[delts145]

This morning I had to take a shopping trip from downtown to the Lowes at the midtown shopping center on Pico and San Vincente. I took Pico all the way. Like me, I'm sure a few of you have also caught this same vision of how many incredible development opportunities there are along Pico. My thoughts continually stray and daydream as I pass by certain areas around Hoover, or Normandie, and especially the area around Country Club Park/Arlington through Crenshaw. There are so many cool old bygone era store fronts and apt. buildings with great old architectural history that's still intact. So many stretches that scream for a chance to be a Village Center with an incredible Latino restaurant scene, clubs galore and urban chic apartments developed. I'm sure the day will come when we'll see vibrant, charming village cores crop up along Pico in these areas I mentioned. The bones are there now, they're just not quite ready to be the sort of village cores that we would call metro wide destination points. For right now however, we'll have to wait for the managerie of power lines to some day be buried. Whether the power lines are buried first in order to encourage the development potential, or developers realize the potential and bury the lines along with their restoration/reuse developments, the lines will have to be buried.

As much as I like Larchmont, the charm factor potential along Pico in several long stretches even exceeds the Larchmont stretch.

Oh, I wanted to ask if any of you have heard of upcoming major development across from the Home Depot on Wilshire? I noticed a lot of those underdeveloped sites across from Home Depot are now boarded up as if there's some pending demolition. I've been wondering for a few years how long it would take for that Wilshire stretch between MacArthur Park and Downtown to catch up with the redevelopment on Wilshire's west side of the Park. Someday we might even see the Westlake Theater restored. That would be a happy day.