Main Street of Dreams

Developer Rick Caruso, photographed at the Grove, in Los Angeles.

There are approximately 6,500 miles of streets in Los Angeles, but by far the most popular one is private, closed to traffic, about an eighth of a mile long, running down the middle of an outdoor mall called the Grove. The mall, which last March had its 10th anniversary, has become one of the biggest tourist attractions in all of California, with 18 million visitors a year, outpacing even Disneyland. One of the shortcomings of L.A. is its lack of pedestrian culture, so the idea of people flocking—by car—to experience an artificially created retail thoroughfare is simultaneously ironic, rich, and maddening. The developer Rick Caruso, who conceived of the Grove and built it (he owns 12 retail and residential assets in California), studied streets around the world and, working with an in-house team of architects, appropriated the most attractive and comforting elements from places people like to walk, such as King Street in Charleston, Newbury Street in Boston, and Madison Avenue. Each element of the Grove is engineered to bring a sense of security and a feeling of familiarity that verges on nostalgia. The design elements are a pastiche of California styles mashed together, resulting in the way many L.A. streets just happen to look—except the Grove is a back-lot-façade version of the real, imperfect, ignored-by-pedestrians city a hundred feet away. “It was very important for me to try to transport people to a better place and time,” says Caruso. “I wanted to create a Main Street for a city that does not have one.” Caruso’s street features a trolley car and connects to the old Farmers Market, all of which seems to link it to an innocent L.A. past. How a shopping mall has captured the heart of a sophisticated mega-city is a topic of fascination for urban planners and for Caruso himself, that rare student of cities who gets to apply his knowledge in a very concrete, influential way.