David Yoon’s Narrow Streets is a great blog where photographs of LA’s oversized streets are narrowed to see how urban design and use might change.
He has now done his magic on Pacific Coast Highway.
David Yoon Narrows PCH.
Tag: “David Yoon”
Matt Logue’s “Empty LA”
Photographer Matt Logue’s created images of the wide streets of Los Angeles absent automobiles. His photographs are now published in a book, Empty LA.
I often have wondered what it would be like to live in this city without fighting the daily war of driving.
Like David Yoon’s Narrow Streets, Logue’s digitally manipulated fantasies of Los Angeles bring up the sad reality about how ugly, depopulated, empty and inhuman the main arteries and roads are.
The architectural pathologies of Los Angeles…… the new modern grotesque monstrosities, the factory high schools, the high rise prisons, the Caltrans black glass behemoth downtown………… they will not go away even if the car does.
You can subtract the cars, but the roads are still four times as wide as they should be.
You can narrow the streets, but the buildings that line the road are ugly, blank, indifferent and cold.
It is not enough to reduce and diminish the automobile. We must do this:
- Los Angeles needs to rip up the enormous asphalt parking lots.
- Urban agricultural gardens should replace the big box shopping center monstrosities.
- Schools should set aside some land for residential, high-density walkable brownstones and cottages on LAUSD land.
- The enormous roads must be downsized by center tree planting, jogging and biking paths.
- Unsafe driving must be vigorously prosecuted and the fines for texting while driving, speeding, running red lights, and aggressive driving should be quadrupled.
- A 50 cent tax should be instituted on every gallon of gasoline to finance region wide train, bus and light rail service.
Let photographers photograph Los Angeles in 2060 without having to resort to digital manipulations.
“Narrow Streets” Narrows Van Nuys Blvd.
David Yoon is a Los Angeles based writer, designer, photographer and blogger who has undertaken a unique and visionary idea: What would Los Angeles look like if its streets were narrowed?
For years I, like Mr. Yoon, have walked around LA and observed the quite destructive effect of too wide streets. Enormous lanes of asphalt discourage walking. It encourages speeding. The sense of enclosure, community and safety that is found along narrower roads is one reason why Los Angeles, with its gigantic streets, is so hated by so many who move here looking for some connection to this monstrously impersonal,ugly, and billboard-deformed city.
The legion of failed places and depressed areas in the San Fernando Valley is really a list of wide streets: Sherman Way, Van Nuys Blvd., Reseda Bl. Areas where the streets are narrower and planted with trees include the revitalized Studio City.
Mr. Yoon has come up to Van Nuys and given us his version of how Van Nuys Boulevard would look, from the vantage point of Oxnard and VNB, if its asphalt were torn up and the buildings on either side moved closer together.
It is still ugly, but it is an ugliness that can be improved upon with trees, cafes and pedestrians. Rip down the cobra lamps, install benches, plant trees and mandate architectural codes that regulate billboards and signs, and this street might become a reasonably cool area to hang out in.
Here in Van Nuys 
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