Planning

‘Shocking’: The fall of Third Street Promenade, Calif’s once-vibrant outdoor mall

By Paula Mejía : sfgate – excerpt

A unique confluence of factors has stymied the Third Street Promenade, a car-free outdoor mall by the iconic Santa Monica Pier

On a recent Sunday, the glittering coastline buffeting the Santa Monica Pier teemed with throngs of tourists. Visitors tried their hand at carnival games and rides on the waterfront, stopping to snap photos backdropped by the city’s arching blue-and-white sign. Others took in the sunshine while moseying around shops and dive bars around Ocean Avenue, which overlooks the vast azure expanse of the Pacific.

Yet that same liveliness evaporated a mere three blocks over at the city of Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. Although the shopping and dining enclave is a car-free, open-air mall not unlike other heavily visited sites including Universal CityWalk and the Grove, only a small handful of people venture over to the outdoor esplanade these days. An estimated 10 million people visit the pier yearly; only a tiny fraction of them appear to be interested in the promenade. The leisurely Adirondack chairs lining the sidewalks sit vacant, the once-plentiful street performers have mostly vanished, and it’s not unusual to spot back-to-back-to-back retail vacancies along each nearly empty block.

It’s all one giant missed opportunity for Santa Monica, the standalone Los Angeles County city with the multimillion-dollar coastline. For decades, the promenade was seen as a masterful reimagining of public space, a rare pedestrian-only area in a region with underperforming public transit and too many cars…(more)