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Originally Posted by destroycreate
I feel like in most of the US, it's generally 1 story only and has copious more parking. In LA, these are in the core, and to be honest, they usually only have a few parking spots compared to say, vast suburban strip malls. Toronto is the only other city I can think of aside from LA that has a lot of 3 story strip malls.
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There's kind of an irony too, in that in many little strip malls in LA, there's only a few parking spaces, so, if a particular little strip mall has a very popular restaurant, there won't be any parking at the actual strip mall. So, something built for auto-centricity isn't all that accommodating for the auto, and you end up parking on the street several blocks away and walking.
Like Jitlada. In the 2 or 3 times I've eaten there, I've never been able to park there. Or the Mario's on Melrose and Vine (my first introduction to Peruvian food, and then I "discovered" other Peruvian places).
Quote:
Originally Posted by destroycreate
I used to live right next to this one - IDK why, but there is a gritty charm to these places in LA even though they are ugly. At night though, they light up with neon and give a little bit of LA's sleazy signature glitz.
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Right? And if you squint your eyes a little bit, you can almost imagine yourself being in an Asian city, which many westerners say are ugly anyway. To me they're at least very functional, and pedestrians dodging cars are part of the Asian city experience, no?
Some few other examples of a multi-story strip mall are in what's been dubbed Sawtelle Japantown; back in the 90s, for some reason my Japanese female friend would drag me to a hair salon there that she liked going to "because they know how to do Japanese hair."
It was somewhere in here, as I recall:
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0384...4!8i8192?hl=en
And then of course there's this one, where'd we go to the Japanese market and get a can of UCC coffee:
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0390...7i16384!8i8192
Edit: I realize a Dutch friend who visited my partner and me a few years ago said that in many places we went, he felt like he was in Asia. I didn't ask him to elaborate; I just assumed it was all the Asians he saw... but maybe he was thinking about some of the built environment too?