Looking for Bike Parking at L.A. Live

Los Angeles Eco-Village has a whole room set aside for residents’ bikes, and we’re looking at doing additional visitor bike parking out front. This post isn’t so much about eco-village’s bikes, but about the lack of accomodations for Los Angeles’ bicyclists in our public and private spaces. This, of course, is not really news. L.A. bicyclists know that our streets and our destinations rarely are designed and built with us in mind. Various other spaces in L.A., from our new police headquarters to our concert hall have huge accomodations for car parking, but little to nothing for bicycles.

I found myself downtown last week, after a Green L.A. Transportation Working Group meeting with Mayor Villaraigosa’s  environmental and transportation deputies. I decided to chill by watching a movie. I used to frequent the old Laemmle Theaters in the basement of the Marriott Hotel, but they closed last year, due to low attendance and competition from new theaters at L.A. Live – a new upscale mega-redevelopment ajacent to L.A.’s sports and convention centers. LAL just opened up a year or two ago, so you might think that they would be up-to-the-moment on trendy new things like bike parking.

Intersection Repair Event 12 September 2009

A view of the mostly-complete southern half of the intersection mural - photo by Yuki

We enjoyed another great talk by Mark Lakeman of Portland’s City Repair last Friday night, and on Saturday we were inspired by their example to paint a new intersection repair mural.

 These photos are worth many thousands of words – thanks to Kathy Hill and Yuki Kidokoro for documenting the event!

We had a lot of help from the youth of the neighborhood - Jennifer (in red) did a lot of great work - and that's me on the right - Photo by Kathy

 

Young eco-villager Jean Michel prepping the area before painting

Another very hard-working neighborhood youth named Mohammed, he has just finished outlining that triangle in purple - photo by Kathy

 

Adonia and Christopher putting down our new crosswalks - photo by Kathy

 There’s a lot to say about it… and a lot more folks that did a lot of work whose picture I didn’t get in to this quick blog entry.  I am still exhausted and have other work to catch up on… so this blog entry is all too brief, and hopefully others can help fill in more details in comments, etc.

The central wheel of the design is based on a bicycle wheel, extending its spokes into a circle design about 15 feet across - photo by Yuki

Josie at work on the northern part of the mural which features a water swirl design that commemorates the historical waters of Arroyo de la Sacatela and the Bimini Slough

Kwanwoo did a lot of excellent detail lettering in this, the northmost section, which featured a commemoration of the railroad tracks in our street which conveyed the H-line streetcars.

LINKS and LINKS to more articles about the intersection repair:

More historic info on the Bimini Slough, Sacatela Creek, and our train tracks here.

Earlier Eco-Village blog articles in anticipation of this event here1, here2, and here3.

There’s excellent event coverage over at Homegrown Evolution. (Check out the comments there…  looks like the new crosswalks we painted look almost too official!)

Eco-Villager Adonia Lugo has more excellent coverage here,  including much better descriptions of the railway section where she and Bobby took the lead. She and contrasts how different parts of L.A. approach their common spaces. 

Here’s a link to Kathy’s photo gallery on Picassa and to Yuki’s photo album on Facebook. (I am  not 100% sure that these are completely available to the public… if they don’t work for you, email us and we’ll see what we can do.)

I covered it on my art blog, too.

At the end of the day we painted handprints and footprints of all the folks who worked on the mural. Here's Mark Lakeman getting his foot painted blue, so he can print it on our new crosswalk. Photo by Yuki