In conjunction with Friday’s Park[ing] Day L.A., the Hollywood Community Studio closed off Hudson Avenue north of Hollywood Boulevard and turned it into a pedestrian plaza on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I didn’t have the time to check it out on Friday and I totally slept on it Saturday, so I checked out the action today.
I guess I missed much of the action. The free massages were over hours ago. And despite arriving at around 3 p.m., the HCS staff were already preparing to pack up for the day.
There were a couple sets of tables and chairs, all owned by the Hollywood Business Improvement District, set up in the street, and a small informational kiosk was set up. Honestly, I had never really considered this street before, despite being a Hollywood area native. Other parts of Hudson are familiar to me, but this plaza, despite the activity already come and gone, gave me the chance to see the large west-facing mural of Latina actress Dolores Del Rio, or the colorful “Natalie Pixie Faerie” chalk mural drawn on the street.
I did meet HCS intern Dominique Kaschak there, and talked shop about open space and general community-related topics. She was also interested in finding out more about some of my blight conversion open space ideas (which I eventually will write about in this blog…). Which reminds me, one of these days, I gotta visit the Hollywood Community Studio sometime soon and check out what they’ve been up to.
But kudos to HCS on an interesting, and attainable, public space experiment. Can that stretch of Hudson be closed down, permanently or semi-permanently, to be public space? I don’t see why not. It doesn’t get much vehicle traffic and its narrow, quasi-alleyway, canyon-like nature makes it a great candidate (shade included).
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