Conference Tours
The conference includes several optional tours of Los Angeles. The schedule begins with a pre-conference tour on Thursday, November 5 and concludes with simultaneous walking or bus tours on Sunday, November 8. See below for descriptions of each of the tours, including details on timing, location, means of travel and associated fees. You may sign up for the tours through the conference registration portal.
Thursday, November 5, 3:00 -5:30pm
Pre-Conference Tour
Sunday, November 8, 8:00 am.
Tour 1: Boyle Heights: Eastside Suburb, Ethnic Community, and Ongoing Change
Tour 2: Pasadena: City Beautiful, Heritage Conservation, Urbanism Old & New
Tour 3: Hollywood: Boulevard of Dreams & Main Street Revival
Tour 4: Big Plans & Big Projects: Torrance, Baldwin Hills Village, Lakewood, and Playa Vista
Thursday, November 5, 3:00 – 5:30 pm
Pre-Conference Tour: “Redevelopment in the Rear View Mirror,” a walking tour around Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill.
As part of a day-long program of activities, participants will have an opportunity to examine the Bunker Hill area first hand. The neighborhood has been many things to many people. Developed in the late 19th century, Bunker Hill was at one time a largely residential enclave of Victorian mansions. As early as the 1920s, city officials perceived the hill to be a traffic barrier and a retardant to the city’s westerly expansion. As one planning document from the era suggested in 1924, Bunker Hill was an “incipient slum”. In the 1940s, federal and state legislation enabled massive clearance and the creation of a tabula rasa for new plans. Over the next thirty years, the hill was leveled and more than 7,000 housing units were removed. Some of the housing stock was replaced, but the redevelopment process was slow and parking lots were the hill’s major land use for much of the 1970s and 1980s. Today, corporate skyscrapers occupy most of Bunker Hill, but the area also serves an important function as one of the city’s most significant cultural hubs.
Means of travel: Walking
Start/Finish: Millennium Biltmore (meet at hotel registration desk), 3:00pm – 5:30pm
Hosts: Meredith Drake Reitan and Trudi Sandmeier
Cost: $35
Note: Cost includes tour, lecture at the Los Angeles Public Library and an evening reception at the Farmers and Merchants Bank
Sunday, November 8
Boyle Heights: Eastside Suburb, Ethnic Community, and Ongoing Change
One of the city’s earliest suburban areas just across the Los Angeles River, Boyle Heights has long been characterized by change and complexity in the face of planning efforts. Sites, stops, and points of interest include: LA Union Station (1939), the region’s main transit hub and one of the last grand railroad terminals built in the US; Pueblo del Sol (1999), a New Urbanist housing venture developed under HUD’s remedial Hope VI program, built on the site of the former Aliso Village (1942) –one of LA’s earliest slum clearance and public housing projects; Mariachi Plaza, an active gathering spot for musicians and the local community –currently threatened with “gente-fication” by a younger generation of returning Hispanics as well as more conventional redevelopment; First Street, an active thoroughfare lined with local businesses, community institutions and street art, all segmented by freeways cutting through; and Breed Street Shul (1915), a reminder of the area’s earlier Eastern European immigrant population and originally an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, now an emerging neighborhood center for the Latino community.
Means of Travel: Transit and walking tour (~2 miles on foot, some sloped); approximately 3 hours
Start/Finish: 8:00 am Millennium Biltmore (meet at hotel registration desk). Tour will return to the hotel by 12 noon.
Cost: $25 (includes all-day Metro travel pass)
Pasadena: City Beautiful, Heritage Conservation, and Urbanism Old & New
Once a citrus colony then a resort town and home of the Rose Parade, Pasadena grew into a hub of Greater Los Angeles that soon boasted a true City Beautiful civic center. Modernist redevelopment threatened this and other historic fabric, and more recent planning has emphasized heritage conservation and neo-traditional design to reverse the damage. Sites, stops, and points of interest include: LA Union Station (1939), the region’s main transit hub and one of the last grand railroad terminals built in the US; Pasadena Civic Center (1920s), planned and executed in the City Beautiful manner by Plan of Chicago co-author Edward Bennett, and focusing on the monumental and telegenic City Hall (1927); Paseo Colorado (2001), a prominent New Urbanist piece of urban design restoration; Old Pasadena (1890s-1990s), a revitalized pedestrian district of shopping, dining, and entertainment that weaves together 22 historic downtown blocks with streetscapes, alleys and courtyards; and Del Mar Station (2000), a large mixed-use complex incorporating an historic rail station —a project of the type encouraged by local advocates of transit-oriented development as the region’s rail system expands once again.
Means of Travel: Transit and walking tour (~2 miles on foot); approximately 3 hours
Start/Finish: 8:00 am Millennium Biltmore (meet at hotel registration desk). Tour will return to the hotel by 12 noon.
Cost: $25 (includes all-day Metro travel pass)
Hollywood: Boulevard of Dreams & Main Street Revival
Not just a world-famous tourist mecca, Hollywood Boulevard is also a local main street serving one of the city’s earliest sub-centers. This thoroughfare’s planning and development over several generations has tried variously to address and improve both identities. Sites, stops, and points of interest include: Hollywood & Vine Metro Station and surrounding transit-oriented development, including the sleek new ‘W’ Hollywood Hotel and a rehabilitated 1920s tower block; Capitol Records building (1956), a mid-century architectural icon and the proposed site for Millennium Hollywood, a controversial redevelopment project sitting atop an active seismic fault; historic theater sites (exteriors only) built in the 1920s, such as Grauman’s Chinese, the Egyptian, El Capitan, and the Pantages; the “Walk of Fame,” the world’s most famous sidewalk, where place and celebrity converge in a starry tribute to booster economics; and Hollywood + Highland Center (2001), a massive entertainment and retail redevelopment at the heart of the tourist district.
Means of Travel: Transit and walking tour (~1 mile on foot); approximately 3 hours
Start/Finish: 8:00 am Millennium Biltmore (meet at hotel registration desk). The tour will return to the hotel by 11:30 am.
Cost: $25 (includes all-day Metro travel pass)
Big Plans & Big Projects: Torrance, Baldwin Hills Village, Lakewood, and Playa Vista
The myth of an unplanned Los Angeles region is completely put to rest on this tour that will visit four significant planned communities whose origins and development span the past century. Sites, stops, and points of interest include: Torrance (1912), a self-contained industrial town with Pullman-like aspirations planned by the Olmsted firm and architect Irving Gill, and promoted at the time as an American garden city; Baldwin Hills Village (1941; now called Village Green), a vast garden-oriented residential complex co-planned by Clarence Stein, who later wrote that it perfected the Radburn plan he’d famously helped to devise earlier; Lakewood (1950), a post-war, nearly “instant” suburban community that went from farm fields to parks, schools and 17,000 homes in three years—then began a bold experiment as the nation’s first “contract city” that outsourced all of its public services; and Playa Vista (1990s), an immense and controversial mixed-use development planned as New Urbanist infill for a coastal site once home to Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose production as well as environmentally sensitive wetlands.
Means of Travel: Bus tour, with some walking (<1 mile on foot); approximately 6 hours
Start/Finish: 8:00 am Millennium Biltmore (meet at hotel registration desk).
Cost: $75 (includes box lunch); seating is limited, and a minimum of 40 registrants is required
Note: The tour bus will have luggage-carrying capacity and make a stop at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) by 2:00 pm, then return to the hotel by 3:00 pm.