Wilshire Boulevard is often described as LA’s “linear downtown.” It’s lined with big buildings from almost to end, typically bigger buildings than in the neighborhoods around them. On or near Wilshire you can find hotels, restaurants, bars, coffee houses, movie theatres, museums, art galleries, a few parks, current and former department stores, boutiques, libraries, and even a few bookstores. There are dozens of historic buildings along it, many being restored to renewed (and pricy) splendor. Wilshire runs from the city of Commerce to Santa Monica beach via East LA, Downtown LA, Macarthur Park, Koreatown, the Fairfax, Beverly Hills, and Westwood. It’s an ideal cross-section of what I call “the visitors’ city.”
I’ve often thought that a car-free traveler could do worse than base a vacation around Wilshire. You can see that the Wilshire corridor contains almost everything a traveler could want. There are hardly even any dead spots, apart from maybe the bizarre constructions of Condo Canyon (thousands of units and not so much as a 7-11 to grab food in?).
Not everything is found in every spot —Westwood Village, for example, is not so hot for the finer dining—but everything’s just a little way down the street. Wilshire is of course served by Metro line 720, the Wilshire Rapid. It’s the only rapid bus that runs 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, using stretch length buses. It literally runs every 3 minutes in rush hour. LA’s finest bus, IMHO, comparable to any of America’s great urban bus lines. And if you want to ride right to a stop between the rapid stops, local bus 20 comes plinking along. Wilshire was the great auto way, but now it is becoming the great transit way.
My family wound up, not really by plan, taking what was pretty much a Wilshire Boulevard car-light vacation (cars used when we checked into the hotel and when we checked out). The idea was to stay near Wilshire & Fairfax, near lots of stuff we like, near where two strong bus corridors cross. But it wound up being a lot more about Wilshire than about Fairfax.
We stayed at the schmancy Hotel Wilshire (not to be confused with the Wilshire Hotel in Koreatown or the Wilshire Motel in West Los Angeles, or the recently demolished Wilshire Grand in Downtown LA), on the boulevard just west of Crescent Heights, The location’s main drawback was the walk to the rapid stops at Wilshire & Fairfax—only a block, but an extraordinarily long, dreary one, with a surprising number of vacant storefronts (plus a few art galleries hidden in white cube buildings). We managed to endure the block, though I heard complaints about it!
So we ate in Koreatown, enduring a long line at BCD Tofu on Western Ave. We ate at Dupar’s and Loteria in the Farmers Market—I’d call 3rd St. the edge of the Wilshire corridor. We ate at Nate ‘n Al’s in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica Seafood in (did you guess it?) Santa Monica, though not downtown (Yeah OK, we like to eat, especially in LA, so sue us). We went to the County Museum and the Hammer Museum, which had a great exhibit of African-American art as part of Pacific Standard Time. We swam at the Santa Monica Y, walked on Santa Monica beach. We shopped at Hennessey & Ingalls and other bookstores in Santa Monica (We importuned bookstores to carry Car Free Los Angeles and Southern California!). We picked up transit information from the Metro Customer Center at Wilshire & La Brea. We regrouped at Beverly Canon Gardens next to the Montage Hotel—a case of Beverly Hills making a positive contribution to the public weal.
We weren’t religious about staying near Wilshire: we went to a great bookstore in Venice (Small World Books), saw a movie at the Royal Theatre in West LA, took the Fairfax bus up to Samuel French for youngest member to buy plays. But the great bulk of what we did was on Wilshire or a short walk away. But there was so much there and the transit was so good, that we kept gravitating to the corridor.
This is only going to get better, really. First, peak hour bus lanes in the city of Los Angeles segment will speed the 720 further. Sooner or later, the Purple Line subway will get extended down Wilshire, with Phase I getting it as far as Fairfax or La Cienega—apparently the geologically preferable choice (hopefully Beverly Hills can handle that). . The Academy is planning its Motion Picture Museum for Wilshire near Fairfax, in no small part because of the coming subway. The subway can’t come soon enough for UCLA, which currently has to waste precious land on over 50 (!) parking lots and structures. Sometimes the good thing and the fun thing are actually the same.
