On the evening of September 19, the 500 block of North Larchmont Boulevard will close to traffic between Clinton and Rosewood. Somewhere around six o'clock, as the light starts to go, the Hollywood Sign will come into view above the rooftops, the overhead bistro lights installed last December will start to glow, and several dozen vintage and exotic Porsches will be parked in a line down the middle of the street. A DJ will be playing. Food trucks will be parked at the edges. It is called Cars Under the Stars, and it is the Larchmont Boulevard Association's first attempt at a car show.
If you have lived here a while, the more interesting fact is not that this is happening. It is that you could have predicted it.
A Street That Keeps Rebuilding Itself
Larchmont Boulevard has been quietly renovating itself for three decades, and almost none of it came from the city. In the 1990s, longtime Larchmont figures Joane Pickett, who opened her clothing store Pickett Fences in 1994, and civic organizer Tom LaBonge installed a handicapped-accessible crosswalk and the landscaped medians that still run down the center of the boulevard. Around the same time, they quietly passed a zoning measure that dropped the allowable building height from three stories to two between Beverly and First, which is the reason the street still reads as a small-town main strip instead of a mid-rise commercial corridor. Pickett has said the goal with the farmers market that followed was simple: Sunday had become a dead day on the boulevard, and they wanted to bring people back.
That pattern never really stopped. The Larchmont Boulevard Association, a volunteer nonprofit of business owners and property owners founded in 1965, spent 2022 through 2025 installing the boulevard's bistro lights in three separate phases, each funded differently. The first stretch of lights went up in November 2022, paid for by a list of local property owners and institutions that included the Hancock Park Homeowners Association and the Windsor Square Association. A second phase lit the city-owned parking lot at 209 North Larchmont in mid-2023, funded by the Windsor Square Hancock Park Historical Society. The most recent phase, strung along North Larchmont from Beverly to Melrose last December, came from a community grant tied to Paramount's return-to-office push, timed to welcome more than 2,000 employees back through the Melrose gate.
Those are the same lights that will be glowing over the Porsches on September 19.
The Same Handful of Names, Building the Boulevard for Decades
What makes this pattern worth noticing is how small the circle actually is. Romi Cortier, the LBA's current president, has run his design business on Larchmont Boulevard for more than three decades and says he has watched the Hollywood Sign from his shop nearly every day of it. Before he became president he chaired the LBA's Beautification Committee, where he led the replanting of the boulevard's medians and concrete planters, the same medians that a landscaping crew is now clearing to stage cars for the show. That crew belongs to Virgo Designs & Landscaping, owned by Lisa Balazs, a garden designer and vintage Porsche owner who has been helping the LBA redesign the boulevard's plantings for years and who happens to belong to the Porsche Club of America Los Angeles. It was Balazs who connected Cortier to the club in the first place.
"I wanted to create that perfect Los Angeles moment: the Hollywood Sign at dusk, the bistro lights coming on, and these beautiful Porsches lining Larchmont Boulevard," Cortier said. "It felt like an image that could only happen here."
That image will be captured by photographer Mathieu Fussman, who connected with Cortier years ago over a shared love of vintage Rolls-Royces. The LBA's board itself reads like a directory of the same institutions that keep showing up in this story: Pamela Christlieb, manager of Chevalier's Books, sits on it. So does Andrew Hutcheson of the Larchmont Chronicle, the paper founded by LBA founder Jane Gilman, who was honored at last year's Family Fair for a career of civic work that also produced the Windsor Square Hancock Park Historical Society. It is a small enough group that when one of them starts a project, several of the others end up funding, staffing, or photographing it.
Even the boulevard's memorial benches carry this thread forward. The French Blue Legacy Benches installed over the past year, at three thousand dollars apiece, are dedicated to families whose ties to the street go back generations, including one bench honoring the Carroll family of HollywoodLand Realty, credited with the original naming of the Hollywood Sign. The same skyline landmark that will frame the Porsches on September 19 is already inscribed into a bench two blocks away.
What Almost Didn't Survive
The pattern is not only additive. It also shows up in what the same group has fought to protect. The Sunday and Wednesday farmers markets at Lot 694, which have run for decades, have come close to disappearing twice. The first threat, in 2020, came from a proposed playground pilot program for the lot. The second came just last year, when a land lease at the same lot was floated that would have displaced the market entirely. Both times, the LBA joined forces with the Windsor Square Neighborhood Association, the Larchmont Village Neighborhood Association, and the Larchmont United Neighborhood Association to beat back the proposal. The market survived, and it still runs on its old schedule: the Sunday Certified Farmers' Market from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and a smaller Wednesday market from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m., both at the same Lot 694 parking area.
That defensive instinct extends to the boulevard's newest restaurants, several of which were opened by people who already live here rather than outside operators. Phil Rosenthal, a longtime Hancock Park resident, partnered with fellow local chef Nancy Silverton to open the diner Max & Helen's at 127 North Larchmont this year. In talking about the project, Rosenthal has described the boulevard the way a person describes a hometown rather than a business address. The same instinct that keeps the farmers market alive and keeps benches dedicated to families who have lived here for generations is the instinct that keeps bringing residents back to open businesses on their own street instead of somewhere with better rent.
Your Fall Calendar, If You Live Here
For anyone mapping out the next six weeks on the boulevard, here is what is actually confirmed:
- Saturday, September 19, 4:30 to 8:30 p.m.: Cars Under the Stars, on the 500 block of North Larchmont between Clinton and Rosewood. Free and open to everyone. Larchmont Boulevard will be closed to vehicle traffic for the duration, so plan parking accordingly.
- Every Wednesday, 12:30 to 4:30 p.m.: the smaller Larchmont farmers market at Lot 694.
- Every Sunday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.: the full Certified Farmers' Market at the same lot.
- Mondays at 5 p.m.: Chevalier's Books, the oldest independent bookstore in Los Angeles, is running a new weekly book club open to anyone.
- Sunday, October 25, noon to 5 p.m.: the 61st annual Larchmont Family Fair, with children's rides, food, live music, and community booths.
None of these were handed down from the city. Every one of them exists because a small, overlapping group of residents and shopkeepers decided the boulevard was worth the effort, and then kept showing up to fund the next phase.
A Boulevard That Knows Its Own Pattern
The honest way to think about September 19 is not as a new event on Larchmont. It is the newest entry in a list that already includes a crosswalk, a set of medians, a height cap, three phases of string lights, a farmers market saved twice, and a row of benches with other people's family names on them. The specific mechanism, a tight circle of residents who keep reinvesting in the same six blocks, is the actual story here. The cars are just the latest excuse to do it in public.
If you live on Larchmont, Rossmore, or anywhere in Windsor Square, that pattern is worth knowing, because it tells you something the next flyer on a lamppost will not: whatever comes after the Porsches, there is a good chance you already know the name behind it.
Work With Josh
Understanding a neighborhood at this level of detail, who built it, who keeps rebuilding it, and why, is part of what makes representation in Los Angeles's most storied residential pockets worth having. If Hancock Park, Larchmont Village, or any of the city's prime neighborhoods are on your mind, Josh Flagg is available for a conversation grounded in exactly this kind of local fluency.
