, it is the "neighborhood associations" that finance the attorneys who then challenge developers in court, delaying projects, and preventing LA from becoming the kind of city we all want: sustainable, pedestrian and transit oriented, energetic, amazing, a city to be proud of, etc. etc.

Beverly Hills is a "great" example of that as they try to do everything in their power to dilute our transit system by selfishly lobbying for a Santa Monica Blvd. station as opposed to Constellation, which would reduce ridership numbers (unless the LA Country Club were developed in the future as dense as Century City, which would then put the station in the "center" again).

[pesto]

LAB: generally agree, but the BH comments are incomplete. They are talking about moving the station one block. But I don't want to go through that discussion again.

And BH has significant medium rise density and a central core ("the Golden Triangle") that is very pedestrian friendly and frequently used. If there is a Union Sq. equivalent in LA, it is Rodeo and the surrounding streets (upscale shopping, cafes, hotels, world-class restaurants and it will be getting a subway stop as well).

More generally, while I agree that areas like Hollywood are needlessly slowed by local groups, I don't want developers to plunk 20 story towers into sfh neighborhoods either. The system has to work more quickly but it shouldn't be scrapped.

[DistrictDirt]

Originally Posted by sopas ej

To go briefly off topic, since we're talking about fast food, has anyone else tried Five Guys burgers? I had it for the very first time a few months ago. I thought it was good, but somewhat pricey, and I can't put my finger on it, but something about the burger was missing. It needed a signature sauce, or something, like In-N-Out-- speaking of which, I think In-N-Out has nothing to worry about when it comes to Five Guys.

I've eaten my fair share of Five Guys. Its originally from Arlington, VA, across the river from DC. They're going for basically the same thing as In-N-Out- burgers made from fresh ingredients without the preservatives and chemical 🞵🞵🞵🞵 that lower-end fast food like McDonalds use. For my money, In-N-Out burgers are better, but the Five Guys fries absolutely kill In-N-Outs, which I find to be not greasy enough and well, too healthy (If I'm eating at a fast food spot, clearly I'm not worried about my diet that day. Make my fries greasy and salty! )

The comparison of the respective business strategies of these two chains is interesting. Five Guys has undergone extremely rapid growth over the past 5 years, growing from a local DC chain to a coast-to-coast juggernaut. In-N-Out on the other hand, seems intent on keeping down the number of locations, and sticking to the West Coast. Perhaps to maintain their cult status?

Anyway, I can't help but think In-N-Out blew a big opportunity for expansion. Both chains are going after the same market, and Five Guys is just gobbling up In-N-Out's possible customers, coast to coast. If they decide to expand the way Five Guys has now, their going up against the thousands of Five Guys locations, already in place and with a base of loyal customers.

Food for thought. Pun intended.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

Originally Posted by pesto

LAB: generally agree, but the BH comments are incomplete. They are talking about moving the station one block. But I don't want to go through that discussion again.

And BH has significant medium rise density and a central core ("the Golden Triangle") that is very pedestrian friendly and frequently used. If there is a Union Sq. equivalent in LA, it is Rodeo and the surrounding streets (upscale shopping, cafes, hotels, world-class restaurants and it will be getting a subway stop as well).

More generally, while I agree that areas like Hollywood are needlessly slowed by local groups, I don't want developers to plunk 20 story towers into sfh neighborhoods either. The system has to work more quickly but it shouldn't be scrapped.

The only "problem" with that kind of thinking is MANY, MANY parts of LA ARE made up of SFRs so that ubiquitous presence of lower density prevents "20-story towers" from being built anywhere. Which keeps LA choked with traffic and dysfunctional, all so people can live in their houses and drive everywhere on congested streets, bitching and moaning, flipping people off and succumbing to road rage. What a greeeeeeeeeat city!


The fact that a proposed 5-story building on La Cienega brings out the pitch forks from neighborhood associations because it "encroaches" into the SFR's territory is absolutely ridiculous and embarrassing.

Luxe @ 375 project via Curbed LA


I really don't care about the areas OUTSIDE of West Central remaining suburban (at this point) because they are essentially the "suburbs" anyway, but INSIDE the heart of West Central (like La Cienega and Westmount where Luxe @ 375 is), there should not be the kind of knee-jerk resistance from NIMBYs that perpetuate the miserable existence of LA drivers, and preventing any substantial portion of all this sprawling mess to make urban coherent sense.

[Kingofthehill]

Infill in Hollywood and West Hollywood, all taken today:

[SD_Phil]

For being boxes a lot of these are actually quite nice. Maybe they won't be in 10 years but right now these are all quite livable even the crazy Nickelodean orange one. #4 is the plainest here but the one with the solar panels on display is quite neat as is the (apparently) aluminum one.

[Illithid Dude]

I like the orange one the best as it is the only one with no stucco. And I hate stucco.

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by DistrictDirt

I've eaten my fair share of Five Guys. Its originally from Arlington, VA, across the river from DC. They're going for basically the same thing as In-N-Out- burgers made from fresh ingredients without the preservatives and chemical 🞵🞵🞵🞵 that lower-end fast food like McDonalds use. For my money, In-N-Out burgers are better, but the Five Guys fries absolutely kill In-N-Outs, which I find to be not greasy enough and well, too healthy (If I'm eating at a fast food spot, clearly I'm not worried about my diet that day. Make my fries greasy and salty! )

The comparison of the respective business strategies of these two chains is interesting. Five Guys has undergone extremely rapid growth over the past 5 years, growing from a local DC chain to a coast-to-coast juggernaut. In-N-Out on the other hand, seems intent on keeping down the number of locations, and sticking to the West Coast. Perhaps to maintain their cult status?

Anyway, I can't help but think In-N-Out blew a big opportunity for expansion. Both chains are going after the same market, and Five Guys is just gobbling up In-N-Out's possible customers, coast to coast. If they decide to expand the way Five Guys has now, their going up against the thousands of Five Guys locations, already in place and with a base of loyal customers.

Food for thought. Pun intended.

I like In-N-Out's fries, they remind me of homemade fries, at least the way I've made them/had them at home.

My understanding was that In-N-Out is still a family-run chain with no desire to trade publicly or franchise any of its locations. I think that's why they're only on the west coast? They used to be located only in southern California, not even up north. I think if they expanded, their quality would go down.

At this point, it seems (to me, anyway) that Five Guys has a ways to go in saturating the SoCal market. To me, Five Guys is just as high-profile as Sonic Drive-In, a burger chain that has thousands of locations, I've heard, throughout the US, but only about a handful in the Los Angeles area.

[StethJeff]

Another interesting addition to Exposition Park. Along with the Expo station, sports arena makeover, eventual upgrades to the Coliseum, gald to see some attention is being given to this part of LA. So much potential in that area.
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$13-million gift boosts Natural History Museum's footprint

The donation to the Los Angeles County's Natural History Museum, the largest from the Otis Booth Foundation, will go toward an expansive glass entrance pavilion that will have as its centerpiece a 63-foot-long fin whale.


By Mike Boehm, Los Angeles Times

January 5, 2011

A 63-foot-long fin whale, one of the biggest skeletons owned by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, will become its public greeter, the museum announced Tuesday, in a new brightly lit glass entrance pavilion made possible by a $13-million gift.

"It's a major statement. It's beckoning and saying, 'Come in and see who we are,'" said Jane Pisano, the museum's president.

The Otis Booth Pavilion, named for the successful investor and former Los Angeles Times executive who was one of the museum's most influential funders and board members before his death in 2008, will replace what Pisano described as an "ugly, dark, barricading" array of steps and walls that had faced Exposition Boulevard. In their place, in time for the museum's 2013 centennial, will rise an architectural signpost that museum leaders say will figure prominently in their bid to boost annual attendance from about 600,000 at the site to more than 1 million, and to spur the $51 million in additional donations needed to fully fund the museum's six-year makeover. The design is by CO Architects, the same L.A. firm that has handled the rest of the renovation project.

Museum leaders have known for decades that the building — actually a series of connected structures that have been added piecemeal to the original graceful domed building that opened in 1913 — needed a commanding entrance, said Paul Haaga Jr., who has been on the board since 1993 and is now its chairman. But in planning the makeover, which began in 2007 and bore its first fruit last summer with the reopening of the restored 1913 building and the popular new Age of Mammals exhibit, officials had decided that a dramatic entrance would increase the cost beyond what they could reasonably expect to raise.

They put off the new entrance until fundraising was finished for the current $135-million "NHM Next" campaign that also includes a new Dinosaur Hall scheduled to open in July, and new indoor and outdoor exhibits focused on nature in Los Angeles that are expected to be finished by the end of 2012.

But when Franklin Otis Booth Jr. died at 84 from Lou Gehrig's disease, part of the fortune he'd made as a ground-floor investor in Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. went toward establishing a new, L.A.-based charitable foundation whose portfolio currently stands at about $190 million.

The $13 million, which will be paid out over three years, becomes the fledgling Otis Booth Foundation's biggest gift, said Palmer Murray, Booth's son-in-law and the foundation's vice president and treasurer.

Murray said that Booth, a great-grandson of Los Angeles Times founder Harrison Gray Otis, left no instructions for the foundation's grant-making. Given Booth's decades of devotion to the Natural History Museum, Murray said, "it became clear to us this is something we have to be involved in." While going over the possibilities with museum leaders, he said, "the fin whale really piqued our interest," because it would give the building "the physical identity it had lacked" along its only major street frontage, creating both a physical and symbolic bridge to the world outside the museum by beckoning with an impressive example of the sights and knowledge to be had within.

In fact, there will be an actual bridge between the world and the entrance pavilion. Its pilings are already starting to rise from the fenced-in expanse of dirt that is currently the museum's front yard. As the 60-foot-high pavilion goes up, 3.5 acres of park-like "urban wilderness," intended to serve as a "living laboratory" of L.A.'s plants, insects, birds and small animals, will take shape directly outside, along with a landscaped amphitheater.

Except for the four years when the 1913 building was being renovated, the fin whale has been on continuous display since 1944. That's when curators finished studying and preparing the creature acquired from a Humboldt County whaling concern in 1926. It currently hangs as the sole occupant of a long, dramatically-lit gallery that's been dubbed the "fin whale passage," leading from the museum's central indoor plaza to the rotunda. When the whale assumes its new position as the museum's frontispiece, the "passage" will become a gallery devoted to Los Angeles history and nature.

The benefits of having a well-known identifying symbol or trademark attraction are well known to leaders of the Natural History Museum. While the main museum in Exposition Park draws 73% of its attendance from within Los Angeles County — many of them schoolchildren — its sister institution, the much smaller and narrowly focused Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits, nearly reverses that equation, drawing 63% of its visitors from outside the county. That can be partly explained by the fact that the tar pits are internationally renowned as the world's most bountiful source of fossilized bones from the Ice Age. Pisano hopes that with new mammal and dinosaur halls, striking new natural grounds and a whale-under-glass, the Exposition Park flagship building will join visitors' list of must-see attractions.

The Otis Booth Foundation's gift doesn't directly advance the museum's "NHM Next" fundraising campaign, which still has $51 million to go to reach its $135-million goal. But Haaga, the museum board's chairman, sees the entry pavilion's creation as "really impactful and helpful in every way." The association with a respected Los Angeles figure such as Booth, and the foundation he created, could have an "endorsement effect" that will attract other philanthropists, Haaga said, and the rollout of the structure itself will give the museum one more accomplishment to celebrate and use as a rallying point for further fundraising.

On the other hand, the Booth Foundation gift is support from inside the museum's existing family of backers, rather than an expansion of its reach via the recruitment of a major new benefactor.

Museum officials say attendance has increased 35% during the six months since the Age of Mammals exhibit opened. Haaga said its success confirms the wisdom of the calculated risk that museum leaders took in deciding to gradually open the new attractions one at a time, knowing that if the first one underwhelmed the public, it could make it harder to raise money for the work that remained.

"Success breeds success," he said. "People want to give to visibly successful plans."

[LosAngelesBeauty]

Just beautiful! I'm so happy to see our city slowly but surely maturing, making the front entrance truly the front entrance as opposed to back entrances acting as the true front entrance because of parking garages. Now with TWO light rail stations, the museum will finally have a substantial portion of their attendees coming from the front for the first time in recent history! That is symbolic in itself saying a lot about LA as a whole maturing into a true urban city.



nhm.org

[JDRCRASH]

Originally Posted by Illithid Dude

And I hate stucco.

Agreed. It's definitely gotten old, especially in Downtown.

[pesto]

LAB: the whole 'hood is a real success story in the making. With the upgrades on campus, the revitalized Univ. Village, museums and other construction this could become a thriving and desirable part of town.

Could be one of the most heavily used stations, with students on the weekdays and Coliseum and museums on the weekends.

[San Frangelino]

Found this image at the Perkins+Will website:

[LA21st]

Wow! I realize its probably just a vision, but that would be amazing.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

In the rendering, there is a much larger tower where the 1540 N Vine Camden project was supposed to be (the one that was going to have the Whole Foods on the ground floor). Hopefully P+W knows something we don't?

[colemonkee]

Two words: "pipe" and "dream".

Though it would be cool.

[JDRCRASH]

^ I sure hope you're wrong colemonkee. That looks insane! The density appears to be concentrated on Santa Monica Blvd (or sunset, maybe?). If that's indeed the case, if the Silver Line and Crenshaw Corridor happen, this could as well.

Maybe this involves the revamping of the city's zoning laws that City Hall is planning?

[mdiederi]

It shows the long range economic development potential of the "Hollywood Redevelopment Project" being implemented by the Department of City Planning. The 1,107-acre project is bounded by Franklin Avenue on the north, Serrano Avenue on the east, Santa Monica Boulevard and Fountain Avenue on the south and La Brea Avenue on the west. The first priorities in the project are housing for low-income and homeless seniors and housing with supportive services for the chronically homeless, addressing the loss of affordable housing caused by condo conversions, developing a motion picture museum and transit oriented mixed-use projects adjacent to Red Line metro stations, and producing an urban design plan for Sunset Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard adjacent areas. Hopefully high-rises will follow.
http://cityplanning.lacity.org/

[StethJeff]

Perkins+Will are a-holes for teasing us with a vision we'll never see : (
That would be amazing. Though I'd much rather see that level of density along Wilshire first.

[202_Cyclist]

I would like to see this but wouldn't the the elimination of the various redevelopment agencies proposed in Jerry Brown's budget make these large-scale redevelopment projects much more difficult?

Jerry Brown's proposed budget would eliminate redevelopment agencies
LA Times
1/10/2011

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/californ...ld-eliminate-redevelopment-agencies.html