Taste of Larchmont is tomorrow. Monday, September 14, six to nine at night, the same city parking lot at 209 N. Larchmont Boulevard where it has landed for the better part of three decades, fifty dollars for a passport that gets you through a dozen kitchens on the boulevard, proceeds going to HopeNet's food pantry network. If you have lived here more than a year or two, none of that is news. You have bought the passport before.
What is different this year is what stands between your front door and that parking lot. Since spring, two things opened that were not there the last time the boulevard threw this party: a full subway stop a short ride east, and a chef-driven restaurant with a former pawn shop's name on the door. Neither one has anything to do with Taste of Larchmont directly. But both of them quietly closed the two reasons Hancock Park residents used to leave the neighborhood, and this fall's calendar is the first one that gets to run against that backdrop.
What's Actually On The Calendar
Before the bigger point, the practical part. Here is what's scheduled between now and Halloween, drawn from the Larchmont Boulevard Association and the neighborhood associations that run these events every year.
| Date | Event | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Mon., Sept. 14, 6–9 p.m. | Taste of Larchmont | City parking lot, 209 N. Larchmont Blvd. |
| Sat., Sept. 19, 4:30–8:30 p.m. | Cars Under the Stars | 500 block of N. Larchmont, between Clinton and Rosewood |
| Sun., Oct. 25, noon–5 p.m. | Larchmont Family Fair (61st annual) | Larchmont Boulevard |
| Mid-to-late October | Wilshire Rotary Pumpkin Patch | 568 N. Larchmont Blvd. |
| Saturday before the Family Fair (typically) | Wilshire Park Halloween Haunt | 600–700 block of S. Bronson |
Cars Under the Stars is a newer addition to the fall rotation, run by the Larchmont Boulevard Association with the Porsche Club of America's Los Angeles chapter, and it does what it says: vintage and exotic Porsches parked along the boulevard for an evening, with music and food from the same restaurants you already walk past. The Family Fair is the big one, now in its 61st year, with rides, food booths, and a costume contest that fills the boulevard for an afternoon. The Wilshire Park Halloween Haunt is a smaller, separate tradition, run entirely by the Wilshire Park Association as its only fundraiser of the year, which means the two or three hours it runs each October are the difference between that block association having a budget for the next twelve months or not.
None of this is new. What changed is everything around it.
The Two Things That Broke The Old Pattern
For most of the time Hancock Park residents have lived here, the boulevard covered the daytime and the errands. You walked to Larchmont for coffee, a book from Chevalier's, groceries at the Sunday or Wednesday farmers market. Then, for the meal that actually mattered or the museum show you actually wanted to see, you got in the car and drove west or south. That second half of the pattern is the part that broke this spring, and it broke twice within about seven weeks.
The first break was a subway stop. On May 8, Metro's D Line extension opened three new underground stations along Wilshire, and the middle one, Wilshire/Fairfax, sits a few blocks from Hancock Park's eastern edge, close enough that Metro's own materials list Hancock Park among the neighborhoods the station now serves. It puts LACMA, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Petersen Automotive Museum, and the La Brea Tar Pits within an elevator ride of a train platform, with a ride back downtown to Union Station described by Metro as about 20 minutes. Put that next to LACMA's new David Geffen Galleries opening the same spring, and what you get is the first season in the neighborhood's modern history where its most prestigious cultural neighbor stopped requiring a parking structure.
The second break was a restaurant. On June 26, the Pawn Shop opened at 5901 Melrose Avenue, in a building that spent more than 40 years as Brothers Collateral, a family-run pawn shop that gave the new restaurant its name. The kitchen belongs to Tony Messina, a James Beard Award winner for Best Chef: Northeast in 2019, and the investor group behind the project includes Mark Cuban, Los Angeles Dodgers President of Operations Andrew Friedman, and former Olympian and Angel City FC captain Ali Riley. It is built as a full restaurant first and a sports bar second, open Sunday through Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. and Thursday through Saturday until midnight. For a household on the northern edge of Hancock Park, that is a chef-driven dining room now within walking distance that did not exist over the winter.
Individually, a train stop and a restaurant opening are not much of a story. Together, in the same spring, they mean the two categories of trip that used to require getting in the car, the big cultural outing and the big night out, both got shorter by the same season. Fall's calendar of neighborhood events is the first one that gets to happen inside that shorter version of the neighborhood.
The Parking Lot The Market Almost Lost
The Sunday and Wednesday Larchmont Farmers Market runs on Lot 694, the city parking lot at Larchmont and First, and it is worth understanding why that address matters beyond the produce. A land lease was proposed for that lot, and the neighborhood organizations that would be affected by losing it, the Windsor Square Neighborhood Association and the Larchmont Village Neighborhood Association among them, worked together with the Larchmont Boulevard Association to defeat it. The LBA counts saving the market's home among its own accomplishments from the past year.
That lot is also where Taste of Larchmont sets up its pavilion tomorrow night and where the farmers market has run long enough that most people who live here have never known the boulevard without it. A parking lot doing that much civic work for one neighborhood is unusual, and it is part of why the fights over it get organized so quickly when they come up.
A Smaller Change Worth Knowing About
Chevalier's Books, the independent bookstore that has anchored the boulevard for decades, started a new standing evening this past summer. A book club now meets Monday evenings, open to anyone who wants to sit down and talk about what they are reading. It is a small addition against everything else that happened this year, but it is the kind of detail that tells you the boulevard's daytime identity, the errands and the browsing, is still expanding even while the nighttime side of it changes shape.
How To Actually Use The Next Six Weeks
If you want a simple way to string these six weeks together without overthinking it, here is a version that uses what is actually new:
- Go to Taste of Larchmont tomorrow night. Buy the passport, walk the boulevard, support HopeNet.
- Take the D Line to Wilshire/Fairfax on a Saturday morning before the fall calendar gets busy. See the Geffen Galleries or the Academy Museum without worrying about parking.
- Have dinner at the Pawn Shop once, even if you are not watching a game. The kitchen is built to stand on its own.
- Show up to Cars Under the Stars on the 19th. It is new enough that most longtime residents have not built it into their fall routine yet.
- Save the last Sunday in October for the Family Fair, and if you live near S. Bronson, check the Wilshire Park Association's calendar for the Haunt the Saturday before.
Nothing on that list requires a trip out of the neighborhood, and two years ago, at least half of it would have.
If you are weighing a move into Hancock Park or thinking about what your own property here is worth against a neighborhood that changed this much in one spring, Blanche D'Souza has spent 20-plus years tracking exactly this kind of shift on the Westside. Let's Connect.