What's New On Larchmont Boulevard This Summer

Stand at the Wilshire Rotary Clock at the south end of Larchmont Boulevard on a July afternoon and the street looks subtly different than it did a year ago. The benches are French blue. The trash cans match. The planting beds around the clock are dense with California poppies and Sticky Monkey Flower where scraggly ornamentals used to be. Two crepe myrtles are in bloom above them. None of this was here in summer 2024, and taken together it points to something bigger than a facelift: after years of storefront churn and pandemic drift, the village is finally being tended to as a whole rather than shop by shop.

If you already live in Hancock Park or Windsor Square, you have probably registered these changes peripherally on the way to Sunday coffee. This is a closer look at what has actually shifted on the block, and how to use it.

The street is being landscaped like a garden, not a median

The most visible work has come out of the Larchmont Boulevard Association under president Romi Cortier. Over the last eighteen months the LBA has replanted the street medians, the Wells Fargo lot beds, and the sidewalk pots that have to be hand-watered by neighboring merchants. The centerpiece is the five planting beds inside City Parking Lot 694, next to the Wilshire Rotary Clock, which sat half-dead for over a year because of electrical and scheduling delays before new landscaping finally took shape near the Wilshire Rotary Clock, in what LBA president Romi Cortier called "the jewel and the crown" of the association's beautification efforts.

The planting palette is worth knowing if you care about what your own parkway strip could look like. African boxwoods anchor the front beds and will eventually grow tall enough to soften views of parked cars; natives underneath the new trees include Sticky Monkey Flower, Point Sal Salvia, White Sage, Blue Eyed Grass, and California poppies, with climate-appropriate non-natives like Silver Striker and lavender tying into landscaping already installed elsewhere on the boulevard. The Hancock Park Garden Club, founded in 1963, chipped in with a $1,000 donation that funded the replanting of the parking lot beds with native plants and the installation of two crepe myrtle trees now blooming.

The other pieces of the refresh you have probably sat on without noticing:

• French blue Legacy Benches. Seven new metal benches sponsored by local families and organizations replaced the old wooden benches purchased decades ago and match the cornflower blue trash cans provided by the Larchmont Village Business Improvement District, which also funds the street's daily trash pickups.
• Bistro lights overhead. Bistro lights are being installed on North Larchmont Boulevard from Beverly to Melrose, funded by a community grant from Paramount, timed to welcome employees back to the office.
• A reactivated Paramount lunchtime trolley running from the studio into the village, which the LBA lists among its 2025 accomplishments alongside the new benches and the developing Business Improvement District on upper Larchmont.

None of this is decorative in isolation. Read together, it is the physical infrastructure a walkable retail street needs to stay a walkable retail street once the novelty wears off.

The two farmers markets are not the same market

Locals who only shop Sunday are missing half the story. The Larchmont Village Farmers Market runs year-round on Wednesday from 1:00 to 5:00 pm and Sunday from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm. Same location at 209 N. Larchmont, same certified vendors, different atmosphere entirely.

Sunday is the social market. It runs three lanes deep, doubles as a dog-walking route, and clears out most of the stone fruit by noon. Wednesday is the working-from-home market. It runs from 1:00 to 5:00 pm in a more relaxed atmosphere than the bustling Sunday counterpart, and is set up for leisurely shopping and actual conversations with vendors. If you want the pluots, bubblegum plums, and coffee cake persimmons that the market pages have been advertising this month without elbowing your way to the flower stand, Wednesday at 2:00 pm is the correct answer.

One Wednesday-only detail: it is the compost drop-off day. The LA Compost booth accepts household food scraps in exchange for finished compost, which is genuinely useful if you are trying to get a Hancock Park parkway strip to hold water through August.

A quiet policy shift changed what dinner looks like

For decades Larchmont dinner meant wine or beer, full stop. That ended in the fall of 2023, and the effects are still working through the block. La Bettola di Terroni at 225 N. Larchmont was the first restaurant on Larchmont Boulevard to serve cocktails and a full line of alcoholic beverages, alongside wine, beer, and non-alcoholic cocktails.

The policy backstory matters. The 2021 Community Conversation series aired the alcohol-licensing question at length after several restaurants sought to take advantage of the city's alcohol beverage program during the pandemic to make up for lost revenue, and most residents said they supported allowing restaurants that qualify for the program to serve cocktails. Bettola opened in October 2023 in the former Vernetti space with Chef Constantino Guzzo brought over from Palermo, Sicily to helm the kitchen, and it is now the reason a Larchmont dinner reservation on a Saturday night in July is genuinely difficult to get after 7:00 pm.

The knock-on effect: Suá Superette opened a few doors down, the Larchmont Chronicle was already reporting in early 2024 that Bettola di Terroni had opened in October and that Suá Superette, Sweet Lady Jane, Cookbook, and Larchmont Jewelers were set to open soon, and the vacancy rate that hit almost 25 percent five years ago has effectively closed. When Stephanie Hjelmeseth of Suá Superette joined the LBA board in May 2026, it was one of eight new appointments, which is the kind of civic churn you only see when the street is being taken seriously by its own operators.

The morning loop is the actual heart of the village

The dinner scene is the news; the coffee-and-magazine loop is the reason people bought here in the first place. The New York Times captured the route succinctly earlier this year, describing Larchmont Village as a miniature stretch of Brooklyn on the West Coast, with Groundwork or Go Get Em Tiger on North Larchmont Boulevard to fuel up before a walk and boutiques, cafes, and a farmers' market lining Larchmont Avenue every Wednesday and Sunday.

The unofficial rhythm most residents follow:

1. Coffee at Groundwork or Go Get Em Tiger.
2. Magazines at the Above the Fold newsstand, which stocks the print titles that most LA neighborhoods gave up on a decade ago.
3. A sandwich from Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits & Cheese, if it happens to be a day they feel like making the tuna.

That last one is not a joke. Emma Roberts, in a Los Angeles Times "perfect Sunday" feature this month, told the paper she is "obsessed" with Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits & Cheese, saying their sandwiches "are to die for," she loves the tuna, and locals know "they only make it when they feel like it, which is really rock star of them." The shop is closed Sundays, which is either charming or infuriating depending on when you first learned it.

Round out the loop with a stop at Chevalier's Books, the historic Larchmont bookstore now co-owned by Larchmont Buzz publisher Patricia Lombard, and Salt & Straw for the seasonal ice cream flavor if it is over 85 degrees. Great White at 244 N. Larchmont handles the sit-down all-day-cafe slot. Cafe Gratitude runs weekday happy hour from 4:00 to 7:00 pm. Bettola at 225 N. Larchmont handles dinner.

Upper Larchmont is where the next year of change is happening

The southern half of the boulevard is mostly settled. The action from here on is at the northern end, between Beverly and Melrose. This is where the Paramount bistro lights are being strung, where the classic car show ran, and where the LBA is developing a separate Business Improvement District. It is also where the newest openings are landing: Kouzeh Bakery opened on Wilshire in June, and the space known simply as Pawn Shop opened at the end of the same month.

If you have not walked upper Larchmont at dusk since the lights went up, do that this week. It is genuinely a different street after 8:00 pm than it was a year ago.

Two things worth putting on the calendar

The Larchmont Family Fair is the boulevard's real civic holiday, and 2026 marks its 61st year under LBA stewardship. The Taste of Larchmont is the food-focused counterpart. Both are held in and around City Parking Lot 694, which is why the LBA fought so hard against the proposed land lease of that lot last year — the lot doubles as the neighborhood's town square, and losing it would have quietly ended both events. That fight is worth remembering the next time your neighborhood association asks whether it is worth showing up to a land-use meeting at Marlborough School on a Tuesday night.

The takeaway for people who already live here

The village you moved to is not the village you have now, and the direction of change is legible. Benches, lights, native plantings, a working BID, cocktails, a second restaurant tier filling in on the north end. The street is being maintained as an asset rather than a memory. That is the kind of quiet, unglamorous groundwork that keeps a Hancock Park block worth its address twenty years from now.

If you are curious what that groundwork does to the value of a specific street or block, or you want to talk through what the boulevard's next chapter means for a home a few doors off Larchmont Avenue, Mark Mintz Real Estate Group knows this pocket of the eastside as neighbors first and agents second. What's My Home Worth? is the fastest way to start that conversation.